Late on the Saturday afternoon, a weary flood of humanity began drifting towards a corner of the vast festival site, picking up dreadlocked crusties, shaven headed ravers and Adidas-trainered Gallagher-alikes along the way. They were drawn like moths to the flame of the mighty Cockney duo, purveyors of knees-up singalong classics and, until that point, terminally, laughably uncool.

And yet there they all were, the crème de la crème of early 2000s youth culture – and me – bellowing out the immortal chorus of ‘Rabbit’, which features the word ‘rabbit’ repeated twenty times and is a paean to a beautiful but irritatingly talkative former love interest of either Chas or Dave. Hey, it was a different time.

Not for a minute to equate the ideological hinterland of the Wolfe Tones with that of Chas & Dave. “We’re all snooker loopy,” is about as controversial as the latter got in terms of a political stance. And while “Ossie’s going to Wembley, his knees have gone all trembly” might be a problematic lyric in its own way, it’s no “Ooh ah, up the ‘Ra!” 

The point is that there are cultural moments that happen every now and again that would have seemed utterly bizarre just a few years prior. When I was in my festival-trudging days, the Wolfe Tones on the bill wouldn’t have filled my two-man tent, never mind a heaving big top. Currents of popular opinion flow in strange directions and every dog has its day, even if only in a camp, knowing sense.

The FAI Cup final has become another cultural event whose massive popularity would have seemed inexplicable just one generation ago. Around the time Chas & Dave were pulling in the crowds at Glasto, Irish domestic soccer’s big day was barely drawing five-figure gates. Whether in its traditional venue at Dalymount Park, brief interregna at Tolka Park and the RDS, or rattling around its longer-term home on Lansdowne Road, the cup final was a minority interest. In music festival terms, it was in the field with the poetry readings and the burlesque dancers.

Loyal fans and former players will remember those finals as some of the best days of their lives, no less magical or important than the current version played out on the main stage of Irish sporting life. But the transformation of the event is so disorienting to anyone who remembers those days that the experience of attending a final now, with the attendant noise, pyro fumes and colour, can seem like a strange, wonderful, hallucinogenic trip.

The question is how much of this is Chas & Dave syndrome? Behind the exponentially growing League of Ireland attendances, rising at Weimar inflation levels especially since Covid, and aside from the hard graft of community-building exemplified by the two clubs who played in Sunday’s final, how many now attending FAI Cup finals are the equivalent of ironic kids from 20 years ago having a cheery singalong before drifting off to see Radiohead?

It’s clear that there is something more substantial going on in Irish football than the mere ebb and flow of fickle public mood. Going to the cup final has become a thing to do, something the broader football community can get behind, a celebration beyond the immediate interests of the protagonists on the day.

As with the Wolfe Tones phenomenon, there is a sense of things shifting and whirring under the bonnet of Irish life. With any society that acquires wealth, there is the immediate period of enjoying it, then the aftermath of wondering what it is for. In the 1990s, the chintzy glamour of the Premiership – as many here still call it – chimed with the times that were in it. To associate oneself with the League of Ireland was to miss the boat, like passing up on the proverbial off-plan investment opportunity on the Bulgarian Riviera.

People here haven’t sworn off the Premier League fandango since, far from it. But there is a slight cooling of the ardour, a distancing, a sense of seeing it for the enormously entertaining, constantly captivating but ultimately shallow entertainment product that it is. Some of that emotional drift has washed up on the domestic league’s welcoming shores, where the fare is plainer but, for many, more substantial for the soul.

But many of the more sensible voices around Irish football have chosen to view Sunday’s sellout cup final as a warning as much as a wonder. The basic maths of the day are obvious. Forty odd thousand turned up to watch two teams whose home grounds put together can’t cater for more than ten thousand. For Irish football, capitalising on the sudden increased interest with the current limited facilities is like trying to bring home the big shop in a bicycle basket.

The game here has previous in failing to take advantage of swelling tides in public favour (says he, writing on the 34th anniversary of the Republic of Ireland’s qualification for Italia ’90). The prevailing cultural winds can just as easily change direction. The FAI had been making the case for government investment in Irish football before it slipped back into the familiar terrain of constitutional crisis and executive pay shenanigans. It needs to extricate itself from the latest quagmire before the floating festival-goers head off to the dance tent or the jazz lounge.

Otherwise, all the positive vibes of this week will be little more than empty talk. And we know what Chas & Dave would say about that.