Munster rugby
Carcasonne was the nearest airport to Castres, where Munster played the local team in a freezing gale on the late evening of Friday 13 January (kick off at 8.30pm local time and the match not over until close to 10.30pm). Several of the Munster contingent stayed in Carcasonne over the weekend, travelling over the Cevennes mountains to and from Castres.
A few remarked over the weekend on my temerity in flying Ryanair after our 'Crisis in the Cockpit' report in the last issue of Village. In fact the flight was on time, the aircraft was new, the seats were solid leather, the crews were polite and efficient and the fares were cheap. Also, there was no crisis in the cockpit, at least none of which us passengers were aware.
We were directly behind the goal posts on the side away from which Munster scored their five tries in the second half, so far away we had no idea how near they were to the Castres line, who had scored or much of what had led up to it. In other words we had only a vague idea of what was going on. Some of the people beside us were phoning home to get updates from friends watching television. But it was great. Great euphoria, great craic, lots of "The Fields of Athenry" (why is our modern song of celebration a song about the famine?), and chants of "Allez Les Rouges".
There is something heroic about these guys: Ronan O'Gara, Peter Stringer, Anthony Foley, David Wallace, Paul O'Connell, Donnacha O'Callaghan, Marcus Horan and John Hayes (not sure about the others yet). Year after year in the Heineken Cup for Munster – they play beyond human endurance and capacity and yet when they play for Ireland they are diminished. It is that the Leinster influx has a contaminating effect, shrinking commitment, courage, grit and ambition?
Did anyone who was any good at rugby ever come from Leinster? Brian O'Driscoll? Gordon Darcy? Malcolm O'Kelly? Yea. We're talking about real men here. When was there ever a real man who was any way good at rugby come from Leinster? Ever? Name one! Shay Deering? But he played for Garryowen.
Did anyone who was any good at football ever come from Leinster? Damien Duff? Can't get into the Chelsea team. Robbie Keane? Who? John Giles? We are talking about modern Ireland here, the last 25 years or even 50 years.
Did anyone who was any good at Gaelic football ever come from Leinster – OK anyone in the last 25 years, can you name one decent Gaelic footballer who came from Leinster in the last 25 years? Aside from Colm O'Rourke?
Ditto hurling. OK, there were a few Kilkenny players who measured up but aside from them, name one Leinster player, outside of Kilkenny, who was any good at hurling in the last 25 years and please don't name anyone from Offaly.
I got talking to a Cork publican and his wife in Carcassonne. They didn't think much of Micheál Martin. A "langer" they called him. The smoking ban was the problem. Destroyed communities, families, the happiness of elderly returning emigrants and the public house trade. Obviously self-serving but they made a good point, which I thought they were genuine about, concerning these elderly returned emigrants. Several of them in their locality, who had returned to their home place after decades of misery in England, looking forward to camaraderie in the local pubs and now deprived of that by the smoking ban.
They were convinced the smoking ban would do serious damage to Fianna Fáil in the next election, even though one of the opposition parties proposed reversing the ban.
The medieval fortress of Carcassonne is startling. The largest medieval fortress in Europe and a world heritage site. The city of Carcassonne is placed between Toulouse and Narbonne and close to another Heritage site, the Canal du Midi. This network of navigable waterways was built in the 17th century to link the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
About 2,200 years ago it was in the border between France and Spain and was fortified around then because of its strategic location on the trade route between Bordeaux and Rome.
It is encircled by a huge double row of fortified walls that run almost two miles long, with 56 watchtowers. In the third century AD the first of the fortified walls was built. The outer walls were build around 1230 and because of extensive renovation in the nineteenth century the city looks more or less as it did 800 years ago.
The Cathars were very much part of Carcassonne's history. Catharism was a very active religion in Europe in the early part of the last millennium. It was a period of religious toleration in France. Jews, Catholics and Cathars lived in peace. Cathars were Christians, but unlike the Roman Catholics, they believed that God had created only spiritual perfection and eternity, not the material world which they regarded as the creation of Satan. They were vegetarian, sex and wealth were forbidden. Catharism became known as the Albigensian heresy.
The then Pope, Innocent III sought to reconcile the Cathars with the Catholic church by sending St Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order, to intercede with them. When a legate of the Pope was murdered by Cathars in 1210 Innocent III preached a crusade against the Cathars, granting the same indulgences to those who agreed to fight in a war against them as had been granted to the Crusaders in Palestine, plus permission for the Crusaders to keep property seized form the Cathars.
Simon de Montford led the crusade. He had taken part in the fourth Crusade to Palestine. The Crusade against the Cathars resulted in the slaughter of probably more than 100,000 people. In the city of nearby Bergiers alone, for instance, the Crusaders "liquidated" 20,000 people. During the Second World War the city was the headquarters of the German army in that part of France.