SIDELINE CUT:Munster has liberated the rest of the Republic. It seems inevitable now that, some year soon, the pubs will be open on Good Friday. And then nobody will go to them, writes KEITH DUGGAN

PHONED A “Munster” friend yesterday evening, curious to know what the scene was like down in Godless Limerick, the citadel of Munster rugby and the litmus test for the new Good Friday Agreement.

The guy takes this Munster business fairly seriously, regarding a tattered sweatband allegedly worn by Ronan O’Gara as among his most precious possessions and insisting that his hairdresser shape his hair in the angelic tresses that Gerry Flannery favours.

He even has a tattoo on his forearm bearing the legend “Irish by Birth, Munster by Grace of God”. No one has the heart any more to remind the dude that he was born and raised in Killybegs. It is a bit like those people that you hear about who joined the Moonies. He believes in it and it makes him happy.

Before the match, he was in no mood to talk, explaining that he was too busy drinking. Pints, spirits, shots: it didn’t matter. He was determined to make up for a lifetime of penitent Good Fridays by skulling all the booze that he could in the name of Munster. I asked him if the Leinster visitors were partaking of a drink.

“Arrragh, they are splitting a shandy between the lot of them,” he said disparagingly.

The background noise sounded crazy, with Beyoncé on the sound system competing with Munster fans in the midst of their triumphal chants. The friend began shouting something down the phone about attacking Jonny Sexton down the channel but then I heard him yell, “Yeah and six Jagermeister, chief,” and I hung up.

What was it all about?

Have Munster become such a dull team to watch that it is impossible for their fans to watch them without getting good and tipsy before kick-off?

Would the atmosphere in Thomond Park lack something if the audience was dry?

Or was yesterday just further proof that, in Ireland, it is pretty much impossible to hold any sort of sporting cat fight without the option “to take a drink”?

The debates about the liberalisation of Limerick for this Good Friday were good fun to listen to.

The main point of those in favour of opening the taverns and allowing the good burghers of Munster to drink their fill boiled down to: “This is the 21st century.” They were in favour of opening up the whole commercial shooting match – pubs, restaurants, shops, the lot – so that towns and cities in Ireland would be no different than somewhere like Norwich on Good Fridays.

Personally, I would prefer to see everything go back to the way it was 20 years ago. Stop the clocks, cut off the telephones.

Show nothing on television except for seven-hour re-enactments of the walk to Calvary. Drape the whole country in black. Black tea and toast, fish for supper. Do nothing more exuberant than breathe until after three o’clock. That would learn them.

Of course, wishing for that is hypocrisy on my part. We grew up just a few miles from the border and, each Good Friday, a mass exodus to Belleek would take place. Many hundreds would abandon the towns of south Donegal, taking taxis, hitching lifts or even walking across to the quiet Fermanagh village which, on all Good Friday nights, went berserk.

People who did not drink from one end of the year to the next felt compelled to do an Oliver Reed on it on Good Friday night. Fathers would bring their sons and put up a pint of stout in front of them. “Courtesy of the Queen,” they would say proudly.

“But I’m five years old, Dad,” the child would complain. “It tastes yucky.”

“It’s not got a great head on it, right enough,” the father would say dubiously.

Some years, the general mayhem would be accompanied by a football match. Liverpool and Manchester United played a derby game on the Good Friday of 1998, when the gang in Stormont declared peace in our time. The game was rubbish, but it didn’t matter: it was an added excuse – a concrete reason – to leave the traditional Irish Good Friday and partake in the Ulster alternative. One reveller was heard to ask if Good Friday could ever fall on a Saturday. Only on a Leap Year, he was told. Only on a Leap Year.

But this Munster booze-up just confirms the inescapable link between Irish sport and Irish boozing. Go to Thurles on Munster hurling final day or Clones for any big championship match and by noon, the fans are boozing in earnest.

To walk to Croke Park on All-Ireland final day is to marvel at the sheer volume and speed at which pints are consumed by fans “up for the match”.

The boozing is suspended – sort of – for the duration of the match but resumes in earnest around the city afterwards, and on the trains and coaches home and then, whether to celebrate victory or to recover from defeat, in the pubs of participating counties.

It is pretty much accepted that when any GAA team wins anything of significance, be it at college level, club or county, they have carte blanche to disappear into the haze of drink for days, weeks, months afterwards. But it isn’t simply the native game. When the Irish soccer team qualifies for any major tournament, it is basically a state-approved month of a national booze-up.

Rugby, too. In the amateur era, the boys in the BBC would inevitably begin their pre-match television features on Ireland’s hopes for the season by showing a pint of stout settling on a wooden bar counter. Then Steve Ryder, looking as suave as Simon Templar, would smile and say, “win, lose or draw, the Irish know how to throw a party”.

The stereotype was both insulting and perfectly true. Still is.

Before the Six Nations game against Wales in Croke Park, it was noted that a 5pm kick-off suited the Irish temperament better than 2pm because the home crowd had a better chance to “warm up”.

And it was true, the atmosphere at that Wales match was dull, kind of sober.

The fact that the crowd of 80,000 was not half-locked when the match began had a sobering effect on the thirsty patrons.

Thinking back to those Good Friday nights over the border, the odd thing was that the other 51 Fridays of the year were never big going-out nights.

Thursday was a big night. Saturday, obviously. Sunday had a big following. Actually, come to think of it, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights weren’t bad either. But Friday nights in winter were like the Specials’ big hit . . . Ghost Town.

The thrill of knocking them back on Good Friday nights emanated from the sense of getting one up on the other counties: of having fun on a night when most towns in the Republic were not.

It is the same illicit thrill that has rendered our illustrious captains of finance as permanent figures of notoriety – the kick of feeling that you were getting away with it.

Munster, it would seem, has liberated the rest of the Republic. It seems inevitable now that, if not next year, then some year soon, the pubs in Ireland will be open on Good Friday. And then nobody will go to them.

All over Europe, images of Holy Week will feature in this newspaper among others. The Moriones festival in the Philippines, the Holy Week processions in Spain, the Procession of the Torches in Brazil. Ireland’s contribution to the pageant is destined to be little more than a lone lad in a red shirt buckled outside Thomond in the semi-darkness, clutching a bag of chips and a tin of cider.

It’s as good a sign of the times as any.