Ronnie, we'll miss you

The end of an era in folk music

Forget The Dubliner. The Dubliner has passed away over to that great big session in the sky. The death of Ronnie Drew, the gravelly-voiced paragon of what it means to be from the city of the hurdling fords, leaves us all a little less.

An institute wrapped in a legend wrapped in a great big beard, Ronnie died in St. Vincent's after a long battle with throat cancer.

As Bono, Robert Hunter and Simon Carmody wrote in The Ballad of Ronnie Drew:

Here's to the Ronnie, to the voice we adore;
Like coals from a coal bucket scraping the floor.