Things are getting pretty bad when even the leader of the Republic feels free to declare that outside of Dublin, “there is not a county in the country which is not willing Mayo to win tomorrow’s All-Ireland football final.”

Chiselled of jaw and upright of carriage, Enda Kenny has always worn his Mayo loyalties proudly even if, like many a Mayo man before him, he has spent much of his life under the bright lights of the capital.

His predecessor, Brian Cowen, could often be found trenchcoated and intently watching the action on wintry days when the budgets were always giveaway and Offaly were playing Division Two in Tullamore.

And before that, during the Roaring Noughties, Mr Bartholomew Ahern was renowned for his devotion to the Dublin football team, rarely missing a game in Parnell Park or on the Jones’s Road and touring the Interior when the Metropolitans lost the occasional championship game in Leinster and were dispatched on football adventures in rural Ireland.

Those of us present in Páirc Seán Mac Diarmada on the afternoon when the Dubs met Leitrim in a riveting qualifier match won’t quickly forget the day that the Leader swept into our midst.

It was 2004 and the Connacht Council men assigned to the car park were at their wits’ end trying to accommodate the non-stop procession of flash motors. Surveying the battery of gleaming cars with a despairing eye, one steward shook his head and said to nobody in particular, “Sure it’s like the showroom in Western Motors.” Nobody listened.

It is impossible to remember now whether Fianna Fáil's main man arrived by car or by air for the sound of helicopters landing in west of Ireland GAA grounds 10 minutes before throw-in was nothing unusual then.

Mug refilled
But he moved easily through the small room, graciously accepted one of those extraordinarily uncomfortable plastic shell seats found only in Irish schools and GAA grounds and popped into the kitchen at half-time to have his mug refilled and to compliment his hosts on the quality of the currant bread.

The Dubs won, just, and the most powerful political figure in Irish life was gone minutes after the final whistle. But the scent of power lingered for hours.

From Jack Lynch to Seán Flanagan to John Donnellan, politics and GAA allegiances are nothing new. So it is only natural Enda Kenny will be shouting for Mayo tomorrow.

Still, his casual assertion that the other 31 counties – and, by inference, the entire world – will be rooting for Mayo is an unintentional slight the Dubs have learned to live with.

Being a Dublin football supporter is a complex thing. A Dublin fan might become a bit paranoid about the notion that the elsewhere often referred to as “rural Ireland” enjoys seeing the Dublin football team getting its comeuppance.

The real Dubs don’t have much time for this city versus country debate because in their minds, there is no debate. Real Dubs feel about Dublin much the way John Updike said New Yorkers feel about New York: that people who don’t live there have to be, in some way, kidding.

The Dubs are generally too polite to point out that much as the country folks bang on about the greatness and beauty of their own counties, a great many get out of there just as soon as they turn legal and race off to live in Dublin, hundreds of thousands of them bunking down in Rathmines and Ranelagh.

The population of Dublin is listed at 1.2 million but that is because the number has been swelled to absurd degrees by the great migration of rural Irish who desire to live there. Leinster House, for instance, is crowded with country men and women, some of whom are almost-Dubs. When Pat Rabbitte was upbraided by protesters while enjoying a summer’s evening pint in Doheny and Nesbitt’s a few months ago, it was remarked afterwards he had remained fairly stoical through the worst of the uproar.

The Labour man’s constituency may be Dublin South West but it is often forgotten he was reared in Claremorris: what was a heckling in a Baggot Street bar in comparison to enduring the debacle against Cork in 1993 or the misery against Kerry in 2004 or 2006? Mayo football steels the soul.

RTÉ, too, is swarming with non-Dubs and we will know the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum when someone from rural Ireland gets to present The Late Late Show.

Teeming with country folk
Dublin's colleges educate and feed the children of rural Ireland, Dublin's many taverns welcome guests from all corners of the nation and its performing venues are booked solid with midlands comedians or west of Ireland folk guitarists doing their thing, and Grafton Street is always, always teeming with country folk who spend half their lives trotting up and down between Heuston station and where ever it is they are from.

Country people blend well into Dublin and many of them show their appreciation by adopting the local accent just months after their arrival. So it becomes difficult to tell real Dubs and half-Dubs apart. It is only on weekends like this the old loyalties re-emerge.

And the Dubs – the actual Dubs, who may number less than ten thousand souls - have always been magnanimous about this. Truth is the Dubs have no issue with rural Ireland. Many go there every summer, to Connemara or Kerry or Wexford, saying nice things about the food, the wonderful scenery, the people etc and meaning it too, even if they murmur to themselves as they head back towards the capital, “Jaysus, though, what it’d be like in the winter?”

No, the Dubs have always had a gracious attitude to the Rest of Ireland and have always maintained a dignified silence about the old canard that playing in Croke Park gives them an unfair advantage and that having a million people to pick a team from tips the odds etc. They even keep their mouths shut about the fact the Dublin late 1970s jerseys has yet to be bettered for style.

Few tears were shed in rural Ireland during the long stretch from1983-1995 when the Dubs failed to win Sam or the awkward decade during the Boom when they fell and fell again in their efforts just to reach the All-Ireland final.

So they can't be blamed if they aren't quite in step with the national Mayo love right now. They can't be blamed if they don't give a toss what the country thinks. And if the day goes their way and the pubs are playing Philo's Old Town and the capital city is half-drunk by tea time, you'd be more than welcome to join them.