Queen's song still strikes a delicate chord

Sideline Cut: The Artane Boy's Band may be busy practising the subtle brass notes of God Save the Queenthis weekend but when it comes to rugby and national anthems, controversy is nothing new.

When Ireland met Scotland in the Five Nations championship in February of 1954, the match was held at Ravenhill. It was a politically fraught period. The Flags and Emblems Bill was up for debate at Stormont, legislation that, if passed, would have outlawed the flying of the Tricolour in the North. The nationalist Mid-Tyrone MP Liam Kelly had been recently jailed for a making a speech deemed seditious. And the behaviour of the British army in Kenya, whose members were allegedly acting upon the motivation of a "shilling for a kill", drew some unflattering comparisons in the Irish newspapers to the Black and Tans campaign during the War of Independence.

The national mood was enough to get the Southern Irish rugby stars talking once they boarded the train from Amiens Street to Belfast. Gordon Wood, the late father of 1990s prodigy Keith, was one of the players on an illustrious side that included Noel Henderson and was captained by James McCarthy. After some discussion, they decided that standing for the Queen's song would not be appropriate and that they would take the field only after the God Save the Queenwas safely completed.

It meant that just six men in green would stand to attention for the preliminaries, but so be it. McCarthy informed the IRFU blazers of the intentions of the Southern players. On the morning of the match, the general practice was for the team to board the bus, take lunch on the Malone Road and head on for the sport at Ravenhill. However, no sooner had the Irish team settled on to the bus than the Southern members were told to report back to the hotel, where they were gathered in room 100. What happened in there was tantamount to an 11th-hour showdown between players and committee members, who argued and cajoled the Irish players into backing down.

It was pointed out that no less than de Valera himself regarded the cross-Border rugby team as a valuable conduit. The six pointed out that players from the Ulster Unionist tradition showed respect for the nationalist tradition at Lansdowne Road. And they were promised that, if they backed down for this match, they would never be placed in the Ravenhill predicament again.

Meanwhile, the Ulster team members waited patiently in the bus without the faintest idea of what was going on. Joey Gaston would recall many years later that he presumed the Southern boys had been sent away to pray for Pope Pius XII, who was known to be very ill at the time.

The bus proceeded to Ravenhill, the full 15 stood for God Save the Queenand Ireland duly won the match. It was the last senior international held at Ravenhill.

The Southern players agreed not to talk about the near-rebellion. Years later, the rugby journalist Seán Diffley referred to the incident as Irish rugby's "most closely guarded secret".

It is the subject of a paper, The Riddle of Ravenhill, by Vic Rigby of Kingston University, which featured in the annual conference of Sports History in Ireland held in the Centre for Irish Studies in Galway this weekend.

Rigby spoke with several surviving members of the 1954 vintage and pieced together the events of that weekend. It made for fascinating listening. As Rigby pointed out, the fact that this tense occasion signalled the end of Ravenhill as an international venue was probably coincidental. The IRFU had gone ahead with upgrading the West Stand at Lansdowne the year before, meaning the Dublin ground could hold 20,000 more spectators than Ravenhill. From then on, the Ulster brothers travelled South and stood to attention - with gritted teeth or otherwise - for The Soldier's Song.

With the visit of the England team imminent, the events of 50 years ago hold contemporary echoes - although next Saturday's airing of God Save the Queenat Croke Park will represent a huge and incomparable concession in the imagination of many Irish people. And it highlights the fact that the business of sounding out the anthem has always been a tricky business for the IRFU.

Music itself has been the ultimate casualty, with the airing of Ireland's Call, that strange wail of a tune that has been heard at many of the world's great sporting theatres. Surely the powers that be could have simply plumped for a popular classic from Madonna and left it at that. Instead, we have to suffer through the mesmerising and somewhat frightening sights and sounds of the Bull Hayes and company straining for the higher reaches of the anthem that offends nobody - except its listeners.

The Bull Hayes hails from Bruff, also the home place of Liam O'Callaghan, who gives a talk debunking the myths of Munster rugby this afternoon. The thesis has already generated coverage that the postgraduate could not have expected and he admits he won't be scrolling through the Munster message boards any time soon.

The popular perception of Munster rugby as a united cultural and sporting movement based on a love of province and rugby which transcends class is, he suggests, wishful thinking. He compares it to historian Eric Hobsbawn's theory of "invented tradition". He points out that of the Munster team, seven of the eight Cork-based Munster players went to fee-paying schools. He examines the century-long power struggle between the rugby citadels of Cork and Limerick, citing the various selection controversies over the years and notes that in the Munster branch minutes between 1927-'77, when the provincial representation was referred to at all, it was generally to lament the cost of running the damn team.

And he has a bit of fun with the excitable media praise that has followed Munster's recent exploits across European fields. He quotes one unnamed commentator as explaining the Munster rugby phenomenon as the classic case of "rural Ireland versus the big city, Barry's tea against skinny grand latte, cider versus champagne".

The main reason behind the success of Munster has, of course, been the emergence of a unique and likeable team whose magic has been to somehow transport the club ethos of the All-Ireland League into the regimented calendar of professional rugby. Munster rugby caught the popular imagination and now seems all but enshrined in the Constitution. The hoop-la and national genuflections led by RTÉ have not been of the Munster team's making. But it is good to see someone - and a Munster man at that - voicing the notion maybe some perspective has been lost along the way.

Still, one thing is undeniable. The Munster crowd sing decent songs. And it will be interesting to see what rugby anthem is chosen when Italy play Ireland in Ravenhill next August for the first Belfast international in over half a century.