The Irish cricket team has lifted hearts here and throughout the world with its spirited performance in the World Cup. A squad with 12 amateurs out of 15 members has brought romance and goodwill to the tournament, amplified by their 500 strong "Blarney Army" fans and fortified by strong all round performances in batting, bowling, fielding, tactics and coaching.
This is one of the most notable Irish sporting achievements and with luck it can endure, since it has firm roots in the development of the game here over the last number of years. The team ably represents a more multicultural, immigrant Ireland and is balanced between North and South.
By their sensational but deserved victory over Pakistan on St Patrick's Day Ireland earned a place in the Super Eight finals, along with Australia, Bangladesh, England, New Zealand, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the West Indies. By defeating Bangladesh in this tournament they qualify for the International Cricket Union's one-day rankings over the next two years - and avoided the wooden spoon. The scale of this achievement can be gauged by the fact that the Bangladesh game played before a capacity crowd last Sunday had been expected to be between two world cricket superpowers - India and Pakistan, both knocked out.
The team's success will now see Ireland pitched against world class opponents, making for better standards and more rounded experience. It will give individual team members many more opportunities, whether on the international one- day circuit, in the growing club scene here - or in the English professional county cricket season. It should bring new resources and greater popular interest to the game. But the game's managers and players need to beware of instant fame, media and sponsorship attention as they decide how to consolidate this achievement by ensuring it has a longer-term effect.
Intriguingly, this success can validly be presented as a revival of Ireland's cricketing fortunes rather than a completely new phenomenon.
Recently published histories of cricket in Kilkenny and Tipperary reveal how popular it was from the 1850s to the early 1900s, with hundreds of teams drawn from all classes of society. So much so that cricket throughout the country was targeted as a foreign game by the early GAA leaders - described famously and unfairly by Archbishop Croke as "not racy of the soil, but alien to it". In fact many people played cricket and hurling, and those familiar with both games often remark on the similarity of their central skills.