Rugby In Ireland - Sky's the Limit?

[INDIANA]

Tankie- I'm a life long rugby fan I even played the game for a while. I know the divide that exists. Believe me when I say it no-one from a working class area will play for the Leinster first team, there are people in the Leinster branch who will make sure of it. Its an elitist game in Leinster and will be for the forseeable future. Maybe more schools are playing it but blackrock college and terenure college now field gaa teams. Thats a victory in itself for the Gaa.

[saffron sam2]

Yes.

Not directly relevant as they're not from Dungannon but I remember reading Kevin Barry and DeValera were both rugby players and I think in Munster there was a battalion of IRA men that came from a rugby club.

I remember Dick Moran saying that one night in Glenroe also.

[Dinny Breen]

I know the divide that exists. Believe me when I say it no-one from a working class area will play for the Leinster first team, there are people in the Leinster branch who will make sure of it.

You haven't a clue have you,  Sean O'Brien, Trevor Hogan, Trevor Brennan (he was a milkman for godsake) Niall Ronan all off the top of my head. In fact Des Kavanagh the President of the Leinster Branch is the head of the Irish Psychiatric Nurses Union, would love to see you have a conversation with him.

Leinster Rugby is far from perfect but it has moved on from your stereotype a long time ago.

[bcarrier]

Which of ye is Tom Humphries ? ;)From The TimesMarch 21, 2009

Ireland grand-slam bid fails to unite nation

For older generations, the prospect of victory in Cardiff today will do little to stir the sporting soul
Drinks all round? Not every bar will be packed with Ireland fans

Tom Humphries
If you are Irish and you like rugby, you will be loving this entire grand-slam business. The old boys of 1948 getting dusted down and wheeled out. The big claims for rugby's centrality to Irish culture. The sense that a grand slam may be one last, grand blowout before the country throws itself down the economic garbage chute.

If you are Irish and indifferent to the rugger hullabaloo, well, you won't be short of company, either.

This has been an interesting month for Irish sport. For a few days at Cheltenham we masqueraded as "the racing Irish", a loveable, all-drinking, all-wagering tribe of codgers pretending that they still had some money left. Here we come clutching a form guide and rosary beads in one hand and a creamy pint in the other. The sport of kings. It's in our blood, see.

Tuesday was St Patrick's Day and Croke Park hosted the All-Ireland club hurling and football finals. If there is a unit of Irish sport that feels itself securely tied to the soul of the nation, it is the GAA.

And then this weekend the stage is boisterously commandeered by the rugby people - big, bluff practitioners of a sport that a rabid RTE commentator asserted a couple of years ago to be the "heartbeat of our nation". It was a claim that set many of us sniggering into our skinny cappuccinos. You either love rugby or loathe rugby, but in Ireland it is also possible to ignore it, even in a week such as this.

Rugby is slowly changing its demographic and the success of Munster, in particular, has provided a sort of gateway drug for those who wish to explore matters farther. For many of us, however, it is too late. We grew up in a time when rugby in Dublin and in Ulster was the preserve and the sporting means of self-expression for the privileged classes.

Even in other regions the game was, as the great Irish writer Breandán ÓhEithir put it, "distinguished from other popular sports by the fact that it was played by Protestants and by the sons of the small-town businessmen who had been sent to the rugby- playing academies of Blackrock, Castleknock and Clongowes Wood, to ensure that they were kept a cut above the buttermilk that surrounded them at home and to make useful business connections".

Irish rugby remains a sport from which generations of us have felt excluded and disenfranchised. Whatever happens in Wales today, it will be a private function. A large swath of us will be at home watching something else or doing something else, not out of ill will but just because rugby does not concern us or stir us. The game does not still the nation in the way that Ireland football matches in World Cup finals do, clearing those streets that have previously been festooned with flags and bunting. And rugby does not stir that deep, atavistic pride inside us like an All-Ireland hurling final.

Even rugby's high feast days leave lots of us cold. I was dispatched to see Ireland play France on the day when Croke Park belatedly opened itself up for business to foreign sports. My journalistic services were not needed for the England game a couple of weeks later, so I went to watch some hurling instead. I am glad my byline did not appear over some of the frothy foolishness that was committed to print and hurled down the airwaves that weekend. Corny, misplaced jingoism was dispensed in industrial quantities by people who should know better.

What a bizarre occasion of self-celebration that was. Rugby people at their hectoring and sanctimonious best, giving hard evidence to the old truth that as "a great sporting nation" we are merely a race of big-event addicts and international sport comes with the added incentive of giving us the chance to get a pat on the head from elsewhere. We are obsessed with seeing ourselves as others might see us, addicted to pointing out cloyingly our charm and our passion. Aren't we the greatest supporters in the world? Aren't we? Say we are. Puh-leese!

