So how exactly did England win the Championship if Ireland won the victory?

Just as the English can take victory and turn it into miserable defeat, so the Irish take defeat and cheer with the song of a thousand victories.

Ireland didn’t just beat England in the rugby at the weekend. The Irish slaughtered them, and having just beaten the old enemy in the Cricket World Cup, and what with it being Paddy’s Weekend, and the game in Dublin and did I mention the old enemy, I did did I, oh so now so now so well, it just couldn’t have been any better.

The English departed heads down, demoralised and bedraggled, while the Irish went bananas nationwide for several days. Everywhere the talk was of how if only they’d played like that in every game, they might have won the Six Nations Championship, or maybe the Triple Crown, or maybe even the Grand Slam, where your country wins all five games in this France, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Italy mini league.

Before this year’s Six Nations, I contacted an Irish friend up in Killala. As a true Ireland and Munster through-and-through rugby fan, what did he hope would be at stake on the last day of the tournament, when the English would travel to Dublin?

‘An Irish Grand Slam. Why not?’ came his reply.

So the Irish pulverised the English and won the day, but the English won the Six Nations Championship. Indeed, they won it from such a strong position that it didn’t even matter that they were marmalised by Ireland on the last day of the competition. England won the Championship yet they left Dublin dejected losers, because they’d believed the hype, and dreamed only of the Grand Slam.

There exists still a small arcane part of the English cortex that believes that anything less than winning the Six Nations is disastrous, what with us giving the game to the world donchaknow blah Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran blah blah.

An arrogance lingers that winning the thing is barely enough. To revel in glory, England must do it in style, with supremacy intact.  Bliss belonged to the Irish, who won nothing but the game. They savoured every bloodstained sweaty second of their team’s splendid display.

Irish thinking has moved on a great deal in the 20 years since I arrived here. They’ve cut the first snips of the chord that bind Church and State in a social context. Irish society has experienced affluence for a while and there are at last non-white faces on the streets of Galway. Yet still, there is nothing that puts a smile on the faces of my hosts like getting one over their historical oppressors.