While the alickadoos in sack cloth caper glumly outside Lansdowne Road, casting ashes of despair around them, and even as the air beneath the Upper East Stand is thick with plummeting blazered bodies, we might ask: why have we got an all-Ireland rugby team anyway? Why do so many Northern unionists support it? Should Amhran na bhFiann be the single anthem for our rugby team? And is the example of Irish rugby not an inspiration for the rest of Ireland as a whole?
Let's answer the last question first. No. Do you really think that Sammy Harryville Tweed wore the green shirt in a spirit of reconciliation and unity with his fellow Irishmen? Or did he wear it because it was simply the shirt of the highest available rugby team he was qualified to play for? We call such teams Ireland or New Zealand or whatever; but in essence the team members play for one another.
We can dress this team-spirit up in the national colours, but in reality, it's for one another that rugby players play, just as it is for one another that soldiers, calling on almost identical qualities of courage, determination and physical fitness, fight for one another. Increasingly these days, players of one nationality become qualified to play for another country as rugby nations everywhere seek austral qualities of strength and skill. Such players are often disparagingly called mercenaries.
Self-declared mercenaries
But did Jack Charlton's Englishmen in green lack team-spirit when they were playing England's Englishmen in green? And who would you prefer to have on your side in a war - an army of self-declared Italian patriots or an army of self-declared mercenaries of the French Foreign Legion?
It is that kind of male-bonding which rests at the heart of teams; nationality is only part of the question. That is why unionists can play for all Ireland. Because it so; and has always been so. It is one of the defining characteristics of Irish rugby. It is not simply a matter of identity.
Sometimes national anthems coincide with rugby anthems: Flower of Scotland being an obvious if unofficial example. The Welsh love their Land of Our Fathers, but theirs is a cultural identity, not a political one: Welshness expresses itself, if carpingly, through the union.
Amhran na bhFiann is emphatically a political anthem, martial, republican, separatist. You can hardly expect Ballymena unionists of 100 per cent Scottish extraction to perform cartwheels of joy that the Army Number One Band is about to perform it, even as the odd New Zealander in green gapes amiably around, asking what this tune is. Nice: Maori, is it?
Our ambiguity and uncertainty over the music for rugby matches have been resolved with an Irish solution to an Irish problem i.e. by making a complete and utter hames of it. Warren Gatland seems to think the Irish rugby team should copy Americans by putting their hands over their hearts not merely during both anthems the Irish stand for, but for the visitors' anthems too.
Getting it wrong
This is barmy, and a classical example of the colonised imitating the colonial master and getting it wrong. Just because Americans do something during their national anthem, doesn't mean we should do the same; and it certainly doesn't mean that Irish players should spend the ten minutes before a match clutching at their aortas as if trying to block a hole left by an assegai and meanwhile sticking out their chins meaningfully while anthems come and go.
Can we all admit now: the compromise of "Ireland, Ireland together standing small," or whatever it is, simply doesn't work. It arouses no resonances in the crowd: it is an orphan-tune, unloved and unsung, and rescued from terminally embarrassing silence by a huge backing track. That much is obvious; what is less obvious is the tune which could replace it. The national anthem is inevitable in its form of the salute when the President is present. But we are fooling ourselves (which is something we like to do a lot) if we think our Northern fraternity puff out their chests at the opening bars of Amhran na bhFiann. They don't: they're too busy looking grim and humming Dolly's Brae under their breath. This is the hard bit, the visit to the dentists. Some hate it; none like it. That's the reality; as it would be for Irish nationalists playing with the Lions if they had to stand for God Save the Queen as their anthem. Bite the bullet and think of the GPO.
Stirring stuff
In the vast repertoire of Irish music - martial, ballad and dance - is there not one which both traditions hold in common and could be used as an anthem which both inspires and unites? One of the Army's favourites is the Munster Killaloe, learned, paradoxically, from the Inniskilling Fusiliers when both were on peace-keeping duties together in Cyprus, and now the regimental tune of the Royal Irish. The combined bands played it together at the opening ceremony at the Memorial Tower at Messen last year. It is spirited, stirring stuff, and wholly unobjectionable. But is it the stuff of an anthem? Ah: that is a different question.
Or Garryowen, set at a stately marching pace, and with suitable words (and that might be the hardest part of any anthem) not merely is played by both armies with respect and enthusiasm, but is the only indisputably rugby song of all, sharing its name with the only tactic Ireland has given to the vocabulary of world rugby.
But as someone was pointing out on the radio the other day, there is one outstandingly eminent candidate, which is already a rugby anthem, and which sung en masse would even bring a lump to the throat of Pol Pot. It is, of course, There is an Isle, the nerve-tingling tune which when rendered in harmony by Shannon supporters can draw tears from the Sahara. If Ian Paisley were ever to hear Limerickmen singing it - once he had managed to mop his streaming eyes, that is - he would promptly volunteer to join the Confraternity and inquire about vacancies in the Redemptorists.
And once we've got a tune sorted out, maybe then we should be looking for a team.