Humanity, realism outweigh ambition

If we took economic collapse, soaring unemployment, evaporating pensions, and the prospect of years of austerity imposed on us to pay off private bankers’ gambling debts half as seriously as we took sport, then we’d have a revolution more or less the second Tuesday of every month.

Barricades at every junction, manifestos on every billboard, Kalashnikov gangs at every roadblock. Champions of the status quo swinging from lamp-posts like Mussolini and his mistress.

Maybe it is just as well that we do not, but the furore caused by Roy Keane’s comments following Thursday night’s 4-0 defeat by world champions Spain, that it was not enough for Irish supporters to go along for the sing-song every now and again, have hit a national raw nerve and again divided the country along the decade-old Saipan faultline. Keane, advancing the same arguments he did after Thursday’s thrashing, was the catalyst for that tragic farce as well.