Did you spot our NYPD Cop Car on the Dublin Streets?

On December 4th, Dubliners commuting around the city might have noticed something a little out of the ordinary. Surveying the streets was a police car – but not one from An Garda Siochana. Instead, a vintage NYPD cop car, circa the 1980s, took to the streets of Dublin, playing an all too familiar song – ‘Galway Bay’, popularised by Bing Crosby, and written by Nicholas Arthur Colohan. Except, this version was a little different.

The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay… weren’t they?

For decades, when listening to the iconic Christmas song ‘Fairytale of New York’, we have belted out the lyric, “The boys of the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay.” Many of us don’t give the line a second thought, but when you stop to think about it for a minute, you might ask yourself, ‘was there ever a NYPD choir?’ The answer to that question is quite simply no, which means they never did sing ‘Galway Bay’. That all changed last year when we at EPIC gathered a group of retired NYPD cops, and created the very thing that the Pogues were singing about almost 40 years ago. You can watch our video of the choir’s performance now, with EPIC donating €1 for every view it receives – to a maximum of €5000 – until the 19th December to the Dublin Simon Community, a charity close to the late Shane MacGowan’s heart.

A piece of the Big Apple here in Dublin

In order to fundraise to the best of our ability, we did something a little different this year, hiring the NYPD cop car reminiscent of those on the roads when ‘Fairytale of New York’ was first performed, playing our version of ‘Galway Bay’ to further honour Shane MacGowan’s legacy and to draw people’s attention to the music video. And draw attention it did, with our very own Garda Siochana showing up to pose for some photos, their car and our car side by side. We were spotted in iconic locations around Dublin city such as Stephen’s Green, City Hall, The GPO and of course the historic CHQ Building, the song serves as an homage to the Pogues and Shane MacGowan, but also to the message of the original ‘Galway Bay’ song, a song about longing for Ireland, a feeling many who have emigrated are all too familiar with.

‘Galway Bay’ – an ode to Ireland

The song ‘Galway Bay’ encompasses everything we believe to be true about Irish emigration and the impact it has had on the world. That image that the Pogues imagined back in 1987, a choir full of NYPD officers singing about “the moon rise over Claddagh” and seeing “the sun go down on Galway Bay” is a powerful one, one that only further idealises the Irish landscape. To describe our country, which relative to the rest of the world, is incredibly small, as “heaven” is a huge token to the love people feel for it, whether they’ve ever called it home, or it’s been the backdrop for tales their family members have told them about.