The VIP visitor was drawing mixed reactions from regulars at the Cricklewood Homeless Concern. West Indians and Bangladeshis looked up from their turkey dinners with either puzzlement or indifference.
But the Irish - still a majority here despite multiculturalism - greeted the arrival with that strange mixture of deference and familiarity normally reserved for Bertie Ahern.
The Sam Maguire Cup was in London yesterday. As with Bertie, most Irish people have met the cup before: in Croke Park, in the street somewhere, or maybe at the opening of a pub. On the one hand, there's great respect for the trophy and what it symbolises. And at the same time, nobody thinks anything of grabbing it and posing with it for a photograph. If you're Irish, it belongs to you.
The other striking thing about the cup's arrival in north London is that the occasion is being run by Kerry people. Maybe it's the association of the Sam Maguire with homelessness that has attracted their sympathy, hurting as they are still over the All-Ireland loss.
But the event has been sponsored by a London-based Kerryman, Danny O'Sullivan. Mayor of Kerry Toiréasa Ferris, has brought 500 Christmas presents from Tralee. Tyrone's Chris Lawn, Sam's official escort for the day, is being marked closely by Paul Galvin, a member of the defeated team. Even the centre's welcoming committee is led by a Kerryman.
Paddy Curran is one of the success stories of the campaign to reclaim the Irish who emigrated to England in poorer days.
The Sam Maguire may not be going back to Kerry anytime soon, but after 46 years in Britain, Paddy is. His most recent visit to Ireland was 10 days ago when he went to Mulrany, Co Mayo, to register for the "Safe Home" initiative.
He's been promised a place to live in Cahirciveen within months, and whenever it happens, he says, "I'll be ready".
Homeless for a period until the Cricklewood centre got him back on his feet, Paddy left south Kerry in an era when "there was still no electric light outside the towns". But he's been back plenty of times since, he's on good terms with his family and - even at 66 - he's not worried about adjusting to the new Ireland. "I think I still have 20 or 30 years left in me, so now's the time to go."
Not everybody wants to return. In 1998 Jim Connolly went home to Galway for six months but couldn't settle. It didn't help that he was working in a pub for a while there, before discovering that everyone else there was being paid "three quid an hour" more than him. "I fecked off after that," he says, still angry at the slight.
His is a cautionary tale. He was lucky enough to spend most of his years in London as a barman, latterly in Cricklewood's Crown pub, the imperious gin palace in which many an Irish builder squandered his earnings. But all the standing took its toll. When his hips "wore away", he could no longer work.
Not long after that he was "living in a van". Again, the homeless centre rescued him.
He walks with a frame now and, like most of the older Irish crowd, avoids the Crown, where epic feats of drinking are apparently a thing of the past. Still, it's not without fondness that he reminisces about the times when the pub turned over "two lorry-loads of Guinness" every week.
Kevin Kinsella, a former railway worker who last visited his native Clones three years ago for his mother's funeral, drags on a cigarette and smiles at the memory of "the busiest pub in London".
Everything has changed, here as well as at home. "Nobody's emigrating now," says Danny O'Sullivan, whose business is supplying labour to the construction industry. Of the 500 men on his books, the Paddies are an ethnic minority these days.
"You'd be lucky if 200 were Irish," he estimates, as the Tralee presents - driven to London in one of his vans - are distributed, to Irish and non-Irish alike.