How rugby became an Irish game: From niche unionist sport to a world-class contender

Since the turn of the 21st century, the Ireland rugby team has quadrupled its number of Grand Slams, added six Championship titles to the trophy cabinet, more than doubled its number of Triple Crowns, has had periods as the world’s number one ranked side and, since the mid-2010s, routinely defeated New Zealand. Rugby fixtures are now among the most watched television events in Ireland and the game, it is fair to say, occupies a position in the public consciousness that no one could have foreseen 25 years ago.
Naturally enough, when a small nation achieves so much in a major international sport, a degree of hype follows. The hype has been sharpened by sponsorship campaigns that have labelled Ireland “Rugby Country” and the Irish rugby team the “Team of Us”. In 2018, after RTÉ posted a clip of the broadcaster Daire O’Brien saying that rugby was “arguably … the people’s game”, the debate that followed “left the Civil War looking like a minor scrap”, as Mary Hannigan observed in this newspaper.
The idea that rugby is the “national game” is undermined by the centrality of elite schools to the player pipeline. Schools rugby, particularly in Leinster, has given rise to a journalistic and literary genre all of its own. The Leinster Schools Cup attracts a level of media attention that is out of proportion for a tournament that matters to relatively few, while the feckless antics of Paul Howard’s brilliant satirical creation Ross O’Carroll Kelly only heighten the public perception that the whole schools rugby scene is awash in brattish entitlement. Yet the schools rugby scene remains the bedrock of Ireland’s success. It is no exaggeration to state that the most influential development in the entire history of Irish rugby was the game’s adoption by elite Catholic schools in the late 19th century.
When rugby took root in Ireland from the 1860s, it had two centres of popularity: Dublin and Belfast. In both cities, wealthy young men who had been educated in England brought their preferred variant of football, rugby, home with them. In Dublin, the game’s hub was Trinity College, then catering to an overwhelmingly Protestant student body, and staunchly unionist in its outlook. Dublin University Football Club, which still claims to be the oldest existing rugby club in the world, was hugely influential in the early evolution of Irish rugby. Many early clubs were Trinity offshoots, and DUFC men were central to the founding, in 1874, of the Irish Football Union (from 1879 the Irish Rugby Football Union).
Running alongside this was the gradual adoption of the game by schools. In the late 19th century, it became the fashion among elite British schools to use games as a means of instilling values in boys. On the rugby field a boy would learn manliness, selflessness and courage, the qualities needed for the future leaders of the empire. This “games cult” soon spread to Ireland.
Protestant schools, looking to tempt wealthy parents to send their sons to Irish rather than English schools, emphasised sports in their advertising materials. Around this time, elite Catholic schools began to grow in number and stature. A series of legal and educational reforms in the late 19th century led to a trebling in the number of Catholics entering secondary schools between 1871 and 1911. Catholics in unprecedented numbers entered the legal and medical professions and enrolled on university degree courses. Blackrock College was perhaps the most prominent of the institutions designed to satisfy the desire of well-to-do Catholics to give their sons a head start in life. In 1881, Blackrock adopted rugby as the school’s preferred form of football. This was partly a function of timing: the GAA hadn’t been founded and soccer had not yet taken root in Dublin. But it seems likely that Blackrock would have chosen rugby anyway, given the broader social networks that the game was connected to.
Rugby soon became a bridge between the growing Catholic elite and the longer-established Anglo-Irish middle class. In Leinster between the mid-1880s and the opening decade of the 20th century, the status of schools rugby was transformed. Catholic and Protestant schools freely arranged fixtures with each other, and the Leinster Schools Cup was inaugurated in January 1887 by a subcommittee of the Leinster Branch of the IRFU. A very potent idea soon took root: that a school’s reputation and sense of self-worth somehow rested on the quality of its rugby team. Cup fixtures were occasions when the school colours were on display in a strikingly visceral way; stories of cup glory allowed a lasting emotional connection to be forged between boys and their school. The schools cup became a rite of passage that bound generations of old boys together. To be a Blackrock man or a Wesley College man, for example, became an identity all of its own. And the most public manifestation of these identities was on the rugby field.
