An Irishman's Diary

WAITING for the grim news from Brussels on Tuesday night, I passed the time like many people watching the Munster-Australia rugby match. And while both events were highly dramatic in their own right, their juxtaposition made each somehow more compelling. There was even an instructive element to watching them in tandem, or so it seemed.

At first, the rugby was an uplifting contrast to what was happening at the EU ministerial meeting. On a night of national humiliation, I thought, here were old values reasserting themselves as if nothing had happened.

Never had torrential Limerick rain looked so comforting. And some of the other eternal verities of Irish life were on welcome display too: men in red shirts playing like dervishes; guttural broad-vowelled support roaring them to victory; a team of frightened foreigners looking overwhelmed by their situation, like white missionaries who had stumbled into a village of cannibals during a food shortage. Indeed, The Fields of Athenryalso made an inevitable appearance: as if to inform the visitors that, the local potato crop having failed and Trevelyan's corn being unavailable, they would be on tonight's menu instead, marked "catch of the day". But then, as the game wore on, the prouder members of the Australian team might have welcomed being swallowed, if only by the ground.

It was hard to know which was more comical: the weather conditions (as observed from a safe distance) or the visitors’ utter inability to deal with them. Gratuitous as they were, jibes about the difference between Thomond Park and “Bondi Beach” were too tempting for the commentators to pass up.

In any case, the whole spectacle was thoroughly enjoyable, as the great Munster performances are. And when you switched over to the news channels temporarily to hear what was happening at the ministerial meeting, comparisons were all the more stark. In Brussels, it was the Irish team that looked scared, unable to do anything right in the face of a relentless storm and of apparently unconquerable adversaries.

Thus it was with relief that one returned to the rugby. But after a few switches back and forth, the two events became hopelessly intermingled. Bondi, the bond markets, bondage (Michael in his prison ship) – even the language grew confused, as if caught up in the swirling Thomond Park wind. And as a consequence, finally, one couldn’t even enjoy the rugby for what it was.

Doubts crept in about the true worth of the Munster myth. Good as the Irish Munster was, for example, the one in Germany was surely better funded. Besides, much as we liked to pretend otherwise, we also had to admit that the modern Munster and its famous fighting spirit was no longer a purely Irish phenomenon.

Among the fearless men in red on Tuesday were members of the Howlett, Tuitoupou, and Du Preez clans, none of which – if I remember my history correctly – were represented in the last Desmond Rebellion, or at Kinsale. It seems likely that the nearest any of those lads got to the Flight of the Earls was when their team-mate of that name – Keith – was substituted after 78 minutes.

Then there was the aforementioned Fields. Not for the first time, it struck me that many of those singing it were by definition survivors of the Famine, whose mantle of suffering they so enjoy wearing. In some cases, their ancestors may even have been strong farmers or merchants who would never have had any reason to steal corn. Hell, for all we know, they may even have exported it.

Whereas the hapless visiting team – those same unfortunates we were taunting about their homesickness for Bondi Beach – included such surnames as “Morahan”, “Daley”, and “McCabe”. Who knows? Some of their forebears could have been from Athenry, before being shipped to Botany Bay for the crime of trying to feed their children. By the final whistle, I was stricken with uncertainty about the whole thing. Was Munster’s rout of Australia really more evidence of Yeats’s “indomitable Irishry”, as I preferred to think? Or was it just another example of the talent for self-aggrandising delusion, which has been a feature of Irish life for centuries and which has repeatedly tempted us to recklessness and ruin, most recently in the financial sphere? Neither, I decided finally. On balance, it was just another rugby match. But the idea about our capacity for self-delusion continued to linger, disturbingly.

Meanwhile, back on the news channels, I learned that the Irish team in Brussels was still holding out, refusing to accept Trevelyan’s offers of corn on the grounds that we were fully-funded, corn-wise, well into the middle of next year.