Where will you find the world's best pubs - London or Dublin?

By Amy Cooper

To be sure, to be sure, the traditional Irish pub is grand. I was in one just last week; Guinness poured to velvety perfection, trad Irish band, Gaelic football on TV, craic flowing from every crack.

I wandered up the road to another, where Irish actor Brendan Gleeson likes to fiddle a foot-stomping reel with the band, then onto a third for a bowl of Irish stew, whiskey and banter with the Donegal-born landlord. Then, before I started seeing leprechauns, I headed home. On the London Underground.

The Faltering Fullback in Finsbury Park, Stoke Newington's Auld Shillelagh and Camden's Sheephaven Bay are beloved Irish boozers, found not in Ireland's capital but England's - and all so authentically Celtic you'll swear you'd been teleported to Temple Bar.

Irish pubs are their country's greatest export. You'll find them from Brisbane to Bratislava, but London's are supreme, lauded by Emerald Isle exiles and even the notoriously brutal Instagram Irish booze arbiter, @ShitLondonGuinness. The Irish Times declared the Auld Shillelagh the best Irish pub outside Ireland.

While almost beating Dublin at its own Guinness game, London's Irish pubs are just a drop in an ocean of 4300-plus eclectic, storied, ancient and awesome establishments across the city.

London's boozing biodiversity can flit from the Emerald Isle to Jamaica via Red Stripe and jerk chicken at Brixton's Afro-Caribbean hub Effra Tavern, Prague with Czech-brewed lager at Finsbury Park's just-opened Bohemian boozer Nicholas Nickleby, then 400 years back in time over cask ales served by Aussie-born Roxy Beaujolais, legendary landlady of Seven Stars, a pub established during the reign of Elizabeth I.

If you had a pint in a different London pub each day, it would take you over a decade to complete your crawl.

Meanwhile, Dublin's 250 or so pubs are all variations on one theme of shamrocks and the black stuff. No wonder the city's famous drinking writers decamped to London. WB Yeats and Oscar Wilde frequented Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a Fleet Street writers' haunt since 1667. Brendan Behan favoured Soho's the French House, an absolute gem where a sign today says: "In the interest of serious drinking and good conversation, please DON'T use your mobile." You can explore London pubs by century, suburb or by Charles Dickens, who drank at just about every one that existed in his era, including the city's only surviving coaching inn, The George in Southwark - also patronised by Will Shakespeare.

River Thames is best navigated by waterside pubs, such as the Prospect of Whitby, where the water laps against 400-year-old walls and the Mayflower in Rotherhithe, on the spot where the eponymous ship set sail for America in 1620. In this quaff-off, I have made my pint: London wins the head-to-head.

By Mal Chenu

This week's topic is a bloody stitch-up. The tavern equivalent of bodyline. Pubs in the British Isles is Amy's area of expertise. Not to mention experience, expenditure, obsession, lifestyle, raison d'etre, and misspent youth, adulthood, middle age and eventually dotage.

At a firm disadvantage, I come to this debate with all the confidence of Joe Biden's speechwriter.

Nevertheless, I'll belly up to the bar and take a craic at it. Most often found at the pub, "craic" is that peculiarly lovable Irish expression for fun, and Irish pubs are "franchised" all over the world to try to emulate it.

Good craic comes in many forms - singing, dancing, conversation, laughter and shenanigans - but its location is singular. You can only get craic in Ireland. The pale ale English comparison might be "Jolly good game of darts last night at the Bear's Crotch, eh what?"

The first stop on our investigation of Dublin's finest saloons is Guinness Storehouse, a must-sip attraction visited by about a million people a year.

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Sure, a lot of these people are Amy, but this seven-storey building in the shape of a pint glass is the trad stout lover's holy grail.

Recognising the importance of beer to the city, Dublin's prescient Lord Mayor granted Arthur Guinness a 9000-year lease of this site in 1759. So closing time is a still fair way off.

Here you'll learn how they make the malty marvel, print a photo of yourself (known as a "stoutie") on the head of a Guinness and pour yourself a pint.

(A fun trivia fact to bring up during another boring night at the Bear's Crotch is that pouring a Guinness is a six-stage process that takes 119.5 seconds).

Dublin is filled with illustrious and historic watering holes, such as The Gravediggers, Toners Pub, Grogans, Kehoes, Bowes Bar, The Long Hall and The Cobblestone.

If you're inclined to a scholarly swill, you can crawl the literary pubs. Neary's is a UNESCO City of Literature Bar with entry via a back door from the Gaiety Theatre. (Make of that what you will.) It opened in 1871 and many original features remain, including the gas lamps.

Davy Byrnes features in James Joyce's Ulysses, and every Bloomsday (the day locals celebrate the author on June 16), you can sip a burgundy and eat a gorgonzola sandwich as Leopold Bloom did in the novel.

Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh were regulars at the Palace Bar, while Joyce, Behan, Jonathan Swift, and Irish revolutionaries Robert Emmet and Michael Collins blew the froth off a few at The Brazen Head, Ireland's oldest pub, which "has been a hostelry since 1198".

You'd be a right eejit not to prefer the history, music and craic of Dublin's pubs. The pints, the pints are calling.