What a wonderful week to be Irish. Tim Henman bowed out of Wimbledon and England's World Cup dreams came to an end. If the English rugby team are beaten by South Africa today it will complete a glorious hattrick of defeats that will have Irish sports fans celebrating for years to come.

We are a nation of APES, Anyone Playing England Supporters. It is knee-jerk xenophobia that surfaces every time England are involved in major competition.

Usually intelligent, tolerant people start banging on about "slaughtering the Brits" while radio, newspaper and TV commentators remind us (as if we needed it) where our true allegiances lie. On Tuesday, when England battled to get into the World Cup quarter-finals, they lay with Argentina. Obviously, muchachos.

Apes have been particularly difficult to fathom this week. All year long pubs are filled with fans cheering on Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and all the other Premiership sides.

But when they don an England jersey, David Beckham, Michael Owen and David Seaman become targets of derision. It's a paradox never fully explained by fans.

A journalist, George Byrne, for example, supports Chelsea but was wishing their star defender Graham Le Saux "a very bad match on Tuesday night". Meanwhile, his friends, rabid Manchester United fans, were dancing around the pub when Red Devil Beckham got sent off.

"It's perfectly logical, it just happens that way," he insists. "If you can't understand that you don't understand football".

Or history.

Although, according to Byrne, our anti-English sentiments owe less to the obligatory 800-years-of-oppression chestnut than to 30 years of English football commentator Jimmy Hill.

When it comes to football, the English, APES agree, are arrogant and thuggish, bringing with them a political past that means they deserve everything they get. And imagine if they won? We'd never hear the end of it.

The Republic of Ireland soccer team have never won anything (except that extremely unscientific award for "Best Fans in the World"), but we are still suffering from the delusion that in international football we matter.

And if an English journalist wrote about Ireland during Italia 90 the way journalist/diarist Joe O'Shea did about England's World Cup hopes, an emergency Dail meeting would have been called. ail.

O'Shea acknowledges that the national anti-English sentiments owe much to the "ouldenemy thing. When it comes to sport we really want the English to fail," he says. "It is a gut reaction. It's not big and it's not clever but it is in the air we breathe and the water we drink."

He takes this visceral thinking further: "If Pol Pot had a starting 11 against England, we would still be rooting for the Khmer Rouge. It would be the same if they were playing a team headed by Slobodan Milosevic," he says.

Of course, it's not just the Irish. There are Scottish APES and Welsh APES and - some people would have you believe - APES in just about every country in the world.

And so, in solidarity with our anti-English brethren, we packed the pubs on Tuesday night to watch the old enemy go down. On the Gerry Ryan radio show people were invited to put forward their fantasies of the best way England could lose.

The show's Brenda Donoghue was in pubs around Dublin to gauge the reaction of observers.

"It was a roller-coaster of emotions," she says. "At the beginning the vast majority were for Argentina. Then during the match they started to support England, but when the last penalty was missed cheers erupted because England were out."

One man wasn't cheering, she says. An English fan who simply wasn't prepared for this naked display of jubilation at England's misfortune.

There are signs of hope. People who in the past never supported England could be seen cheering for Glenn Hoddle's team on Tuesday. These recovering APES didn't want to be named but said the country was confident enough now not to have to cheer against England.

Others talked about how near and familiar the country was to the Republic. One said he had cheered for England because of the quality of the players.

Unfortunately, many of us will continue to justify what amount to historical insecurities with near-racist rants against English media commentators, their team and a minority of their football fans. But for some Irish people, with England gone, the rest of the World Cup is changed, changed utterly.