He said: "It was a good workout for us but we know that we have to raise our intensity. We are going to have to handle teams that come off the line and put pressure on us better. We got the win and we are into the quarter-final but we know that we can play at a higher level. We will regroup now. We will take a long hard look at that game and then park it and look at how we are going to beat France. We are going to build on the result and build on the performance. A couple of mistakes doesn't make us a bad side. We have a lot of experience of knock-out rugby and we know that if we keep improving that we will be a very difficult team to beat."
Despite the performance, the important statistic was that Ireland got the win and guaranteed that they would be playing knock-out rugby.
"We now have an opportunity to go and top a group," Rory says. "We now know that we are in the quarter finals of the biggest event in rugby. It only happens every four years and you have got to be enjoying it and you have got to love what you are doing.
"The Irish support has been unbelievable. Not only at the games but everywhere we go people are wishing us well and asking for signatures and photographs. What we have to do now is to just keep producing results and better performances.
"We talked about this (Italy) game being the start of a big build-up and the World Cup really starts now. We've got past this game, it's important we improve over the next two weeks if we want to do anything."