TIPPING POINT:IT ALWAYS comes back, that old chestnut about sport and politics not mixing. And it's complete garbage. If leaving home to go to work is an innately political act, then togging out in colours that represent the dreams and aspirations of so many certainly is.

Rugby knows all about politics. South Africa gave it a thorough grounding during those controversial Lions tours when the cant of separation between sport and politics provided cover to a much more vile kind of separation so that British and Irish rugby players could do what they simply wanted to do, which was get stuck into the Springboks.

Phil Bennett was on the 1974 tour and probably bought into the notion that his team were playing in a sporting bubble. But this is also the man who captained Wales three years later and whose pre-match pep-talk for a game against England has become legendary.

“Look what these bastards have done to Wales. They’ve taken our coal, our water, our steel,” he roared. “They buy our houses and they only live in them for a fortnight every 12 months. What have they given us? Absolutely nothing. We’ve been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English – and that’s who you are playing this afternoon.”

So anyone believing that Saturday at Twickenham is going to be some oasis of snow-white sporting purity as Leinster and Ulster square off for the Heineken Cup final is deluding themselves. In baggage terms, Ryanair’s calculators would be whirring into a frenzy with all the excess set to be piled into Twickers.

It can’t be any other way. McGuinness and Robinson, the mullahs of the new moderation will be in the stands, flesh and blood reminders of the sectarian toxicity that ripped so much flesh and blood apart, largely on the back of religious and tribal differences so minute they bring to mind what Rich Hall’s redneck alter-ego Otis Lee Crenshaw once said – “When you don’t got blacks and Jews you gotta improvise!”

Der Taoiseach Enda will probably be there too, spouting banalities, and making some crack about Mayo not being able to win an All-Ireland, and certainly not until they get a spine donor. And nobody will mention James McClean’s revelatory remarks about how he didn’t feel comfortable playing for Northern Ireland, an affront those “Sash” yodelling yokels from Windsor Park reacted to by threatening to kill the young fella.

So there might not be explicit mention of “taigs” and “prods” and “fenians” and “huns” this weekend. But it’s all there, bubbling under the surface. It always is.

Yet wait, there might be something different this time. Recent conversations with some denizens of this corner’s native south have been revelatory. We’re talking real Munster fans, maybe not the “legend” grotesque of Aprés Match fame but grizzled middle-aged men who would gladly queue up to suckle at the teat of Paul O’Connell and whose party pieces run the gamut of musical range from The Boys Of Kilmicheal to The Boys Of The Old Brigade. And guess what – they want Leinster to lose.

Imagine that. It’s not that they give a fliers about Ulster winning. In fact, give them the choice and they’d probably prefer if it was Clermont or Toulouse or Edinburgh kicking the crap out of Leinster. But the basic point remains the same – Anyone But Leinster.

We have come this far. Isn’t it great! There might be hope yet for this wet, benighted piece of broken rock on the edge of everywhere.

Because this is something entirely natural. Everyone everywhere hates the metropolitans. If you’re Imanol Harinordoquy, you might hate Les Rosbifs but what you really detest is Parisian fancy-dans looking down their big-city noses at the provincials. There ain’t nothing like a New Yorker to get a redneck’s back up in the US. And waving a Londoner at a Manc is like waving a Wallaby at a Kiwi.

It’s the way of the world, and it’s starting to happen here. Leinster are disliked not because of religion, or tribe or identity. They’re hated all for themselves, for being poncey, right-on, Dublin 4, toffee-nosed, privately-educated Hoorays whose daddies still wear school-ties. Praise the Lord, we’re growing up a bit!

Of course not everyone is.

Gaeldom actively doesn’t care about the Heineken Cup and Gaels in the North really don’t care.

If this rugby thing catches on it might sway youngster away from the real Irish pursuits of clattering refs and getting the hump with Laois.

However, here’s the thing: it might not seem so judged by how the two extremist – or should that be fundamentalist – political parties dominate in the North, but there’s a middle-class there too that doesn’t hang out in Windsor or Casement but have taken the Ulster rugger team to their hearts. Even the Taigy well-to-dos, you know, the ones pretty okay with the status quo and who’re no shoo-ins to vote nationalist when the great pick-your-side numbers game is ultimately played.

It was Thackery who said it is the middle classes we look to for safety and banal and middle of the road as the respectable suburbs often are, it is their aspirational quality that encourages us to look forward and not constantly backwards.

Right now there’s a lot more to the Ulster rugby set-up than the traditional image of bowler-hatted suspicion. There’s Rory McIlroy on the sidelines for example. And nearly as many fenians on the side as there are South Africans.

None of which means the centuries of built-in prejudice have gone away.

At least, though, they aren’t absolutely to the forefront anymore. Instead there’s more than a hint of normalcy. And how refreshing is that.

Billy Wilder would understand. Maybe the greatest film director in Hollywood history, Wilder relished normalcy in a way that some of his more flash contemporaries like Hitchcock or Orson Welles seemed incapable of. And yet examine films like Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard or The Lost Weekend and try to argue they’re not among the best ever made.

“I never overestimate the audience, nor do I underestimate them,” Wilder once said. “I just have a very rational idea as to who we’re dealing with, and that we’re not making a picture for Harvard Law School, we’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.”

The politics will be there on Saturday. It can’t be any other way. But it really will be the sport that counts, just as it should be. And how great, and how normal, is that.

“ None of which means the centuries of prejudice have gone away. At least, though, they aren’t absolutely to the forefront anymore. Instead there’s more than a hint of normalcy. And how refreshing is that.