Lawdee! February 2007. What a time we had of it. The business of the Union Jack being run up a flagpole at Croke Park and of God Save the Queen being sung in the old place was held up to us peasantry and a bemused international audience as an example of how things should be done. Our little Mandela-Pienaar moment.

We were asked to stand back and let the rugby folk take care of the healing. The old oppressors' anthem had been played and the flag run up and down the timber many times during the Special Olympics at Croke Park a few years earlier and nobody had died of apoplexy, but this, we were told, was our history in the making, the final proof that as a nation we had matured.

The rugby chaps had done it. They had planted the flag on the peak of national adulthood. The final stage of our evolution as a race was complete. We were walking on two feet and with a straight back at last. And wearing blazers with shiny buttons.

Of course, we speak out of both sides of our mouths. Beating our new best friends, the English, at Croke Park was the least that could have been done for the GAA. The chaps had sorted out that nasty old Bloody Sunday business once and for all, given payback for the days when the English took the corn out of our foamy mouths while the spuds rotted in the fields and soothed the seething peasantry who were gathered somewhere else in a parish hall, brandishing cudgels and scythes and baying about the feckin' Brits being in the good field again.

Cry god for Croker, Ireland and the oval ball, one reporter concluded before passing out in a state of religious ecstasy. There was plenty more guff to the tune of rugby being the heartbeat of our nation and this being a point that divided our history in two. The rest of us expressed our maturity by placing our tongues between our lips and exhaling so as to make farting noises.

But the truth is that all Irish sports need occasional sips of this nationalist soma to sustain themselves. An Ireland win today would be a nice punctuation mark to place at the end of the bizarrely vulgar Celtic Tiger years, but perhaps the real measure of our maturity, as a sporting nation at least, will come when we can play games without the constant need for external validation and self-congratulation.

Meanwhile, good luck to the boys. Some of us will be passionately checking Teletext later to see how ye got on.

†Tom Humphries is a columnist for The Irish Times and has twice been nominated for William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize

[Gnevin]

The two things about rugby that may mean it never makes it quite as big are the class thing and religion in the north. Unfortunately while the latter isn't as big an issue now it will impede it being developed in schools. How can catholic schools teach rugby when none of the teachers ever played? Ok they can but to what sort of level...

I'd love to have played it at school to be honest.

So you also accept protestant schools can't teach GAA to any decent level?

[imtommygunn]

Well unfortunately that's the way it is...

[Gnevin]

I dont think rugby has a chance in ulster either.

Have you told the 9,000 average who attend Ulster matches?

Was talking grassroot level..

Most would be involved in a grassroots

[Gnevin]

Will never accept Irish rugby until the rightful national anthem is played at all matches and not that excuse of a song. The only thing it shows is that this island can be seen as a united one when north and south can in some way support the one Irish team.  If they could do away with the N.I soccer team and play under the one jersey then who knows what could happen.

With your attitude a United Irish soccer team will never happen. Your attitude of let them do all the compromising won't work.

[INDIANA]

I know the divide that exists. Believe me when I say it no-one from a working class area will play for the Leinster first team, there are people in the Leinster branch who will make sure of it.

You haven't a clue have you,  Sean O'Brien, Trevor Hogan, Trevor Brennan (he was a milkman for godsake) Niall Ronan all off the top of my head. In fact Des Kavanagh the President of the Leinster Branch is the head of the Irish Psychiatric Nurses Union, would love to see you have a conversation with him.

Leinster Rugby is far from perfect but it has moved on from your stereotype a long time ago.

I played senior cup rugby at schools level. i know what its like. I've seen the bullshit that goes on first hand. I know the criteria for selection for the Leinster academy- you don't. So don't start telling me what I do and what I don't know. Ask yourself how many of the first 15 for Ireland last week came from club rugby. 3- John Hayes-Marcus Horan and Ferris. Every single other player on the team went to private school. The very odd exception comes through club rugby if you go to Blackrock College, Clongowes etc you've got a headstart.
It is still dominated by the old school ties. And I 'll argue that all day.

[Dinny Breen]

I know the criteria for selection for the Leinster academy- you don't. So don't start telling me what I do and what I don't know

Indiana if you really want to pursue this arguement with me I better point that I am a Level II coach in Leinster rugby, I coach schools, youths and club, I have been involved in identifying young rugby talent in Kildare and know many of the Leinster Academy members and coaches personally. The head of the Leinster Academy is Colin McEntee, a working class lad who went to Naas CBS who played Leinster Youths, Irish Youths and professionally for Leinster, do you honestly think that he only looks at players from Section B schools.

Just because you played SCT 20 odd years ago does not make you all of a sudden an expert, going to Clongowes or Blackrock only gives you a head start because you are exposed to high level coaching 4/5 times a week for 6 years, Clongowes doesn't even produce that many Internationals. Newbridge College whose fees are nominal produces as many interantionals as Clongowes.

