It comes from somewhere, whatever it is. Folks say it starts as a whisper on the Atlantic air: a wheeze, a rustle, a ripple, a swell coming in on the cold; then a sulphurous bouquet of fishy salt and maybe blood. In time, it rises from the sea, a churning vortex. One can, presumably, see this from the Loop Head lighthouse at the western fingertip of Co Clare but, unreported by meteorologists, clearly too scared to speak up, it’s never made the shipping forecast. So people say it’s an old, wrinkled god of the briny deeps – Mannanán mac Lir, sweeper of waves and cousin to Poseidon perhaps. By landfall, it’s human-looking enough but clearly something else. The sound becomes a barbarous whooping, a war cry.
It rides up the Shannon Estuary in a chariot smothered in seaweed tentacles and scaly, boggle-eyed unspeakables. Towed by three frenzied bottlenose dolphins, gold Eastern Crowns jammed on their smooth grey heads, its entourage is a gasping tide of trout and bass and hake and cod and selkies. Then it hails the Merchant Seaman Memorial by the Shannon Bridge and shows the V-sign to the smug lads in chinos at the Boat Club before the whole foaming pageant founders on the Curragower Falls, as the Vikings once did. It turns to mist and falls on Limerick like fine rain, spreading thirst for slaughter.
Munster against Leinster isn’t just a rugby match. There’s more at stake here than victory after eighty minutes or bragging rights until they meet again. Shannonsiders say it’s tribal, in the blood, a matter of local pride. Limerick is, after all, generally the one place in Ireland where rugby is working class. Leinster, by contrast, stand in not only for the decadent snobbery of Dublin today, but where Irish rugby comes from: gentleman amateurs at Trinity College in the 1850s juiced up on muscular Christianity from British public schools.
Though it’s one of world rugby’s great rivalries, Munster-Leinster isn’t a world-historical deal. This fixture can’t compare to any Cold War-era sporting clashes between America and the USSR, Muhammad Ali’s fights with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman, or the Soviet-Romanian gymnastics rivalry. It isn’t another expression of real tensions like Glasgow’s Old Firm Derby – one of soccer’s most infantile claims for its own importance – or India against Pakistan in cricket. And it won’t make people care about rugby if they didn’t already. But there’s more to it than fellas with busted cabbage faces chasing after an oval-shaped ball: it’s a local cultural event.
One part of this is, inevitably, the ritual repetition of dates and statistics. The rivalry dates to 1879, when the sides were founded, and they’ve met 114 times since the inception of the unloved Irish Interprovincial Championship in 1946, which pitted the four provinces of Ireland against each other beyond local club loyalties. Leinster have won sixty-four encounters and Munster forty-five, with five draws. Munster have lost all three of those I’ve seen (two narrowly, but the Betwixtmas 2024 loss was pretty bad). The rest of it can be learned after a quick search online. The bare facts (who won or lost and when) are just details in a bigger story: the fading music of what happened.
Limerick’s oldest pub, JJ Bowles, was founded nearly a century before the teams, even predating the Act of Union by six years. It is, however, hard to precisely date the building on Thomondgate. The timber shopfront and fascia just scream colonial backwater Victoriana, but the pitch of the roof, placement of the window openings and craggy limestone walls could be from much earlier. The day before the game, over a pint of Black Stuff – paradoxically heavier, lighter, daintier, creamier, sweeter, sourer, wetter, and, weirdly, drier than any English approximation – Kev, a London-based Limerickman and late-1990s Shannon RFC Juniors veteran, points to a conundrum in the stats. Leinster have, he explains, played six more of the derbies at home but come out on top in a greater proportion of their away games.
That is, the visitors from the capital have claimed victory at Thomond Park, Munster’s hallowed home ground, with its roar before and during games and total silence for the kickers, more times than Munster themselves. The old-timers at the bar grimace when reminded of this injustice, as if some ornate storehouse of memory has been stormed and burned by yet another invader, leaving only the acrid stink of ruined crops and witlessly honking livestock, flayed bits of illuminated manuscript now but lost mulch. We pop out for a smoke on the terrace. Then we’re all distracted: a black omen.
