Wales 15 Ireland 17

It’s nice to be Irish sometimes. Like tonight, at the end of a sunny day, in a packed Irish pub tucked round behind Cais do Sodré train station in downtown Lisbon.
(Apparently there are five such bars scattered around the city of Lisbon. But O’Gilins, as they´ll proudly tell you was the first and the only one with genuine Irish people behind the bar. None of your plastic replica shillelaghs here)

Anyway, back to the rugby match, and it’s in this amazingly colourful cosmopolitan atmosphere of Irish and Portuguese, with a few Welsh, Spanish and French thrown in, that the Irish have managed to do something that had evaded them for 61 years. And I thought to myself, my father would have loved this moment. To think that back then he would have been a young man recently demobbed from the military and making his way into civilian life during that last heady season when the Irish won the Grand Slam.

Now life has a funny habit of turning around on itself now and again, taking you way way back in an instant to something vaguely remembered and yet becoming crystal clear in that self same moment. Memory for me suddenly takes me out of the smoky pub (no EU directives here) and back down on the Belfast Dublin train line and to Lansdowne Road as a wee boy, clutching my father’s hand among crowds of flat caps and scarves hasting through the turnstiles, and then standing on the terraces in the drizzle. Those were the years when Van Morrison was writing lines like

“On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row
Throwing pennies at the bridges down below
And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow”

And amazingly, the man’s still singing those lines to packed houses in Hollywood. But that first album “Astral Weeks” which had had such a profound affect on my growing up years in Northern Ireland, still manages to take me back to times like that on the Dublin train, and conjure up that unusual affinity created in a moment between a father and a son. So, my father never did manage to see Ireland win the Grand Slam again. Although I do remember him clearly on the edge of his seat watching the matches, even in the nursing Home, wincing with every disappointment, groaning with every failure. And my poor mother had to take a walk and visit a neighbour down the corridor when the match was on to get out of the way of him.

So life turns around again. He has passed on to Glory. And we’re watching the Ronan O’Garas and the Brian O’Driscolls here in downtown Lisbon. And I’ll bet he’s looking down, pleased as punch. Well done , Ireland.