The solidarity we will feel as Munster people this weekend will not last, yet it is a force to be reckoned with, writes Vincent Browne
THIS COMING weekend, some 40,000 to 60,000 of us Munster crazies will spill into Cardiff for the Heineken Cup final. Many of us without tickets or anywhere to stay. We probably will suffer through the 80 minutes, racked with anxiety that Munster might lose, as we did two years ago when Munster survived.
During the match even those of us who can't sing will join in the one verse we know from the Fields of Athenry (why do we in Munster sing a Galway song about the famine in moments of celebration?), the chorus of Stand up and Fight (a Google search reveals the same verse is popular among Sir Lankan lesbians).
Maybe There is an Isle (a Scottish song about an island in the Hebrides, but most Limerick people think it is about the island on the Shannon where stands King John's Castle and one of the most violent estates in the city).
At the end of the match on Saturday we will probably hug men we never saw before - if we win. Spill tears of joy and laughter, then off to pubs for binge-drinking and more delirium. There will be speeches.
If there are replays of the match on television screens, silence will be demanded while Ronan O'Gara retakes shots at goal. Fellas will do solo acts (in Leicester a few years ago a fellow with a Cork accent told how his wife had run off with his best friend - "I still f***ing miss him").
Another great outing, never to be forgotten. At least until late on Saturday night.
And if we lose, probably we will still celebrate - what, I don't know. Maybe just that we are from Munster. Maybe just that we are not from Leinster.
Twenty years ago most of us had no identification with Munster at all. We thought of ourselves from Limerick or Cork or Tipperary or Clare - I think Waterford fell out of Munster a few decades ago. Anyway, most of us never thought of ourselves as being from Munster.
Munster was a strange imagining, evident only at Railway Cup matches which nobody went to anymore, or rugby inter-provincials which nobody went to anymore, aside from the quarter of a million who were at Thomond Park for the Munster victory against the All Blacks.
But then came professional rugby and the construction of a Munster rugby club and, more remarkably, a Munster identity. Out of nothing, it seems.
And it has become a force in the lives of many of us Munster people, Munster men anyway (real men?).
Now for at least part of the year we are Munster, no longer from Cork or Kerry (actually some of us from Limerick equate Munster with Limerick for it is from the Greater Limerick Area - those part of the Anschluss incorporating south Tipperary, south and east Clare and north Kerry - that most of the players who matter come from, aside from one or two others from the southern hemisphere, including Cork). But for the months of the Heineken Cup campaign the Munster identity surfaces, out of nothing at all.
In part it was an extension of the "culchie" factor.
A revolt against the belittlement, real and imagined (almost all real), we had suffered in Dublin for years, belittlement inflicted by Dublin sophisticates.
This was a chance to get our own back and, boy, has it worked.
Leinster may have won the odd inconsequential game against Munster in the last decade, but whenever it counted Leinster buckled against whoever, and especially against Munster.
But in part it is probably a search for identity anyway, an identity lost or forsaken or never experienced.
Being social beings we feel a need for social identities and this is as good as there is on offer, at least for us from Munster.
And at these matches away from home especially, there is a sense of community that we (or most of us) don't experience otherwise. A solidarity with people we don't know from Eve.
But it is fleeting and brittle - identities constructed as easily and as casually as the Munster one is precarious.
And for the most part we have fairly shallow social identities, certainly shallow social solidarities.
The ties that bind have got looser.
Not that they were ever that tight, I suspect. I recall that in the village in west Limerick when I was growing up over half a century ago there was real poverty in the village and in the locality, and I recall no special care or any care at all for those living in poverty.
Yes, there was solidarities in the sense of farmers sharing the harvest work, but no solidarities across class boundaries.
There were Travellers who came to the area often to stay for months on end, sleeping in tents on the side of the road in the midst of freezing, rain-soaked winters, and I remember no solidarity with them.
There was Muintir na Tíre, but it did not care or seem to care about all the "muintir".
There was no "stand by your man" then and, in truth, there is no stand by your man now. Not across the class boundaries certainly.
I hope the Sri Lankan lesbians fare better.