Kilmainham Gaol, Croke Park and rugby union

It's always good to go to Dublin for the Ireland v England match. This year was special because of a change in venue. Ireland's Lansdowne Road stadium is being refurbished so the fixture was taking place in Croke Park run by the Gaelic Athletic Association.

But Croke Park is not just any old stadium. It's a very well appointed modern venue, the third biggest sports stadium in Europe with a capacity of more than 82,000. Yet hitherto it has confined itself only to Gaelic sports such as the all-Ireland Gaelic football and hurling championships.

There is a reason for this since in 1920 Croke Park was witness to one of the most notorious events in Ireland's long struggle for independence. The ground had already achieved some symbolic significance in the use of rubble from buildings wrecked in the 1916 Easter rising to construct one of the terraces, thereafter known as Hill 16.

Bloody Sunday

Then, on Sunday, November 21, a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary was brutally interrupted when police auxiliaries entered the ground and began firing on the crowd. The police were responding to a co-ordinated series of killings that morning when agents working for the British military had been murdered by hit squads loyal to Michael Collins, the Irish Republican leader.

Whether or not the shooting was a deliberate act of reprisal, or whether it was triggered by a nervous response to shots, real or imagined, from somewhere in the panicking crowd, is still far from clear. But at the end of the shooting some 14 people: 13 spectators and one player, Michael Hogan, the Tipperary captain, were dead or dying. Confusion in the aftermath was very similar to that after the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry when members of the British Paratroop Regiment shot 13 people dead during a civil rights march.

Ancient history? Not in Ireland. There was a great deal of heated debate before the Croke Park administrators agreed to host the six nations rugby internationals. Some in the press had predicted crowd trouble. But only those who have no knowledge of rugby or its supporters would conceive of such nonsense.

I travelled over with six friends - seven of us and six tickets, not the ideal combination, but a better position than the group of twenty England supporters we met who had a single ticket. They wouldn't part with it to make their misery and our happiness complete. Irritatingly we had been covered for tickets but due to a mix up in communications a couple of tickets had been let go elsewhere.

At some stage we would need to draw straws. The last time it happened, some who had put tickets in to the kitty had lost out when the names were drawn out of a hat. This time there would be only one of us out of luck. Everyone had fingers crossed.

Firing squad

We spent the Saturday morning at Kilmainham Gaol where, in May, 1916, fifteen of those who had organised and led the Easter uprising were taken out in to the prison yard and shot by firing squad. One prisoner, James Connolly, dying from a serious leg injury that had turned gangrenous, was brought from his hospital bed and strapped to a chair before he was shot.

I can recommend the prison tour for those who seek to get a better understanding of the events surrounding the Irish rebellion. The story of the prison was harrowing enough without any need for embellishment by our tour guide, Ciaran, who delivered an excellent and even-handed narrative.

Walking to the ground - yes I was one of the lucky ones - we saw two men standing with a poster in memory of Michael Hogan. There was a delay before the British National Anthem as Mary McAleese, the Irish President, was shown to her seat. The press reported that the mainly Irish crowd was respectful of the National Anthem. That was an understatement. I saw some wearing the green who were singing God Save the Queen and at least one in front of me removed his cap - more than I managed to do.

There was near silence on the few occasions when Jonny Wilkinson kicked for goal. The rest of the time the home supporters were raising the roof as the Irish ran up an embarrassingly convincing win by a thirty point margin: 43-13.

Hen parties

As others have said, there is a new spirit in Ireland that may not have forgotten the past but which no longer feels weighed down by history. That's a good thing. The slightly sad aspect of this, however, is that the centre of Dublin on a Saturday night is a succession of hen and stag parties dominated by the alco-pop crowd whose appreciation of history extends to last night's TV.

The singing pubs and their singing clientele seem to be disappearing in the trendier parts of Dublin where gastro-pubs are beginning to compete with the drinking only bars. Our post match sing song was confined to the trip back to the suburbs on the Dart railway ahead of an early ferry the next day.

We always sing, win or lose, but after a loss like that we might have been excused if the chariots were not on fire that night.