A chara, - The IRFU, the spectators at the match, and indeed the Irish people paid the English rugby team an unprecedented honour at Lansdowne Road in playing the British National Anthem before the match. I have no doubt myself that this was a factor that affected the outcome of the match.
I believe, as the great Irish patriot Tom Kettle believed, that "it needs only a fiat lux, of a kind very easily compassed, to replace the unnatural by the natural". I hope that last Saturday marks the beginning (albeit not in a rugby sense) of a new relationship between our two great nations. - Mise le meas,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2.
PS: I cannot forbear quoting at this moment the tribute paid to Tom Kettle in the French journal, L'Opinion. "All parties bowed in sorrow over his grave, for in last analysis they were all Irish, and they knew that in losing him, whether he was friend or enemy, they had lost a true son of Ireland. A son of Ireland? He was more. He was Ireland! He had fought for all the aspirations of his race, for independence, for Home Rule, for the Celtic Renaissance, for a United Ireland, for the eternal cause of humanity. He died, a hero, in the uniform of a British soldier, because he knew that the faults of a period or of a man should not prevail against the cause of right or liberty."