The 1890 game, against the strong English club I Zingari, was Berkeley's debut for Ireland. He had sprung to prominence earlier that summer when, on his debut for Oxford University, he took 8-70 against the Australians. He bowled slow left arm but could increase his pace and opened the bowling for Ireland. He made an immediate impact, toppling seven wickets for 20 and 4-55 in the second innings. Two of his victims - including Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein - were recorded in the scorebook with ?caught Browning bowled Berkeley' beside their names.

Fast-forward to 1914, and Captain Berkeley, after fighting in the Boer War, was a barrister living in London. A Liberal in politics, he served on the London Committee for the Irish Volunteers alongside Roger Casement and when Professor Eoin McNeill came to ask the group for financial support to buy guns, Berkeley stumped up most of the £1,500 needed. Berkeley did not believe in physical force republicanism, but the recent arming of the Ulster Volunteers at the Larne gunrunning needed to be matched. When the Asgard landed at Howth with 1,500 rifles, Berkeley was in Belfast, drilling the Volunteers.

Another paramilitary body, albeit a legal one, was founded by Frank Browning on the outbreak of the First World War. A decent rugby halfback with Wanderers and Trinity, Browning was best known as a cricketer, playing 39 times for Ireland from 1888 to 1909.

Browning went into administration and, uniquely, became President of the Irish Cricket Union and the IRFU.

He held the latter office when war broke out and helped found a ?pals' regiment of rugby players (which later fought at Suvla Bay) and a home guard unit called the Irish Rugby Football Veterans Corps for those too old for active service. A thousand strong, they drilled at Lansdowne Road in civilian clothes but later were approved to wear uniform.

They also sported a red armband with the initials ?GR', Latin for ?Georgius Rex', or King George. With the wit for which Dubliners are renowned, the GRs became known as the Gorgeous Wrecks.

Two years later, the GRs were on manoeuvres in Ticknock in the foothills of the Dublin mountains when the Rising broke out on Easter Monday. Hearing of the insurrection on the way back to their barracks at Beggars Bush, the unarmed group split up at Ballsbridge. One party marched down Shelbourne Road where they came under sniper fire from the railway bridge over Bath Avenue, while Browning's group marched along Northumberland Road.

In a house on the corner where Haddington Road intersects, a pair of rebels, Michael Malone and Jim Grace, were holed up with two 15-year-old boys, Michael Rowe and Paddy Byrne. As the uniformed column marched towards them, the two men opened fire and 13 men fell, five fatally. A woman living in a neighbouring house watched the veterans from her window: "A sharp report rings out, and the man in the foremost rank falls forward, apparently dead, a ghastly stream of blood flowing from his head? Bullet follows bullet with lightning rapidity."

One of those lethal slivers of lead, paid for by George Berkeley, caused fatal damage to the 47-year-old body of Frank Browning. He was carried to the barracks and later to Baggot Street hospital, but died there two days later. He left a wife and young son. The news that an unarmed group had been fired upon was greeted with fury in Dublin and helped ensure the rising was highly unpopular at the time. Pádraig Pearse issued an order that night that no unarmed persons were to be fired upon, whether wearing uniform or not.

The two 15-year-olds escaped that night under cover of darkness, as did Grace later in the week, but Malone was killed in a lastditch battle for the house and his name is remembered in the area in the name of a street. Berkeley's views were not recorded, but he presumably would have been horrified to learn that his actions had caused the death of a teammate. A few years later Berkeley helped set the reparations Germany had to pay after the war, and thus can also be blamed for the rise of Nazism.

Next Sunday, tens of thousands of rugby supporters will pass the scene where the IRFU president was fatally wounded, but only a plaque to Malone would tip them off to what happened there. Across the city in Clontarf, Ireland's cricketers are also in action in their first game of an exciting new era in the English oneday league. The confluence of these great fixtures with the anniversary of the death of one of their exponents adds further poignancy to a tragic tale.

Gerard Siggins is the author of 'Green Days: Cricket in Ireland 1792-2005' (Nonsuch Publishing)