Blog home Is Munster rugby club bigger than God?Pubs in Limerick are being allowed to open on a Good Friday for the first time because a crucial rugby match is taking place. Is rugby now bigger than the Catholic church?
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Bill Chawke's pub in Adare, Co. Limerick, Ireland. Photograph: Tom Mackie/Rex Features/The Travel Library

In Ireland the thought of crossing the threshold of a licensed premises on Good Friday and ordering a pint carries a delicious whiff of the forbidden. Nobody would expect to turn into a pillar of salt when the first sup of Murphy's passed their lips on the most sacred day in the Church calendar, but if it happened we would probably feel it was only as we deserved.

So a court ruling that pubs in Limerick are to be allowed trade on Good Friday for the convenience of 26,000 rugby fans attending a match in the city was a bombshell. Feeling the full force of the recession – across the country it's estimated that each day another pub closes – bar-owners in Limerick, the home of Munster rugby club, petitioned a local court for a dispensation. A crunch tie with rivals Leinster qualified, they argued, as a special event and could thus exempted from the prohibition on pubs opening.

Speaking to the local paper after the ruling, former Mayor of Limerick Kevin Kiely caught the mood in the city. "The licensing laws should be revisited ... we are a modern multicultural country and we should cater for everyone who comes into this country."

Living near Dublin and with only a passing interest in rugby, the prospect of a sacrilegious pint won't be enough to tempt me to Limerick. Rest assured, however, I will be joining the revellers in spirit as I liberate the contents of the drinks cabinet and engage in what has fast become a national pastime: getting mildly tipsy in front of the telly on Good Friday. Were he alive to witness this, the bishop who confirmed me would probably spontaneously combust out of shock. If I'm honest, that's part of what motivates me to do it.

How far we have come. In Ireland, Good Friday has hitherto been sacrosanct, a moment apart. Even for those of us who had long parted ways with the Church, the holy feast marking Christ's crucifixion felt like a divine time-out, the lyrics to Talking Heads' Heaven - "a place where nothing ever happens" - made real. The pubs stay shut, as do many businesses and public services. Think of it as Christmas with a crown of thorns and black tea in place of party hats and streamers.

To this day Good Friday 'beer and burger' parties are a popular form of soft rebellion among the young (meat also being forbidden on Good Friday). I remember the thrill as a student of cracking open a tin of 'value' cider and sinking my teeth into a half-charred wedge of beef in a bun. At some level I was, I felt, doing my bit to secularize Ireland (as with all college protests the bonus of gratuitous alcohol sweetened the deal).

We weren't glancing over our shoulders in expectation of the religious police kicking the door in. Nonetheless, Good Friday was the one day of the year on which those of us born in the 70s and 80s had taste of what Ireland was like in the grim decades when clerics in Darth Vader cassocks outnumbered gardai in Ireland – and were far more punctilious in cracking down on 'inappropriate' behaviour.

Naturally, there have been a few mutterings about the decision, but the attitude of everybody else is perhaps best summed up by a T-shirt seen in Limerick the morning after the ruling: "Munster Rugby: Officially Bigger than the Catholic Church." A ball hasn't been kicked yet but it feels like victory is already ours.
Is Munster rugby club bigger than the Catholic church? | Life and style | guardian.co.uk