There is an isolation-home in the middle of the Bog of Allen which is one of the Government's most closely guarded secrets. The architect who designed it was garrotted with cheese-wire once he had supervised its construction; and the builders who worked on it were then lured onto Hercules transports planes that had been specially fitted with special hinged floors which were opened 10,000 feet up and 1,000 miles over the Atlantic. The skies were temporarily dark with plummeting builders' bums, an unspeakable sight.
Armed guards patrol this home. Because they are Albanian monoglots whose tongues have been cut out, they are unable to understand what they are told by their inmates, or even to imitate the sounds that they make; though if they tongue-lessly were to try, the result would be rather like that of a bullock with laryngitis trying to say how often it had been castrated: once.
Valley of death
And that indeed is the sound that occasionally drifts in the wind from the source of the sound: withered, broken men, misshapen, twitching, demented, the kind who filled the convalescent homes of Europe after a world war. They have passed through the valley of death, and though alive, they have no life: they are automatons, haunted by God alone knows what demons, driven to spend the rest of their time on this planet walking around in baffled circles, meanwhile bovinely lowing the nasal monosyllable which unites and defines them.
And what is the monosyllable? It is this. Lens. No, not the thing you find in spectacles, but the place in Northern France. Get a cow to moo the word "lance" and you get a rough idea of how the French pronounce the ugliest town in the Fifth Republic. It was there that Irish rugby explored the meaning of the word nadir - and found it could go even lower still.
I have tried to tell the editor of this newspaper what I went through there. In vain. He witnesses my palsied attempts to describe the hell of Lens, observes my pathetic assaults on the north face of the Eiger of communication that is the English language, puts a few coppers in my begging bowl, lights a Havana with a five-zloty note and is then whisked away in his chauffeur-driven Reliant Robin.
Of course, even had I retained the power of speech, there are no words to describe the grim grey dispiriting hell of Lens anyway.
Never mind a game which was to rugby what Lens is to Venice, there was no accommodation in that vile place which would not have disgraced a bridewell. I slept in a bed with a hollow in it deep enough and wet enough to keep shoals of herring happy. They were indeed very happy, chirruping through the night the way contented herring do.
Silence
But hush. I say no more of this. Prudence - though a quality we patently lacked in going there in the first place - dictates silence on the matter.
But have you any idea, any idea at all, what it is like for those who went to Lens, and then by God, despite that signal lesson, went to Twickenham, where blancmange would have tackled better than many of our defenders, now to see how Ireland is playing at home? It costs a lot of money to go to London and back - yet people who have not sold their children to a Roscommon meat-processing plant in order to pay for the away-journey are being treated in Dublin to a veritable festival of what rugby would be like if Brazilians played it.
It is time to abandon the rugby habit abroad as an expensive idiocy; we veterans of foreign games - at least those not reduced to gibbering idiocy in the home in Offaly - all agree.
New threshold
So what folly is it which is now causing me to gaze wistfully outside a pawnbrokers specialising in second-hand coshes, blackjacks and truncheons, and to start making a note of the times of Brinks Mat cash deliveries? What intellectual infirmity causes me to make querulous enquiries at travel agents about flights, hotels, itineraries to Stade de France? Are we not likely to see once again rugby as played by a drowning chain-gang, or have we finally crossed some new threshold into a world of rugby as played by the Welsh in the 1970s?
God forgive me for saying it, but I think we might have done. Maybe the Lords of IRFU have actually got it right. Maybe the patient cultivation of skill and talent is finally producing a serious team of serious consequence. Stringer, O'Gara, O'Driscoll: when did we ever have three such world-class players behind the scrum, with so many others to boast of?
Lens was inexcusable, an incompetent shambles; yet when our coach Warren Gatland said after the match that we had the six-nations championship to look forward to, I wrote derisively of his predictions. (I was lucky; others who were in Lens are now gibbering lunatics in Offaly). But no doubt he saw the talent rising through, too green for Lens or London, but ripe for Lansdowne Road.
I said at the beginning of this season that I thought we were good for the triple crown. I still believe it, despite the defeat by England; for I did not say which triple, did I?
Allez Irlande. Anyone with a spare ticket?