Healy admits he got nasty mail

Cian Healy has never been a man to use 10 words where one will do so it was hardly a surprise when he declined to elaborate on the content of the hate mail letter he received at Ireland’s Carton House base last month.

The missive in question had been penned and posted in the wake of the prop’s successful appeal against the length of the ban imposed for his stamp on Dan Cole in the Six Nations defeat to England but it was a wasted tirade.

The Leinster loosehead merely scanned the first “violent” line before handing it over to team manager Mick Kearney for disposal and yet there were other dissenting, if less abusive, comments made at the time of the incident and in the wake of his second hearing with the tournament’s judiciary. That the reduced absence frees him up to face France this weekend is an undoubted bonus for Ireland and a beleaguered Declan Kidney but, whatever way you cut it, a one-game ban for such an offence is hardly proportionate and sheds further light on the need to impose match-specific sentences.