At the heart of much of the pomposity surrounding the Croke Park anthems debate lies an overwhelming silliness, writes Mary Raftery.
Grown men - and it does seem to be mainly men involved - are becoming greatly exercised over the singing of a collection of anachronistic lines in songs whose meaning has become so obscure and hackneyed as to be rendered nonsensical.
Leaving aside for the moment the bizarre reality that few of us in this country can even understand our own anthem, a reading of the English translation - available on the website of the Department of the Taoiseach - displays it in all its foolishness.
All one can do is laugh helplessly at its exhortation to the "Sons of the Gael! Men of the Pale" to "set the Tyrant quaking". Aside from being a ludicrous notion in this day and age, it baldly excludes the half of the population who are neither sons nor men.
Further, the idea of a neutral country with an anthem entitled The Soldier's Song is nearly as farcical as that of a long-established democracy whose national hymn focuses so intently on the saving of its monarch.
For every accusation of belligerence and bellicosity hurled at God Save the Queen, there is an equal or even more savage one that can be applied to ourselves. While the British have had the good manners to largely drop their verse which relishes the oppression of Scotland ("And like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush"), we in this country persist somewhat pathetically in clinging to our lines about "the Saxon foe".
It would be churlish to deny that lifting the myopic ban on foreign games in Croke Park is anything but a welcome mark of progress, particularly as it was done by the GAA in the full knowledge that foreign anthems would sully that hallowed ground.
However, arguably as great a leap forward was the gesture by the IRFU to sacrifice Amhrán na bhFiann entirely at rugby matches played away from home out of sensitivity to the Northern Irish members of the squad. Its replacement, Ireland's Call, has at least the virtue of being relatively inoffensive.
Which cannot be said for a number of the anthems we may now hear at Croke Park.
Take the French, for instance. La Marseillaise, that great, rousing rally cry against oppression, exults ghoulishly in the prospect of watering French fields with impure blood - a fond desire to exsanguinate foreigners rather than a reference to recent transfusion scandals (of which France has had its share). It is hardly a helpful sentiment in the face of France's troubled multiethnic identity.
And spare a thought for the poor Germans, who have spent decades trying to live down the wildly supremacist overtones of their anthem. Jubilantly belted out by the Nazis, the first verse - the Deutschland Uber Alles one, translated as "Germany over all, over everything in the world" - has been officially excised from the anthem for over 60 years. But it is still what everyone, German or not, has in their heads when the tune strikes up.
On official occasions, however, only the third verse is sung. It is harmless enough, full of blooming happiness and brotherhood. Sisters get a look-in, but only in the second stanza, which lists - in the following order - German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song as inspirations for noble deeds.
This kind of nonsense is depressingly typical of national anthems in general, a form of expression in which people seem to lose all sense of judgment, taste, discernment and even common sense.
There has been the odd attempt in recent years to change the offensively sexist nature of some of them. In Austria, for instance, objections were raised to the exclusively male references, including the line "you are home to great sons", and the usual homage to fatherland and brotherhood. They got nowhere, however, and the paradigm of the heroic male and the decorative female adjunct - if the latter is mentioned at all - remains paramount, particularly in Western anthems.
Undoubtedly among the more entertaining, though, is Slovenia's national song. It is an ode to wine, taken to such an extreme that each verse on the page forms the shape of a wine glass. While it also touches all the tiresome bases - the brotherhood of men, the beauty of the maidens and cheerful slaughter of all enemies - the emphasis on alcohol, "to summon hope out of despair", is refreshing. Sadly, however, only one verse, predictably the most banal, constitutes the official anthem.
Finally, a modest suggestion for next Saturday at Croke Park. In the plethora of anthems and national songs to be sung, could we not add one more - just a little one, which could do us the great service of placing all others in the context they so richly deserve? It goes something like this:
"Hail, Hail Freedonia,
Mightiest of mighty nations.
Hail, hail Freedonia,
Land of the brave and free."