3 April 2008
We’ve had nine Irish number ones about Irish and Man United soccer (not counting two football-related charity fundraisers plus a comedy ballad with a verse about a footballer from Cork), one about Wexford hurling, another that asks will Galway bate Mayo (answer: not if they have Willie Joe) but this is Ireland’s first and so far only chart-topping single about rugby. Welcome to rugby country!
Munster’s dramatic European exploits in the ’00s caught the Irish public imagination: a couple of near misses in finals, a few dodgy calls along the way, an epic ‘miracle match’ in the group stage, and after all that two Heineken Cups finally won in 2006 and 2008. There were a few other Munster-related records in the lower reaches of the charts in those years, just as there are usually county songs in or around the Irish top thirty come All-Ireland time. However, ‘The Munster Song’ had the additional wind in its sails of being a charity fundraiser for Bluebell ABA (for ‘applied behavioural analysis’) School in Limerick, which was set up by local parents of children with autism. Glenn Keating was a young Bluebell pupil at the time, and we’ve already heard Greg Ryan at number one in Ireland as part of Irish hard-rock boyband Zoo with ‘Poison’ / ‘I Believe’. The song itself—a folk ballad tale of supporting Munster—and the rugby tie-in are means to a worthier end, and I hope the families of Bluebell saw the benefits.
Putting my Munster birthright and citizenship to one side while I don the mantle of objective analysis, I note that there has never been a Leinster rugby song at number one in Ireland. That tells its own sorry story.
