ON RUGBY:The popularity of the Leinster v Munster fixture has led to excessive antipathy between the two sets of supporters

IT WAS in December 2001, in the inaugural Celtic League final, that the Leinster-Munster rivalry reached a new level. Unexpectedly, more than 30,000 turned up at Lansdowne Road on the second last Saturday before Christmas and saw an epic contest in which a 14-man Leinster achieved an unlikely 24-20 comeback win to claim the trophy. In the context of the professional era, perhaps that was the day the fixture came of age.

However, for much of the ensuing years, it was as if Eddie O’Sullivan and the IRFU were doing their damndest to play down the fixture’s intensity. Leinster-Munster games were invariably pencilled in for weekends when many of the Irish front-liners would be unavailable. All the while, though, the rivalry bubbled away under the surface, and exploded into life again in the 2005-06 campaign with a couple of compelling league meetings and the first of those Heineken Cup semi-finals.

There’s hardly been a dull encounter since and last season the pair of them laid on another European semi-final for the benefit of a world-record attendance for a non-Test match. It is the fixture which showcases Irish rugby talent more than any other and has perhaps defined a golden era more than any other.

They have been good for each other as well as Irish rugby, each demanding more of the other. Leinster saw things in Munster they aspired to emulate and vice versa. Between them, they have won three of the last four Heineken Cups and backboned last season’s first Grand Slam in 61 years.

An inevitable by-product of their success and rivalry has been to broaden each province’s fan base, which has to be welcomed. It would be nice if more of them were involved with their local clubs, but they pay their ticket prices and are as entitled to support their provinces as much as anyone else.

Partly as a result, each province has moved into bigger, swankier new stadia and it would be no surprise if next season’s Magners League meetings fill both the 27,000-capacity Thomond Park and the new 50,000 all-seater Aviva Stadium.

Such is the fixture’s popularity, they’ve even helped to ensure the pubs will be open on this coming Good Friday; a sacrilegious occurrence which wouldn’t even have been countenanced 10 years ago.

Alas, with this popularity has come excessive antipathy between the two sets of supporters or, it would seem, between some of the newer supporters to each province.

When Leinster thrashed Munster 30-0 at the RDS in early October, the atmosphere was electric and befitted such a superb home performance. It didn’t need the sound of Ronan O’Gara’s name being booed when it was read out before the kick-off, the same Irish player who had landed the Slam-winning drop-goal six months beforehand.

Nor did it need the bile directed at John Hayes when he was red carded for an utterly out-of-character stamping, nor those chants borrowed from Old Trafford, Anfield and elsewhere of “Same Old Munster, Always Cheating”, or “Boring, Boring Munster”.

Conceivably, these chants and the baiting

of Munster players should be taken in the context of a one-off night, when the recently-crowned European champions were in rampant form. But several readers have written to this column telling of their eye-wateringly unpleasant nights at this fixture in the past few years. One Munster supporter at the RDS that night recalled a constant flow of foul-mouthed and often racist invective at both Munster players and his small group of red-scarved friends.

After Shane Horgan’s intercept try, to complete the rout, they were patted on the heads and shoulders while being taunted Munster would win “F*** all” this year. “They also sang to the air of the Pompey chimes ‘No score Munster, Munster no score’.” “When I took issue with them for the gross intrusion off my personal space I was abused by at least six people, who shouted that I was ‘just a sore effing loser’. One of my friends intervened only to be invited outside for a fight by one of the aggressive yobs,” he recalled.

In the absence of any stewards or police, they felt compelled to remain and put up with abuse until the bitter end, when they were again taunted. There are many, like them, who will simply not attend another Munster-Leinster fixture again.

The danger is that with each passing instalment of Leinster versus Munster, the rivalry will become more poisonous. A degree of banter/rivalry between supporters is healthy, and amongst the majority of supporters, it remains a healthy rivalry, with each rooting for the other in Europe.

Nor is this a desire to apportion blame or to take the high moral ground. Indeed, we in the media happily helped to stoke up the rivalry, and sometimes excessively so. Maybe all this is a by-product of professional sport and increased commercialism. Old traditional fans and values versus new ones. Obeying the customary silence for kickers (a pity, albeit understandable, that it was forgotten for Dan Parks’ winning kick at Croke Park, all the more so as silence might have utterly flummoxed him) gives one hope. But if we ever get to the stage of those freeze frames, a la football, of an away player walking off to the backdrop of a baying mob mouthing obscenities, then the horse has surely bolted.

All in all, Irish rugby has embraced the professional age impressively. With all change come challenges, as one emailer wrote in, and with those can come potentially good and bad developments. Rival fans mixing freely, before during and after games, without hostility is surely worth keeping, no? As Declan Kidney is wont to say, our unity is our strength, and Ireland is such a small country, with such a small playing base, that the worst excesses of this rivalry cannot do any good.

Whatever its causes (and one ventures it may in part be a Dublin v country thing that has been partly transferred from other sports) taunting individual players from either side is totally out of character with what Irish rugby is about. And, along with the respective branches, the true fans must help to stamp this out. Otherwise it’s going to get more and more out of hand, and ultimately lead to segregation, and if segregation is to happen, then this fixture is now the odds-on favourite to provoke it.

Now that is definitely not what Irish rugby is about.

gthornley@irishtimes.com