The old beer ad with Sally O’Brien and ‘the way she might look at you’ came to mind last Sunday. It has become the emigrant’s cliche, I suppose. The cold beer, the smile, the egg you could fry on a pavement, “if you had an egg”. I sat in a small hotel room in Montevideo watching Ireland rein in Australia on TV, thinking how, even though the world is just an outsized village now, Croke Park seemed galaxies away.

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