Slightly at a tangent, but I watched a brilliant documentary last night where the former Ireland rugby captain Brian O’Driscoll tried to find out how, throughout the fight for Home Rule, partition, civil war, and the Troubles, Ireland managed to stay united in one thing only, its national rugby team. He talked to former players, some of them fairly staunch Republicans or Loyalists, and they all said that the differences weren’t forgotten or not talked about while the players were together, they were just put aside for the sake of the team. Donal Lenihan, the captain during the 1980’s, had a grandfather who fought during the Easter Rising, and he used to share a room with a player who was a member of the RUC. Some very moving moments, including the part about 3 players on their way south to Dublin for training being accidentally involved in a roadside bombing of a judge’s car in 1987. The judge and his wife were killed, but fortunately the 3 players survived. One, Nigel Carr, missed the first World Cup because of his injuries but remains very philosophical about the whole thing.
Well worth watching if you can find it, it was a BT production called Shoulder to Shoulder, a line from the anthem used by the IRFU.