Last month, we brought you the news of O'Neills releasing of a special 1916 commemorative jersey. The jersey was an Irish edition, embossed on the back with a facsimile of the proclamation and a crest in the form of a harp. It was advertised with the fundamentally hilarious blurb of "a terrible beauty is born".
That blurb, of course, is an excerpt from the Yeats poem Easter 1916, which marked a violent and bloody rebellion as a wildly disorientating first step in the birth of a new state.
We are not sure whether Yeats had envisaged his words being used to sell a jersey that would populate the beaches of J1 destinations in 2016, but Yeats knew more than most the violent and varying vicissitudes of time. Perhaps the apocalyptic foreboding of his poems of this time were in reference to lads on beaches with bags of cans and a cotton proclamation on their back.
The special O'Neills' jersey now has a Second Coming in the shape of a Dublin special, with the differences being colour (this one is blue) along with the front featuring the ruins of the GPO and a crest consisting of the capital's three castles. The proclamation remains on the back.
The @ONeills1918 Dublin 1916 Commemoration Jersey, now available here: https://t.co/Rx6hdJTva0 #ChoiceofChampions pic.twitter.com/qK50BZrArE
— O'Neills (@ONeills1918) February 22, 2016
