Meet Irish rugby’s first superstar

When he died on a WW1 battlefield Basil Maclear was an Irish rugby star and acknowledged by many of the early game’s greats

In the early hours of May 24, 1915, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers were bunkered down in Mouse Trap Farm, a Flemish chalet about two and a half miles from Ypres’s Menin Gate in Belgium’s west corner.

Close to 3am, red lights speckled in the skies overhead. The Germans had started firing. But it wasn’t shells. It was worse. The Commanding Officer, Lieutenant — Colonel Arthur Loveband yelled out, ‘Get your respirators, boys. Here comes the gas.’