Heâll still be Mr Billy Big Balls showing off how much he does for charity on Grafton street on Christmas Eve with lickspittke Duffy.
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Change you can believe in
Thereâll be some amount of seething mugged off muldoon on here if ir land win this thing.
Hes not far off doing a Delaney on it #33rdteam
Ewan would have to be sedated
If you have it in a non INM publication, non paywalled, I will have a look at it
Delaney trousered 5 million for the FAI for having the cojones to do what he did.
Browne will probably get 10
As a member of the rugby community, Iâm embarrassed by Philip Browne myself at this stage. His head on a plate this time next week once the process has concluded.
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I would hope with the robust governance structures in the IRFU that this letter has a big board input .
The bid was never going to be taken serious when the chairman is listed as being Dick Spring. Whenever I am named in important documents* I ensure my first name is listed as being Michael.
*nope, never happens.
Dick Spring hasnât been taken seriously in rugby circles since he dropped the ball at Cardiff Arms Park in 1979.
20.23 in.
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Superb Gman thanks.
Browne is after leaving the country down here. He must have been taking advice from Mr Delaney.
Take your beating and move on. Clap each other off the pitch. Thank the ref. Uphold standards #therugbyway
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Youâre like a dog chasing his tail today. Id say you have a reel in your head.
The only man in Kerry who couldnât catch a ball and they picked him full back on the rugby team
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They were the glory years for rugby in the valleys .
Surely he should have justified his letter? It looks dreadful.
Itâs as bent as a nine bob note. Didnât one of the power brokers tell the paddies to pipe down and that theyâd get it in 2027?
A couple of big browne envelopes after coming from the Saffies Iâd say and Big Phil isnât happy about that.
IRFU not in a position to ridicule South Africa
For decades, the Irish rugby union refused to boycott sporting interaction with Springboks
Article image
Dr Noel Browne TD takes part in the anti-apartheid march before Ireland played South Africa at Lansdowne Road in January, 1970. PHOTOGRAPH: JIMMY MCCORMACK
MARK DUNCAN
Last Monday, in an effort to revive Irelandâs flagging bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup, Philip Browne, the chief executive of the the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU), wrote an extraordinary letter to Brett Gosper, chief executive of World Rugby. It was expected the IRFU would challenge the recent evaluation report by the World Cup Technical Review Group which rated Ireland last in all but one of the hosting criteria, yet the manner in which they have done so is still startling.
What the IRFU presented was less a defence of what this country has to offer than an undiplomatic spear-tackling of its principal competitor. No mud was left unthrown, including allusions to the South African crime rate and an explicit post-bailout-Ireland dig at another countryâs sovereign credit rating â for the record, itâs âjunkâ. It has certainly added a spice to Saturdayâs match between Ireland and South Africa at the Aviva Stadium.
The IRFU stressed its commitment to âpositive and respectfulâ involvement in the bidding process, but itâs hard to reconcile such sentiment with the substance of its letter. Itâs hard, too, to reconcile the hard-edged attitude taken now by the IRFU to the passivity it displayed during the decades when South Africa really did deserve the jabbing of judgmental fingers.
Over the course of three decades â from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s â the IRFU maintained and encouraged sporting contacts with South Africa at a time when it was a focus of angry public protests. And not just from the âpale-pink ideologists of the unwashed, workshy hippy brigadeâ, as one letter writer to this newspaper casually derided them in the late 1960s.
The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement founded earlier that decade was in fact an impressive coalition of academic activists, politicians, trade unionists and others who did much to raise public consciousness of the obscenities of the apartheid regime and challenge any attempts to normalise it. Sport did just that, though the Irish rugby authorities were frequently at pains to deny it. Whenever the spotlight turned on their sporting links with the Springboks, they clung to a progressively threadbare line that sport and politics were wholly separate spheres.
Fiction
For a time, too, Irish governments indulged a similar fiction. In principle, of course, the official government policy was unambiguously opposed to apartheid but sport presented the point at which they were unwilling to press that principle. Speaking to the DĂĄil in 1965, shortly before the South Africans arrived to suffer their first international defeat to Ireland, then taoiseach SeĂĄn Lemass expressed the view that the ârefusal of all contacts with citizens of a country whose government practises discriminationâ was not the best way to end it.
That view would change, but only gradually and over time. Even into the 1970s, the Irish government was abstaining on a United Nations resolution urging member states to take all necessary actions to sever links, including sporting, with South Africa. It wasnât that they didnât agree with the resolutionâs intent â they whole-heartedly supported far stronger anti-apartheid measures; it was that they didnât believe they could trespass on the independence of Irelandâs voluntary sporting organisations. Nor did they wish to â these were autonomous and the government liked it that way.
And yet, the governmentâs position hardened all the same â and at the expense of its good relations with the IRFU. When, in 1979, Irelandâs rugby chiefs opted to press ahead with an invite to Dublin for a South African âBarbariansâ side, the government intervened to thwart their plans. It simply denied the South Africans entry to the State and hoped the IRFU wouldnât switch the fixture to Ravenhill across the Border. They didnât. Whatâs more, they never again hosted an apartheid-era South African team on Irish home soil. Instead, the traffic flowed in the opposite direction.
The Lions toured South Africa with IRFU backing in 1980 and the following year, Ireland returned for a tour of its own. On both occasions, the IRFU defied the wishes of a government all too aware of the wider reputational fallout, not least among those African countries with whom it was furiously building political and trade relations.
In late November 1980, six months prior to the Irish teamâs scheduled departure for South Africa, the government tried one last time to waken the IRFU to wider realities. Led by Brian Lenihan snr, the suits of the Department of Foreign Affairs met with the blazers of the IRFU for what turned out to be a dialogue of the deaf. The IRFU bullishly defended its tour plans, accused the government of double standards, of taking the âsoft optionâ in targeting rugby, of being ignorant of the South African âmentalityâ and of the great reforms it claimed were transforming South African rugby.
None of this cut much ice with a well-briefed minister and his team, armed as they were with 10 pages of speaking notes and a briefing paper that demolished the idea that the South African Rugby Boardâs âreformsâ were anything other than superficial â rugby was still, the paper emphasised, âone of the least integrated sports in South Africaâ. The meeting â described by one official as ârelatively cordialâ, if frank â lasted 50 minutes and ended with the two sides as far apart as before.
Apartheid
The IRFU was not for turning and the tour went ahead as planned. If the issues involved werenât so serious and the evil of apartheid so obvious, there would have been something almost admirable in the IRFUâs imperviousness to the public protests and political pressure.
And yet, it was not the sportâs governing body but the small number of rugby dissenters â the clubs who refused their grounds for training to visiting Springbok teams and the players who turned their backs on opportunities to travel on Irish and Lions tours â who would ultimately find themselves on the right side of history. When, in May 1990, months after his release from a 27-year imprisonment, Nelson Mandela came to Dublin and addressed the DĂĄil, he pointedly thanked Irish sportspeople, including rugby players, for their âwholehearted and often sacrificial support for our struggleâ.
Everyone knew to whom he was and wasnât referring. The new South Africa Mandela helped bring into being has certainly not delivered on its post-apartheid promise and it is probably not the best venue for the 2023 Rugby World Cup. But, conscious of all that has gone before, did it deserve the ridiculing it received from the IRFU this week?
Mark Duncan is a historian and founder of the InQuest Research Group
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