Back to Ronnie Drew. His voice comes from some guttural point in his stomach and connected with that Dublin accent it expresses an Irish song, a Dublin ballad with an unique sound and sincerity. He uses the Dublin accent as a powerful tool, a joy to proclaim. He delights in its robustness and coarseness and comes across as Dublin as the street paper sellers or the impervious Dublin barmen. The actor Stephen Tomlinson of the Irish soap Ballykissangel introduced Ronnie and Sharon of Eastenders was also there. We were all neck twisting and star gazing.

As the evening drew to a close, there was a joy in being with your own in Hammersmith but also a nostalgia to be back to roots. To sip a pint in a real Dublin pub like Mulligan?s in Poolbeg Street or Hedigans (The Brian Boru) in Glasnevin or the Hut in Phibsboro, possibly the best pint of Guinness in Dublin. London with all its challenges and presentation and life styles loses out on the humanness of Dublin life with its emphasis on the wit of conversation and the pleasant interaction of people. To bring sociability to an art form. Its where the craic is, was invented and will always remain.

There is a sadness there, a longing for some past life of turf firesides and evenings in hay meadows.
Of smoky pubs where men with knurled hands produce music and recitations of angelic sense.
But there is also a fierce appetite for life, a longing to improve, to create, to bring the beauty of the making of a thatched cottage to a modern purpose.
That huge feeling that deep down we know who we are and what we represent and sometimes we find it difficult to get it out.
Ronnie Drew reminds us what we are.

A people who have come through a troubled history, have known what it is to grieve, to know the value of sorrow and yet are moving forward to that future our forefathers talked about on the headlands of meadows and at crossroads on a Summer evening.