Move over the Champs Elysées. The Champs d'Athenry will take another step towards becoming the world's most famous fields today if a stunt planned for the half-time interval in the France-Ireland rugby international comes off. Frank McNally reports
The idea, proposed by sponsors Guinness, is to turn the giant screen at Lansdowne Road into "the planet's largest karaoke machine".
The lyrics of The Fields of Athenry, Ireland's unofficial anthem, will be displayed on it, with backing music.
And when the words: "By a lonely prison wall . . ." ring out at around 2.45 p.m., the organisers hope that 50,000 voices - the 49,000 attendance, plus stewards, gardaí and emergency personnel - will raise the famously low-lying pastureland to new heights.
The plan assumes that 5,000 French supporters will join in. The visiting fans were even more subdued than usual yesterday as they strolled around Dublin, so perhaps they were memorising the words.
But, amazingly, the Guinness Book of Records doesn't yet have a category for mass outdoor karaoke performance, so whatever happens today will be a world's best.
What the French make of a nation which rallies its sportsmen with a song about famine, deportation and the loneliness of east Galway is a cause for wonder.
It may well be that the karaoke idea is just a cunning plan to distract the visitors during their team-talk. "Mon Dieu!" they will shrug in the dressing room as they strain to make out the words. "Zey are all singing about corn!"
The visitors will, as usual, perform the Marseillaise before today's game, a song which also mentions fields, but in a somewhat different sense.
For Irish fans wishing to extend the karaoke session, the anthem is about the defence of the homeland ("Aux armes citoyens!"), and it describes a grave threat facing France: "Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes/Mugir ces féroces soldats?" [Do you hear the sound in the fields/The howling of these fearsome soldiers?]
Irish rugby fans will hope that, contrary to the Marseillaise's prediction, France's day of glory has not yet arrived. A win for Ireland today, followed by the traditional victory in Cardiff, would set up the mother of all grand-slam deciders - against England on March 30th.