Very interesting selection from England … A kid playing blindside and neither second row is particularly good at stealing ball. I said that England didnt have the players to disrupt the line out or get joy at the breakdown … it looks like their not even gonna bother…they’ve gone for plenty of lads that will break the gain line but it’s gonna be hard for them to get up and support the man on the ground all day. Ireland will turn a lot of ball over here.
It will still be tight - opening game played in very cold weather … revised prediction 16- 10 to Ireland.
You and the other Eire soccer types will be telling us next that Augusto Pinochet was one of the good guys.
EAMON Dunphy’s controversial decision to play soccer in Chile just months after the bloody military coup of 1973 featured in confidential government files released last week.
The documents, opened in the National Archive under the 30-year rule, show that the Department of Foreign Affairs kept newspaper cuttings on the former Ireland player after he was criticised for travelling with the Ireland team for an international game in Chile in May 1974.
Dunphy, who even 30 years ago was known for his outspoken political views and support for trade unions, was accused of “swallowing his principles”.
The tour took in Brazil and an international game at Chile’s National Stadium.
Ireland became the first foreign side to play in Chile since General Augusto Pinochet’s military junta ousted the socialist government of Salvador Allende in September 1973.
Chile’s National Stadium, where the Ireland game was played, became a detention camp during the coup, where thousands of people were rounded up, tortured and many “disappeared”.
A Sunday World article dated June 23, 1974, and posted into the same Department of Foreign Affairs file, quotes Dunphy as defending the game.
He told journalist, Sam Smyth, who then worked with the Sunday World: "I never refused to play in Chile. I had reservations about going and I thought about it for a week before agreeing.
"I have refused South Africa summer trips for the last three years, although I would have been £1,000 richer each time. But the Chilean issue is vastly different from South Africa.
"When we went out to inspect the pitch, armed guards ordered us back to the dressing rooms. It was a sobering experience. I think most of the lads in the team realised we were being used then.
"The stadium was freshly painted for our visit so all traces of blood and torture were destroyed.
“But by going to Chile I certainly wasn’t supporting the regime. I was playing football.”
According to the files, the Foreign Affairs Minister of the day, Garret FitzGerald, was advised by officials to refrain from condemning the Ireland team’s trip to Chile.
At the time, Dr FitzGerald had been outspoken about the Irish Rugby Football Union’s Lions Tour of South Africa, a country then in the grip of apartheid.
On April 4, Patrick Smyth wrote to Dr FitzGerald on behalf of the Irish Committee for Chile, asking him to issue a statement and to prevent the trip which he said “can only enhance the prestige of the regime”.
The files show that officials advised Dr FitzGerald to issue a simple acknowledgment rather than a substantive reply, in case the Government’s position would be misunderstood. However, Dr FitzGerald chose to give a substantive response on May 14.
He wrote the ‘evil of apartheid is much more fundamental than discrimination or segregation of political groups because apartheid is founded on a fact which is immutable; a man may change his politics, he cannot change the colour of his skin’."
Dr FitzGerald also resisted pressure from the Department of Justice to refuse the admission of Chilean refugees in the aftermath of the coup. In February 1974, Patrick Cooney, who was then Justice Minister, challenged Dr FitzGerald’s proposal to accept 12 families of refugees.
A memorandum from his department claimed that Ireland had had a bad experience with Hungarian refugees, whom he accused of causing trouble. More than 500 Hungarian refugees came to Ireland after the uprising in their home country of 1956. “The Hungarian refugees who came here in 1956 caused problems beyond what is recorded in your memorandum. The fact is they failed to settle down, and even when the majority left for other countries, the few remaining either in Knockalisheen Camp or elsewhere in the country were running into continual trouble to the extent that eventually an ad misericordium plea had to be made to the relevant British and American authorities - to agree to take them off our hands.”
The memorandum argued that Chilean refugees who came to Ireland were likely to be “extreme left-wing activists” and would have the potential to gravitate towards Ireland’s “large and well-organised subversive group” - in other words, the IRA.
Eamon Dunphy said this weekend that he was “flattered” to feature in the government files and had no regrets over being the first team to play Chile months after the coup. “After the coup, we were the first international sports team scheduled to go there.”
The Championship gets underway in Paris in just under an hour. France v Wales first up. Wales getting talked up a lot as possible Championship winners. I wouldn’t be all that convinced about them.
The Championship is still the big one. Always has been, all the way back to its inception in 1883. Give me a Championship win over a World Cup any day.