Sir, - What is it with the Irish psyche? Do we despise success?
What was Warren Gatland's sin? Was it beating France for two years running? Beating England brilliantly this year? Was it our highest rating in God knows how many years in the Six Nations? Or, ultimate folly, was it building an Irish team we can be proud of?
Did not he know that, for his Irish masters, to quote Bob Dylan, there is no success like failure?
Gatland has carved a team who can play with their hands and their heads, not just with their feet and their hearts as was so often the case in the gloomy years before.
And now the IRFU, bowing to that long-standing and much-practised Irish tradition, have stabbed him in the back. And, in so doing, have spat in our collective eye.
I'm disgusted. - Yours, etc.,
Paul Butler, Swords, Co Dublin.