Ciara Griffin hailed Beibhinn Parsons as "a special player" but was keen to put Ireland's impressive destruction of Wales on Saturday afternoon down to the collective.

Ireland began their Six Nations campaign with a 45-0 win in Cardiff, the ever impressive 19-year-old Parsons scoring a brace of tries, one a terrific solo effort that saw her leave Welsh players for dust as she scorched down the left wing.

She's a hugely exciting talent, though captain Griffin shared the praise around in the aftermath. 

"Beibhinn is a really special player but this squad has 40-plus really special players," she said.

"What this performance shows is the dedication and work of that squad over the last six months in terms of work rate, working at home, working in camp. That really was a whole squad effort and performance.

"There was a hunger there. You could see there was a real hunger in the group. That gave us that platform to play that attacking style of rugby in the first half and for the rest of the game.

"Beibhinn backs herself, and that’s what you need in that position.

"We train so hard because we want to play in the green jersey. Every chance you get to play you are going to relish it. Everyone wanted to put their best foot forward. You could see the smiles on the faces. That’s what you want. It was an enjoyable day."

Ireland can now look forward to a meeting with France in Donnybrook next weekend.

The mood is good. Having finally returned to competitive action, Adam Griggs' charges were full of beans in a clinical first half that yielded five tries.

The second period was more of a slog as errors crept into Irish play but Griffin was not getting too hung up on the negatives.    

"We still got 45 points," she said. 

"We’d be happy any day with that, and not letting anything in either, that was a big thing for us, to protect our try line. After such a long break from matches you’re going to have rustiness and bits of errors but I’m happy it happened this week to be honest.

"We’ve a lot to learn in terms of what we did learn, what errors we need to tighten up on for next week but it’s definitely put us in a good position going forward.

"A big thing was our hunger on both sides of the ball. We weren’t just going through the phases, we were working to get there first, we wanted to win that race on both sides.

"No one stepped off. Everyone kept going until the last minute.

"You wish you’d taken some of those chances but the big thing is we’re making them. There’s small little bits of execution here and there that can be fixed easily. I’ll take that as a positive going into next week. We have areas we can tighten up on - that’s a good focus going into France."