“There will be no violence here today,” the old man goes. He’s wear-ing his famous Cole Haan camel hair coat and his hat and his face is sort of, like, flickering in the candlelight. “This will be a peaceful protest.”
There must be, like, three or four hundred of us gathered outside the French Embassy on Ailesbury Road.
“Angry as we are,” he goes, “we must not descend to hooliganism. We’re not anti-water charge protestors.”
No, this is a candle-lit vigil to protest against the decision to let Johnny Sexton leave Leinster for Racing Metro.
“The focking French,” someone shouts, totally ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people here own holiday homes in either Brittany or Provence. “We shouldn’t buy any more of their cheeses. We should picket, I don’t know, Sheridan’s – in fact, anywhere that insists on selling it.”
The old man just shakes his head. He’s there, “While the temptation, I know, is to lash out. Let us not forget that our argument isn’t with the French. They are our friends. A lot of us spend three or four months of the year there.”
You can see people nodding and generally calming down.
He goes, “And, as I’m often wont to say to the inestimable Hen- nessy Coghlan-O”Hara, what would John Shanahan’s famous Angus beef be without a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild to keep it company?”
That gets a cheer and an actual round of applause. You can see why he topped the poll when he ran for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
“They love him,” Hennessy goes, as if reading my mind. He’s standing over my right hammer. “I said it in 1990. He could have been the next Charles Haughey, if that’s what he wanted.”
I’m there, “Yeah, no, it’s pretty inspiring stuff alright.”
"Our argument," the old man goes, "is not with the French. And it's certainly not with the notion of a free market European econ- omy in which workers are permitted to – inverted commas – ply their trade wherever they so wish. Our argument is with the Irish Rugby Football Union, who have allowed one of the greatest number tens this country has ever produced to slip through their fingers – and, let's be honest, they have a history of doing that."
He looks straight at me when he says it. I feel a lot of hands suddenly patting me on the back – we're talking Oisinn, we're talking JP, we're talking Gerry Thornley, we're talking One F from The Stor.
Everyone’s going, “He’s talking about you, Ross!”
Someone shouts, “Your son was the greatest waste of natural talent that Irish rugby has ever seen. Even Declan Kidney said it.”
It’s definitely one of the proudest moments of my life.
The old man goes, “So will you follow me, ladies and gentleman?” even though there are no actual women there – he’s just covering all the bases. “Will you follow me to the headquarters of the Irish Rugby Football Union, where we will give the bean-counting fools who run Irish rugby a demonstration of the depth of feeling that exists on this issue?”
“Will there be hymns?” someone shouts – presumably a Protestant.
The old man goes, “Oh, there’ll be hymns alright! And there’ll be a few stories told, no doubt, about our favourite Johnny Sexton moments.”
“Obviously the Heineken Cup final against the Northampton Saints in 2011 stands out in the memory!” someone shouts. “He did most of the talking at half-time! He’s the one who got them to believe the match was still basically winnable!”
Someone else shouts, “His cross-field pass for Isa Nacewa’s try against the Scorlets last year was simply sublime! There’s no other word for it! So was his forty-five-metre drop goal in the same match!”
It’s pretty heady stuff.
All around me, people are lighting their candles. Someone storts singing A Change is Gonna Come, except changing the opening line to, "I was born by the river, near the RDS – and just like that river, I've been Leinster ever since."
Everyone joins in. There’s some incredible voices in the crowd. Like I said – Protestants.
Then we storts walking behind this humungous banner that Oisinn and JP made for the occasion. It just says, “Let’s Bring Sexy Back!”
And we morch to Lansdowne Road. We morch as a tribe. Because that’s what we are.
We are Leinster.
This is us.
Although a lot of people do end up either driving or getting taxis – because Lansdowne Road has got to be, what, three kilometres away?
Tomorrow: Ross goes on a Tinder date
Seedless in Seattle is published by Penguin Ireland