A crow sweeps down from King John’s Castle. We watch its path, arcing low over the rushing water. It lands on the railings. Everyone stops. Silence. It looks each one of us in the eye. A squawk. The music, ‘Baby Love’ by The Supremes, carries on, tinny now, scraping the empty air. Nobody blinks. ‘Don’t throw our love away,’ pleads doe-eyed Diana Ross. Exchange of glances; more grim and sober nods, ‘In my arms, why don’t you stay?’ There’s rage to come.
For an outsider – a Munster fan by adoption – there’s nothing like being part of the pre-match vibe alongside people with hardened skin in the game. Newspaper reports, sports books, academic studies about the cultural history of rugby in this part of the world, they all need weaving into that thicker fabric of memory. Luckily, Munster rugby lore is egalitarian. People seem to know its highs and lows. It makes for a cracking atmosphere.
It’s in the surprising cheer of the security staff at Shannon Airport and the hearty guffaw of a woman in the Dunnes Stores off the Childers Road, buckling under shopping bags full of goodies for viewing the game at home. ‘It’s not all for me!’ she assures us as we help her get it all in the boot. It’s in the half-ironic lowing of ‘Muuun-steeer’ from a fidget of vaping teenagers up the back of the monument. Silver Toyota Priuses now spectral chariots carrying champions to combat; suburban living rooms now great feasting halls for heroes of Thomond Park’s North Terrace to tell of battles past and old; places where rotten stinking things happened to Frank McCourt as a young fella become makeout waystations where the innocents shift in a souring haze of Joop! Jump and protein powder.
The driver from the airport tells us all about it. He has long white hair and a plunging druid’s beard. His teeth match his tinted glasses, but the smile is dazzling. He’s storied, and he speaks beautifully. That voice is smooth when he’s talking about Limerick and how it’s changed over the years, but he hams it up when describing his days playing for Young Munster decades ago. His theatrical wheezing means I didn’t catch the precise year, but he slams his chest when he says the team lives in his heart.
And it’s not clear how to make all his claims for himself add up: ordinary seaman on the vast South Pacific; owner-operator and chief craftsman of a company dealing exclusively in circular tables; leader of what he says was an ‘English republican think-thank’ with a very smart office in Mayfair (he admits to having a ‘very mixed’ reputation); expert marksman on the Olympic clay pigeon circuit (apparently, there’s a now long out of print book about him and his exploits by initial initial Beaucroft or Beauchanan or Beauchop ); chief-executive-cum-military-strategist-turned-memoirist with his own meditational practice he made all his employees do before the start of the working day (apparently, he wrote a book about this with a new-agey title); eventually, beloved principal of a school for ‘exceptionally special’ children. When he finds out that I’m writing a piece about the big game, he assures me that poets and bards and magicians were much respected in ancient Ireland and could expect fine hospitality from their kingly patrons. ‘Ye’ll want to satirise the bastards,’ he says, ‘Demoralise them! May their fortunes fail!’
This was on brand. Local legend presents Munster and Leinster as two foes in a forever war, though the truth depends on who you ask. Perhaps their enmity has a rational basis: not just Leinster’s flashy Dublinite civility, all those dortspeaking shapers breathing in their ‘wh-s’ like they’re entitled to suck at the world from a straw, but alleged anti-Munster bias in the selection of Ireland international sides. Or maybe it’s been pumped up for other reasons.
The game has, certainly, been able to get big attendances for the last decade. Nearly 70,000 made it to Cardiff to see them in 2016, and there were close to 81,000 at Croke Park in October 2024. Then again, though it’s hard to come by complete attendance figures, the available evidence suggests they were, in fact, shocking low in the Interprovincial Championship Years (1946-2001), which nobody seems to have much enjoyed. Despite the interest recently shown by newspapers and podcasters, some wags even say there’s no real rivalry at all, on the field or in the stands, the whole thing just cynical Celtic Tiger-era branding no older than the early 2000s, the frozen tears of joy and hurt slathered over a slick package called ‘Ireland’ floating on the global market.
Some of this was aimed at credulous Americans. One 1988 Irish Tourist Board advertisement, produced by now-seemingly-defunct New York firm Berkofsky, Sillie & Barrett, calls Ireland ‘the ancient birthplace of good times’. Soundtracked by Enya’s ethereal warbling, we see the obligatory clips of Irish dancers, horses, goats, abandoned abbeys, and old-timers in flat caps enjoying some gentle craic together while setting on a bench. The best bit, however, is about halfway through when a man driving a horse and cart drifts past some golfers in the reddening dusk. The voiceover invites ‘Yanks’ to a ‘grand time’ following the stomping tread of the Vikings Normans, and Saxons, all of whom ‘found Ireland irresistible’, promising escorted tours, cottage rentals, and golfing packages for $42 a day (including rental car and accommodation but apparently not pillaging materials or broadswords). The number to call was genuinely 1-800-Shamrock.
No such nonsense in Ann Kiely’s cosy, calm living room in Ballysimon. Kev and his father, Kevin Sr – the head of him, the son – are holding court from deep brown armchairs about three major Munster victories. The two against Australia (1967 and 1981), brilliant fun though they sound, are controversial, since it’s alleged, possibly by the same callous rogue as before, that the bounding macropods fielded a ‘second team’ on both occasions. The revisionists have now even dentured the most famous Munster win of them all: the unmerciful 12-0 flaking of the mighty All Blacks on Halloween 1978 before a crowd of 12,000.
Kevin Sr shakes his head and decries this nonsense with a wink, before Ann says ‘It’s a knuckle supper they’ll be wanting fer their tea, with all the trimmings, from the same serving the boys’ll be doling out tomorrow.’ She’s steady and matter-of-fact as ever, but there’s a remorseless fire in her eye as she says this. And this isn’t just from raising five children. The same look shows up in people across town, even those full of cheer. Also, during this chat, I’ve busted through multiple chocolate Kimberlys, their foil cloaks studding the tray (and my jeans) like the battered regalia of a once noble foe, before starting on some Rich Teas from the tin, collywobbling yahoo that I am, but nobody says a word.
These days, though, the teams have bigger melts to knack in than international opponents. Global commerce is at stake, as both teams boast international players and major corporate sponsors. This can’t help but lessen some of the rivalry’s rhetorical fodder: the age-old tale of differences between the country and the city and what the people who live there are meant to be like.
This is something we all feel we know intuitively. There’s enough written about the subject, from Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse to more recent theories about the capitalist world-system, contrasting the provincial innocent’s deep bonds to nature and land and kin to blasé cityfolk, sophisticates who know only how to show off their finery but are coldly out of touch with what really matters.
The rivalry leans into this. The two sides typecast themselves: parochial Munster, the rag-tag rebel alliance of honest, toothsome culchies running barefoot through the lanes to get to the game with iced buns in their pockets as a treat for after; D4 Leinster, a legion of chortling property developers taking the field in pink poplin shirts and grey gilets, rain-resistant dye-jobs slicked back, fresh from fiddling the GDP figures.
This doesn’t hold up anymore. Then again, provinciality always was relative: Limerick wasn’t Dublin, but Dublin wasn’t London; most of London was excluded from the glamorous spectre of itself that appeared in film and TV, and neither real nor imaginary versions were Paris; it definitely wasn’t New York. But globalisation has put this in a new perspective. Nobody chose ceaseless global flows of communication and capital, but we’re all equally part of and excluded from them at the same time. To really access that nebulous thing we call ‘the global’, the human sensorium – our gooey material eyes, ears and brains and powers of cognition – would have to undergo some painful expansion with computer chips and wires, pumped up with triumphalist Californian post-humanist marketing guff. It sounds almost backward, anti-modern even, but we should all embrace being some species of culchie.
Global forces are everywhere, of course, even in Dave Hickey’s man-cave, a standalone steel tech-shed. It’s a testament to straightforward needs: a telly, an American pool table (security footage of games decided at the death is shared in a group chat, though it’s never Dave losing), a fridge full of cold cans of Guinness, the whole gaff smothered in deep red Liverpool FC gear. At one point, his eight-year-old bursts in, dressed up as Harry Potter with exceptional attention to detail (uniform, scar, broken glasses, even a plastic wand that whizzes and whirrs if you press a button).
When we ask him about the big game, he’s in wizard mode. ‘I’ll hex them,’ he hisses, spouting some spells in imaginary Latin, ‘That’ll larn ‘em!’ Then he stops and thinks and looks up at the ceiling, like he’s thinking about a particularly difficult sum or something. He raises his arms in a V, standing there quaking for a second or two. Then, consumed with a strange new ferocity, he growls ‘War! Fury! Pestilence! May their scalps flake in blizzards! May they never reach what itches them! May no mead stanch their miseries!’ When it’s over, the grownups smile. They think it’s just babble, but I’ve seen that look already. The game is four hours away.
He was, of course, born well over a decade after the start of the rivalry as we know it now: the 2006 European Cup Semi-Final (won by Munster), consolidated on the same occasion three years later (won by Leinster). In both cases, the derby victors went on to win the tournament. But, more than that, the teams were now brands, the locally specific meaning of what it did or didn’t mean to watch them play – all that civic pride and parochial solidarity – now just more fuel for rip-roaring revenue generation and swishy fabbo logos. There was a Thomond Park fashion brand and Thomond Reserve wine, with bottles sometimes even signed by Munster legends. One reviewer, writing in 2016, says that the wine is, like the team, ‘past its best’, describing a 2009 Sauvignon Blanc as a ‘stale liquid that tastes as if it was made from grapes grown on the Fields of Athenry’.
Irish readers don’t need a rehearsal of the economic story – colonial underdevelopment, the ‘Is Ireland a Third World Country’ debate of the mid-1980s, or the brogueish roar and, later, austere muffling of the Celtic Tiger. The question for Munster-Leinster is not just whether it’s a victim of its own success, but whether the real fun and silly meaning of the rivalry can hold up if some of the material conditions for it aren’t there anymore (spiralling inequality and grotesque house prices notwithstanding).
Everyone from anywhere with an online device can, after all, if they want and if there’s no censorship in the place they live, consume the same ‘content’ – sober police procedural dramas and grainy snuff flicks, niche sub-genres of electronic music, shitty dating advice, therapy exercises, vicious online scandals, sports events – as anyone from anywhere else at the same time. It seems, then, that the very processes that created a glittering high-tech Irish capital (the idea of it, at least, that useful tool in berating Munster fans) also mean that it’s not that much different from anywhere else in Ireland or beyond, making Dublin in theory no more or less cosmopolitan than London, Lagos, Lahore, Los Angeles, Lima, Luanda, Lucknow, Lisbon, León, Louisville, Lusaka, Leipzig, Lille, Łodź, Lviv, Leicester, Liège, Lublin, Lausanne, Luton, Linz, Livorno, Lugo, or Limerick.
With two hours to go, they gather at Harvey’s Quay beneath a malnourished sun. Then they’ll grind their way up to the stadium. A pounding horde of fulminaters, tattered red jerseys further mantled by stinking dyes and gore. They’ve brought torches and flags and banners and the heads of slain beasts staring hollow from pikes shoved into the ground by some strength beyond all muscular estimation. Someone puts on a Bluetooth speaker. ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ by The Supremes blares out, an auditory bludgeon, unbearably distorted, the wall of sound now a bubbling hellmouth.
Two chaps, their faces masked by plastic bags like bank robbers, roast a pig on a makeshift spit. They hoot along to the lyrics while the swinish juices spill onto the fast scarletting concrete. ‘I’ve tried so hard, hard to be patient,’ they whine, ‘Hoping you’d stop this infatuation.’ They’re joined by a marauding gang of the elderly, drawn by the sight of carnage. ‘But each time you are together,’ they respond, ‘I’m so afraid I’ll be losing you forever’.
They begin a war dance around the statue of Terry Wogan, arms aloft, as if conjuring some black and abysmal spirit from the Luciferian beyond. The song stops, and now they howl ‘Drink their blood!’ and ‘Exterminate the brutes!’, a call-and-response that lasts for hours, long into the game, when they chant it at players on the field. Then a crow lands on Wogan’s head. His face changes. In the wild flicker of torchlight, the shadows fall anew about the cheeks and mouth. That smile was once full of easy charm. Now it’s an avaricious leer.
1/2/2025
Max L Feldman, born in London in 1988, is a writer based in Vienna. He teaches Criticism at the University of Arts Linz.
