THE VLADIMIR LENIN quote about there being weeks in which decades happen springs to mind when you cast your eye towards late May in Irish boxing.

Never before has this country hosted world-title fights on back-to-back weekends but 20 May and 27 May will be defining nights for Katie Taylor and Michael Conlan respectively, with sold-out crowds at Dublin’s 3Arena and Belfast’s SSE Arena hoping they can witness in person two Irish boxing greats scale new heights.

Taylor and Conlan made their Olympic bows in London just over a decade ago and they are two of the four boxers left from The Golden Generation of eight whose subsequent 2016 campaign went historically arseways.

Post-Rio, Paddy Barnes fast-tracked his professional career and, despite a couple of early hiccups, challenged for a world title before bowing out in 2019. David Oliver Joyce, true to form, gave the pros a good lash but reached his ceiling at European level a year after Barnes stepped away. Steven Donnelly hit the wall mostly outside of the ring, retiring unbeaten as a professional — but fairly fed up with the sport — also in 2020. Michael O’Reilly, who received a four-year doping ban after failing a test in Rio, dusted off his gloves last year but stays off the radar for the most part.

The other two names from that 2016 still boxing are Brendan Irvine and Joe Ward: Irvine, still just 26, remains a part of the Irish amateur setup and will seek qualification for a third Olympics this year; Ward, 29, won three European Championship golds and three World Championship medals (2x silver, 1x bronze) — unprecedented for a male Irish boxer — but was lured into the paid ranks in 2019. The Moate light-heavyweight suffered an ACL tear — and, consequently, a defeat — on a nightmare pro debut at Madison Square Garden three and a half years ago but has gradually crept up the light-heavyweight rankings since, most recently producing an eye-catching first-round knockout in Quebec a fortnight ago to move to 9-1(5KOs).

Ward’s aim over the next 12 months will be to work his way into a similar position as the one in which Conlan finds himself: on 27 May in his hometown, the Belfast man [18-1, 9KOs] will seek to relieve Mexican champion Luis Alberto Lopez [27-2, 15KOs] of his IBF belt and become only the second ever Irish boxer to become a world champion as both an amateur and a professional.

Conlan’s longer-term ambition, of course, will be to replicate the first Irish boxer to do so, Katie Taylor, and eventually seek to rule the world in multiple divisions: this was the mission statement for both former teammates when they turned over in the aftermath of Rio and, on 20 May, long-reigning undisputed lightweight queen Taylor [22-0, 6KOs] will face her light-welterweight equivalent, Chantelle Cameron, in pursuit of that very honour in Dublin.

Conlan’s professional journey has been one of incremental progress in comparison to the trail Taylor has blazed through the thinner female ranks. The Falls Road native was announced to much fanfare by Top Rank in the aftermath of his scandalous Rio exit to Russia — his profile imbued by his middle-finger salutes to the bout’s dodgy judges — but in the early stages of his pro career, portions of the American boxing public were sceptical as to whether Conlan’s capacity to entertain in the ring was commensurate to all of the colour that surrounded him outside of it.

He brought a lot of them onside when he avenged his Olympic ‘defeat’ in December 2019; the emotion involved in that Madison Square Garden bout with Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin, combined with Conlan’s assuredness in his superiority over his opponent, brought the dog out of the West Belfast switch-hitter to which only his Irish fans had previously been exposed. Subsequent thrillers with tougher opponents in Romania’s Ionut Baluta and Portlaoise’s former super-bantamweight world champ TJ Doheny only enhanced Conlan’s reputation on either side of the Irish Sea as a boxer worth tuning in for.

The irony is that it was only in his first career defeat that Conlan gained the near universal respect within boxing that his ability has always warranted. His dramatic last-round knockout defeat to Leigh Wood last March, in which Conlan collapsed through the ropes and out of the ring, was one of the two consensus fights of the year alongside Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano’s classic in New York. It didn’t feel like it to Conlan himself at the time, but he only gained from it: his performance — in the backyard of a brick-fisted opponent — had been legitimately world-class for 11 rounds. There was a touch of class, too, about Conlan’s handling of the uncomfortable reality that Wood had removed him from his senses for the first time in his 25-odd years of boxing.

Conlan has rebounded with two fairly explosive wins against featherweight gatekeepers and there is recognition that he belongs at elite level in the early odds for his first attempt at a proper world title, with both he and champion Lopez opening at 10/11.

The Mexican is a proper world champion, no frills. He went to Leeds to relieve Josh Warrington of the IBF title last time out having previously claimed the unbeaten records of American Gabriel Flores Jr and Englishman Isaac Lowe in their own respective home countries.

The natural extension of those facts is that the man who eventually beats Lopez will be considered a proper world champion, too. Since they went on sale on Friday morning, over 7,000 people have purchased tickets for the SSE Arena in the hope that Conlan can claim that mantle for himself, just as he swore he would after his previous boxing dream was stolen from him.

The tickets for Taylor-Cameron in Dublin, which will go on sale next week (3Arena pre-sale Monday; Matchroom pre-sale Tuesday; general sale Wednesday), will surely fly out similarly.

Similarly, too, any sort of victory for Taylor over her younger, bigger, and fresher opponent would rank among the very best in Irish boxing history.

It is, after all, for this very reason that Taylor has taken on a challenge the size of Cameron: it is one of the very few humanly possible ways for her to extend an already unparalleled legacy both at home and on an international scale.

The Bray woman’s true greatness was established long ago but if she can find a way to become a two-weight undisputed champion just weeks shy of her 37th birthday, that greatness will need to be redefined for the umpteenth time.

Dublin and Belfast, back to back. Seven years on from the debacle that befell the class of 2016 in Rio, two 50-50 world-title fights in which one Irish boxing great can push through his ceiling and the other can float further into the stratosphere.

It’ll probably be more than a decade before we experience another week like it.