To be honest since you didn't respond to the working class arguement I don't see any point in pursuing a debate with a guy who just argues with Cliches and sterotypes and tells me quite flippantly that he knows the selection criteria for the Leinster Academy when he painfiully doesn't.

[bcarrier]

I know the criteria for selection for the Leinster academy- you don't. So don't start telling me what I do and what I don't know

Just because you played SCT 20 odd years ago does not make you all of a sudden an expert, going to Clongowes or Blackrock only gives you a head start because you are exposed to high level coaching 4/5 times a week for 6 years, Clongowes doesn't even produce that many Internationals. Newbridge College whose fees are nominal produces as many interantionals as Clongowes.

To be honest since you didn't respond to the working class arguement I don't see any point in pursuing a debate with a guy who just argues with Cliches and sterotypes and tells me quite flippantly that he knows the selection criteria for the Leinster Academy when he painfiully doesn't.

Flipping eck I agree with Dinny . Really good analysis of this in The Outliers : The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell.

[The GAA]

Humphreys does not reflect my opinions in this instance but i have to say he was spot on in the ambivilence from a lot of gaels i know

[Hound]

Humphreys does not reflect my opinions in this instance but i have to say he was spot on in the ambivilence from a lot of gaels i know

Gerry Thornely had a comment at the end of his celebratory piece on Monday, that I think was directed at his colleague Humphries.

"Pity those who won't enjoy it.
Someday"

[Hardy]

That's extraordinarily bitter, mean spirited stuff from Humphries. I generally enjoy his anti-rugby rants - they're usually funny and every man is entitled to his prejudices, sporting and otherwise and I even thought I shared some of what I thought were his attitudes to rugby.

However this piece reveals that his antipathy is more deep-seated and mean. I find it embarrassing as a GAA man the he feels the need to disparage another sport in order to seem to be standing up for the GAA. We can be proud of ourselves without needing to bad mouth others or assume the worst in their motives. I certainly haven't detected any condescension from rugby people or been offended by their behaviour since we rented them the use of Croke Park.

And I burst out laughing at the fact that he then can't see the irony of a statement like "Corny, misplaced jingoism was dispensed in industrial quantities by people who should know better." It certainly was in your article, Tom.

And then the final piece of unconscious self parody: "perhaps the real measure of our maturity, as a sporting nation at least, will come when we can play games without the constant need for external validation and self-congratulation".

Indeed, Tom.

[INDIANA]

I know the criteria for selection for the Leinster academy- you don't. So don't start telling me what I do and what I don't know

Indiana if you really want to pursue this arguement with me I better point that I am a Level II coach in Leinster rugby, I coach schools, youths and club, I have been involved in identifying young rugby talent in Kildare and know many of the Leinster Academy members and coaches personally. The head of the Leinster Academy is Colin McEntee, a working class lad who went to Naas CBS who played Leinster Youths, Irish Youths and professionally for Leinster, do you honestly think that he only looks at players from Section B schools.

Just because you played SCT 20 odd years ago does not make you all of a sudden an expert, going to Clongowes or Blackrock only gives you a head start because you are exposed to high level coaching 4/5 times a week for 6 years, Clongowes doesn't even produce that many Internationals. Newbridge College whose fees are nominal produces as many interantionals as Clongowes.

To be honest since you didn't respond to the working class arguement I don't see any point in pursuing a debate with a guy who just argues with Cliches and sterotypes and tells me quite flippantly that he knows the selection criteria for the Leinster Academy when he painfiully doesn't.

You didn't answer my question did you. I've noticed that about you you're good at answering the questions no-one asked. 12 out of the 15 starters for Ireland on Saturday came from private school. 75% of Leinster academy players go to private school. Do you want me to take out the list of the Irish u20 team this year and detail where they are from as well? Do you want me to put the Leinster u20 team and detail where they are from as well. I go to all the leinster games- I even go to the A games- I doubt very much you know more about the leinster rugby team than I do.

Lets start with the leinster senior team

Rob Kearney- clongowes
Luke Fitz- blackrock
BOD- blackrock
Darcy- Clongowes
Sexton- St marys college
Donohue- belvedere
Healy- belvedere
Heaslip- newbridge college
Jennings-st marys college
MOK- st marys college
Toner- Castleknock College
Cullen -Blackrock Colllege
Dempsey-Terenure
Brown- Blackrock College
Keane- belvedere college

That leaves Horgan , Jackman and O Brien as the only 3 players from club rugby. Now Dinny do you really want to debate the inequities the system seriously. Its a debate you're going to lose from all angles. Tell me how many of those schools above you don't have to pay to attend?
Jamie Hagan and Eamonn Sheridan are the only 2 academy players that haven't attended private school.
I love my rugby but I detest the inequities of the system that don;t make it a game for the masses and when i see working class lads representing leinster on a  regular basis the I'll start to believe.