Michael Moynihan
IF YOU heard it once, you heard it about fifty times over the weekend, the declaration that when Ireland  played England in rugby at Croke Park three years ago, we matured as a nation.
God, make it stop.
There’s something about the self-congratulation involved in this solo run that would make your flesh crawl. To sum up with the thirty-second version, our national maturity was complete – our voices broke, if you like – when we managed to keep our gobs shut for God Save The Queen when Martin Corry and his pals lined up in front of the Hogan Stand.
Let’s break that down a little bit.
You had 82,000 people there. A few thousand English supporters. The standard Lansdowne Road support for Ireland of roughly fifty thousand people.
Now, the English weren’t going to boo their own anthem.
Ireland supporters who’d spent decades hearing GSTQ every second year in Lansdowne Road were hardly going to boo.
The extra people – the thirty-odd thousand-plus supporters accommodated in Jones’ Road on that occasion – were, presumably, the people to be praised for not jeering the English.
But surely those extra bums on seats belonged to rugby supporters anyway? The proof of that is in the capacity crowd drawn by Munster and Leinster last year: why then the big deal about the silence for the English anthem?
We supported the opening of Croke Park to soccer and rugby. It was the only option at that time – socially, economically, spiritually, even grammatically (Hence the ‘Croker choker’ headlines recently) – and it worked out well for everybody.
But less of the mythologizing, everybody. Ireland-England was a great occasion, maybe one of the greatest sporting occasions we’ve ever had.
But it was a sporting occasion.
If you think that we’re being unnecessarily harsh, consider this – how many sporting occasions really take over the country?
Not Kilkenny’s four in a row.
Not a strike in Cork, or Limerick, or Clare, or anywhere else.
Not even Paul Galvin’s disciplinary troubles.
Not Munster winning a Heineken Cup.
Or Leinster.
Not even Roy Keane being sent home in 2002 from the World Cup.
To the best of our memory, the only time a sporting occasion really spilled out into the streets – and we use the term advisedly – was the World Cup in 1990.
No matter if you’re a GAA diehard, a rugby obsessive, or a devotee of competitive eating, nothing compares to that. When Diego Maradona led Napoli to the Italian league title, the Neapolitans hung signs in the city’s graveyards addressed to the dead: “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Suffice to say that in 1990 those Italians would have been viewed as models of austere understatement. The country was INSANE.
The most appealing aspect of the entire summer was that it just got crazier and crazier, from people dancing in fountains to Bill O’Herlihy’s clapping-hands baseball cap.
I remember it as the time we became immature as a nation. And it was all the more enjoyable because of that.