IT WAS Sunday night at Doneraile Golf Club, the affable Peter Hogan’s President’s prize-giving ceremony done and dusted (The Griff had picked up his usual piece of glass, Denis ‘Dinny’ Cole in the winner’s enclosure once again), and Donie Cotter, a magnificent one-man rock orchestra, was giving it Galtee.

“DON’T spare them now!” a man said to me on Saturday referring to the Munster team that had lost the Heineken Cup quarter-final the previous evening, “don’t spare them!” he repeated.