A chance to show Ireland at its best

Next year’s Rugby World Cup in England will mark 20 years since Nelson Mandela used the 1995 competition in South Africa to bring that beautiful country’s irreconcilable, almost-at-war cultures together.

By wearing Springbok captain Francois Pienaar’s jersey to the final Mandela — who died a year ago yesterday — did more to unite his country through that one magnificent and selfless gesture than decades of tentative, uncertain political engagement had achieved. He used rugby’s biggest stage to declare his core and defining belief — only a society united as one can be truly successful. The intervening decades have done nothing to diminish that empowering credo.

Yesterday’s formal and long-awaited announcement that a cross-border bid for Ireland to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup is a declaration of ambition on such a grand scale that it deserves a similarly profound and far-reaching response. That it is a 32-county bid must be a huge cause of satisfaction right across this island. That the bid could not be made without the co-operation and generosity of the GAA — several GAA stadiums would host games if the bid is successful — must be a cause for even greater celebration as it shows a confidence and unity that, if no longer novel, is still remarkable. This is especially so in a society where sport was, until recently, used to divide communities rather than celebrate natural human commonalities.