Tommy Bowe and Brian O’Driscoll ran in tries while Jonathan Sexton finished with the man-of-the-match award following a magnificent display at fly-half topped by a 14-point haul.

The tone was set when Ireland sent their opponents hurtling backwards at a second-minute scrum and Johnson admitted England were never in the contest.

“This is a scar and we’ll have to wear that scar. Do you have to get your scars and bruises in before you win something?” said the manager.

“You hope not, but Ireland had theirs before they won the Grand Slam in 2009.

“I told the players we’ll take this on the chin. We were beaten by a good team, an experienced team.

“Ireland are very good at what they do. They have a lot of caps, we don’t. We hoped we’d do better.

“We knew at the start of the championship it would take one heck of a team to win five and we were in with a shot.

“The boys are very disappointed because they wanted to win a Test match and we know what was at the end of it.

“Ireland played well and we were beaten. We had a horrible first half.

“Very quickly things can slip away from you and we ended up where we were.

“We were always chasing the game. It was tough but we gave it a crack in the second half because we needed to play.

“It summed up our day up when two of our players ended up passing straight back to them.

“When you’re in a fight you want to feel like you’ve landed a few blows, but we didn’t. They kept on taking shots at us.”