Keep calm but Irish rugby may be at a turning point

Walk along any of London’s famous old shopping thoroughfares — your Oxford Streets, Covent Gardens and Sohos — and the same tacky souvenirs will festoon the windows and spill out onto the pavements.

Union Jacks abound, of course. China, mugs and t-shirts of questionable quality, many with images of the royals emblazoned on them. Then there are the plastic Bobby helmets, models of those iconic double decker buses and phone booths and, in more recent years, a quotation plastered everywhere that has come to sum up a nation’s dearly-held sense of stoicism and stiff upper lip: ‘Keep calm and carry on’.

It is a statement that was coined by some British government wonk at the dawn of the Second World War and imprinted on a bright red poster with the crown insignia at its head, all in the hope it could in some small way help sooth fears of mass air raids in the weeks after Neville Chamberlain’s famous radio speech announced “this country is at war with Germany“.