The only crown Dev would have wanted is up for grabs tomorrow

MY earliest memory of anything to do with rugby was the horror of the Christian Brothers in the early 1950s at the news that Eamon de Valera described rugby as his favourite game.

The Brothers gathered in the schoolyard in Tralee to talk as if their whole world was caving in. Little did we realise then that we were witnessing shock and awe. They could hardly have been more stunned if the Long Fellow had publicly renounced his religion.

That was the era of the ban in Gaelic Games. People were suspended by the GAA for playing, or even attending, “foreign games”. The Christian Brothers played the part of enforcers, so the idea that Dev could prefer a foreign game just blew their narrow minds.

If they knew anything about the man they should not have been surprised. He had been an enthusiastic rugby player at Blackrock College and even got a trial for Munster in the exacting position of full back. He reportedly felt that hurling and rugby were the true sports of the Gaels. Maybe that was just a reflection of his Limerick upbringing, because rugby is the most popular football game in Limerick, where people of all classes play it.

Nobody associated de Valera with hurling, but on one occasion he showed a prowess with a hurley that surprised one of the game’s most famous players, then-Taoiseach Jack Lynch.

King Baudouin of the Belgians was on a visit and Lynch accompanied him to Áras an Uachtaráin where the king asked President de Valera about hurling. The Long Fellow, who was almost totally blind, picked up a hurley and, to the Taoiseach’s amazement, threw a sliothar up in the air and hit it with the hurley. Lynch said that he had thought that Dev could not even see the Áras to hit it with a hurley.

When de Valera endorsed rugby, it was taken as an affront to all Gaelic sports, which had been mindlessly sanctified by the Christian Brothers.

“Riddle me this,” Patrick Pearse wrote. “What if the dream comes true?”

The 1950s were the first full decade of the 26-county Republic, but looking back from the perspective of almost half a century later, people are finally waking up to the realisation that the republic of Pearse’s dream had turned into our nightmare for many years. We didn’t have a real republic at all, because the politicians had handed over the ultimate say in the running of the country to a clique of Catholic bishops who made a dreadful mess of things.

They interfered in all walks of Irish life with a censorial attitude that made an international laughing stock of Irish art and literature, with the Rose Tattoo fiasco and the banning of books.

The Archbishop of Dublin, who was the self-appointed interferer-in-chief, even tried to ban a soccer game between Ireland and Yugoslavia in 1952.

There were no great sporting occasions of international stature to capture the imagination of the whole nation, like tomorrow’s rugby game against England. Within the past 20 years there have been many such occasions, such as Stephen Roche’s win in the Tour de France, or the soccer internationals that brought the country to a halt during Euro ‘88, and again in the 1990s during the World Cup in Italy, or the games in the United States four years later.

There were also the Irish exploits at the Olympic Games in Barcelona and Atlanta.

There were no such occasions to liven the drabness of the 1950s. The Irish soccer team nearly qualified for a play-off game to get into the 1958 World Cup finals. But that dream was dashed by an injury-time goal. Ireland would not qualify for the finals of a major championship for another 30 years.

Ronnie Delany’s gold medal at the 1956 Olympics was probably the highlight of the decade, but international athletics were confined to a handful of clubs in Dublin back then.

Few gave Delany any chance, and Radio Éireann did not even bother to send a reporter to the Games in Melbourne.

Much of the world enjoyed an economic boom in the 1950s while this country was economically depressed. Mercifully, the boom in England, the United States and Australia afforded ready employment to facilitate emigration from here. My abiding memory of primary school was of friends whose whole families were uprooted because their fathers could not find work here. Tens of thousands of people emigrated and were forgotten. Of course, the Ireland of those days was itself eminently forgettable.

Movies have already begun to depict the sordid aspects of life here in the 1950s, and as these build up, we could eventually find ourselves in the role of the 20th century equivalent of Dickensian Britain.

We may well be remembered as a paedophiles’ paradise because clerical paedophiles were not only protected but actually facilitated. There was something so horrific about making such an allegation against someone of the cloth that society refused to face up to the issue.

If parents in the know complained, the offending paedophiles were quietly moved, but usually the remedy only made things worse for others.

The paedophiles were essentially given a licence to start all over again. Offending Christian Brothers were sent to the industrial schools, where the boys had no parents to complain. This compounded the problems and exposed the most vulnerable children, which explains why the most horrific stories have been coming from the industrial schools of the era.

Some 120 children died in questionable circumstances in industrial schools. A couple of years ago the body of young William Delaney, a 13-year-old-boy from Kilkenny who died in Letterfrack Industrial School, was dug up after more than 30 years because of persistent rumours that he had died as a result of a fractured skull due to a beating by a Christian Brother.

It took over 30 years to exhume his body, but there was no evidence of a skull fracture. It seemed the boy actually died of meningitis.

He was probably already mortally ill when he was beaten so badly that his fellow pupils believed that the Christian Brothers had murdered him. That such a rumour was allowed to persist for so long is an indictment of Irish society.

Of course, people will trot out the excuse that they didn’t know. Most did not know the sordid details, but we all knew enough to realise that something was rotten. As a race we are often accused of drinking too much and fighting too much, but we have never been accused of lacking imagination. It did not take much imagination to know what was going on, but we chose to ignore it.

We did not even have the luxury of any great sporting occasions to help us forget existing problems.

Our current difficulties include ghost patients milking our health boards, insurance scams threatening our economy, ministers shamelessly preferring their own constituencies and a lying Government brazenly seeking to emasculate the Freedom of Information Act and thus return to the culture of sleazy secrecy.

It will be nice to forget that squalid mess for a while by beating England and winning not only the Triple Crown but also our first Grand Slam in over half a century.