Our wakes have roots in paganism, but also in our history as a colonised nation, in the elevation of the oral tradition when the written records of our culture were destroyed and banned. This, too, is part of what makes us a nation of storytellers. 

Stories, whether in song or spoken word, are a central part of the wake. Stories about the deceased bridge our loss for a moment.

Shane MacGowan could layer a single, throwaway line—'Bury me at sea, where no murdered ghost can haunt me', for example, or 'the wind blows right through you, it's no place for the old'—with so much intrigue and humanity that it became a story in itself, and each song of these lines created a living, breathing world. 

And, as with all the best storytellers, Shane seasoned the facts with a little myth and magic to create something universal. That's the beauty of stories; they're as much about the listener as the teller or the subject.

So it was only natural that, when one of our greatest storytellers died, the nation plunged into full wake mode. 

Social media and group chats hummed as friends shared favourite lines, favourite songs, in particular those of us who have lived abroad, or still do: Edinburgh, Perth, Milwaukee, Seoul... The usual and unusual places you'll find Irish people setting up camp for a little or a long while, and longing for home.

My now wife and I moved to London in 2003. It was the height of the Celtic Tiger and we moved for adventure, a change of scene, not necessity, not to find work, certainly not 'only sixteen, with a fiver in my pocket and my ole dancing bag'. We had jobs, college places, a roof over our heads. 

I wondered more than once whether it was fraudulent to even call ourselves migrants. Cork was an hour away via Ryanair. Phone calls were cheap, if not free. You could get Barry's Tea in Tesco. We weren't labouring on the sites like a character in a Pogues song.

But something does happen to you when you leave Ireland. They may drive on the same side of the road in your new home, but the road signs are a different colour, the place names have a different tenor. The language may be the same, but the accents are alien. 

Everything, down to the change in your pocket, is different, and so you yourself are different. 'Though there is no lonesome corncrake's cry of sorrow and delight, you can hear the cars and the shouts from bars and the laughter and the fights.' 

On holiday, it's an amusing novelty. On a more permanent basis, being in not-Ireland feels like bifurcation. You carry Ireland inside you, but what's outside you is not-Ireland; your inside and outside don't match.

Frauds or not, you decide. But we lived in County Cricklewood, and we drank in County Kilburn, watching Cork lose, then win, then lose, All-Irelands against Kilkenny. 

We screamed it was our shout in the Euston Tavern, and we met the men (and, to a lesser extent, the women) who migrated in larger or smaller waves from the 1950s onwards. 'And it's lend me ten pounds, I'll buy you a drink' was still a thing, though adjusted for inflation. 

We listened to their stories, they listened to ours. We visited home and re-told their stories, sprinkled with a little stardust from 'that London'. It was the perpetual wake that is the experience of the Irish abroad, mourning not a death but the parting. 

Every migrant, to or from Ireland, whether you're Piotr, Patel, or Paddy, knows it. Shane, perpetually bifurcated between London and Tipperary, gave voice to it better than anyone else—the longing, the loneliness, but also the defiance and the triumph.

So this weekend, Irish people the world over will hold a wake for Shane, as only we know how, with story and song and his own inimitable words—'Sad to say I must be on my way so buy me beer and whiskey 'cause I'm going far away...'