WATCH: Mary O kicks off viral scone-making campaign with an Irish blessing

Mary O’Halloran, the Irish proprietor of Mary O’s in downtown New York City, went viral back in August when she was featured on the popular Humans of New York (HONY).

O’Halloran, a mother of six, recounted in her installment for HONY how she turned to cooking traditional Irish food, including scones, to help make ends meet when her pub and restaurant was forced to shutter amidst the pandemic.

“It created big scone hype for a few months,” O’Halloran told HONY in August. “It wasn’t a ton of money. I was only making $1800 for 100 boxes of scones. It wasn’t paying rent or anything. But it was something to do, you know? I finally found something that was working. People were writing notes, saying: ‘I gave these to my grandmother, and she loved them.’”

Wanting to help the inspiring Irish woman, Brandon Stanton, the mastermind behind HONY, launched an online shop where people can order O’Halloran’s “magical” Irish scones. For $30, you’ll get an order of scones, as well as a drawing from O’Halloran’s daughter Erinn.

Additionally, “each box will also include an invisible Irish blessing that will be passed down through the generations to all of your descendants until the end of the time,” says Stanton.

The results were staggering. Within 24 hours of Stanton sharing O’Halloran’s story on HONY, orders came in for some $1,000,000 worth of soda bread scones.

Now, it's time for O'Halloran to get baking. 

Presiding over a sizeable delivery of Irish flour, and surrounded by Irish fiddles and raised pints of Guinness, an emotional O'Halloran offered this Irish blessing in a video shared by Humans of New York on Monday evening:

"May you live a long life, full of gladness and health.

With a pocket full of gold as the least of your wealth

May the dreams you hold dearest be those which come true

and the kindness you spread, keep returning to you."

The caption for the smile-inducing HONY post reads: “Mary O’Halloran. Queen of the Mary O's Irish Pub. Mother of six and ninth of her name. Hailing from the rolling green hills of County Mayo, Ireland. Has recently accepted a divine mission to prepare 200,000 Irish scones to grace the tables and fill the stomachs of HONY folk across the land. 

“Last Friday 20,000 lbs. of the purest Odlum’s self-raising Irish flour was delivered on a sturdy ship from Dublin. Over the next two months, it will be magically transformed into scones, using the ‘gigantic ovens’ in the basement kitchen of St. Francis Xavier Church. Queen Mary has given assurance that her hand will touch every bowl of flour. But the process will be supervised by ‘six rock-solid Irish Mammies,’ whose ‘kids are grown,’ and ‘know how to follow a recipe.’ 

“Afterward, the scones will be joined with 7,000 lbs of homemade blackberry jam, placed into boxes by an army of volunteers, and dispatched on horseback across the land.

“BUT FIRST, and as promised, the flour was infused with an Irish blessing by Mary.”

You can watch Mary O offering her Irish blessing here, courtesy of Humans of New York: