Simon Barnes, writing in the Times, sums up the real importance of Ireland's Six Nations victory over England at Croke Park yesterday:

It was an occasion that had all the furniture of hate, but hatred itself went missing. A million anticipatory words were written about it on both sides of the water. If there was an incitement to hatred implicit in all this, the people who came along didn’t pay attention. Bugger history, this is now. This is sport and we don’t know what happens next, so don’t talk to me of the Troubles and the past; all that matters is Ronan O’Gara versus Jonny Wilkinson. Life really should be like that.

Croke Park! Home of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the only sporting organisation in history developed on explicitly political and subversive lines. You couldn’t play Gaelic sports if you played football or rugby, or if you were a policeman.

Croke Park was also the site of the massacre of Bloody Sunday, as you will have read a thousand times — 14 people killed by the British in 1920. Croke Park has been sacred to the memories of oppression and the GAA has long been defined not so much by a love of thrilling, violent and exotic sports as by a hatred of the British.
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Then the tune [God Save The Queen] was played and the England team and the 7,000 England supporters sang along, and there was not a whistle or a catcall or a boo. Why should there be? This was just sport, was it not? Then, extraordinarily, a round of applause; not for the song but for the silence, the palpable feeling that the end of an era was being celebrated. And then the Irish anthem, The Soldier’s Song, deafeningly, and after that Ireland’s Call. Two anthems, because this team represent both the Republic of Ireland and the chunk in the north that is part of the United Kingdom. Complex matters, for which no one cared a jot on Saturday evening in Dublin.