Blackrock won the inaugural cup in 1887 and retained it in 1888. Their dominance of the competition soon became viewed as the natural order of things: the school won 14 of the first 20 Senior Cups. From 1890, all boys were expected to attend schools cup matches. The cup was now more than just a competition – it was a ritual, the hordes of schoolboys descending on Lansdowne Road like pilgrims visiting a sacred site. The prestige of the cup encouraged other Catholic schools such as Belvedere, Castleknock and Clongowes to follow Blackrock into rugby. Castleknock entered the Cup for the first time in 1913 and won it. A massive celebratory bonfire at the college greeted the victorious boys home. The Munster Schools Cup followed slightly later. Here, as in Dublin, elite Catholic schools were to the fore, with Presentation Brothers College and Christian Brothers College in Cork, and Rockwell College in Co Tipperary quickly becoming the dominant institutions. When their schooldays finished, these boys graduated to senior rugby, where clubs such as Lansdowne and Bective Rangers in Dublin, and Cork Constitution further south, all developed cross-faith memberships. These were more than mere rugby clubs – they were social networks where business deals were struck and professional careers advanced.
Criticism of rugby-playing schools has a long tradition in Ireland. In the eyes of some nationalist polemicists, these schools were reservoirs of snobbery where Irish culture was rejected. “Thanks to the unfailing and constant patronage of our colleges,” a correspondent in the United Irishman claimed in 1900, “Rugby football occupies the leisure moments of our young men whose destiny is one of the learned professions or the Indian Civil Service.” Gaelic games, the writer sarcastically claimed, “is altogether unfitted for and beneath the scions of country grocers and police pensioners.” This imputation of snobbery, clearly directed at boarding schools such as Blackrock and Clongowes, many of whose pupils were the sons of provincial businessmen and wealthy farmers, was not entirely fair. Most Catholic rugby-playing schools dabbled in Gaelic games, some with great success. Cistercian College Roscrea have won the Leinster Colleges hurling title on five occasions; they have only won the Senior Cup in rugby once. But in general these schools preferred rugby. By the time that the GAA made serious efforts to develop Gaelic games in secondary schools, elite Catholic institutions had already adopted rugby; the game was ingrained in the cultural fabric of these schools. And its ties with broader professional networks made it an attractive option for school authorities.
Schools might have determined the predominant class profile of Irish rugby, but that was not the whole story. The outlier was Limerick, where rugby acquired a significant working-class following from the mid-1880s. The great Limerick club was Garryowen, founded in 1884. From the outset, the club was atypical. It had a strong Catholic and nationalist element within its membership and became a focal point for civic pride among all classes in Limerick. Shortly after its foundation, Garryowen initiated a series of rugby tournaments among small local clubs drawn from the streets and laneways of the inner city. Crucially, fixtures took place on Sundays – the only guaranteed day off for working people – meaning that the tournaments were open to a broad sweep of the city’s population. Keen, often violent, inter-parish rivalries soon developed, and rugby soon became more than a mere sport in Limerick – it became woven into the cultural fabric of the city. The IRFU did not approve of Sunday rugby on class and cultural grounds, but this didn’t matter: most of the clubs involved never affiliated to the union, and Limerick rugby culture was self-contained. Indeed, in the first half-century of the IRFU’s history, Garryowen was the only Limerick club to consistently affiliate to the body. The Limerick rugby tradition, with its apparent rejection of the elitist rugby establishment, was profitably drawn upon by Munster Rugby when they went about developing their own identity as a professional side more than a century later.
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The Limerick experience reminds us that there is nothing in the essence of games – especially relatively simple, resource-light ones such as rugby – that make them “middle class” or “working class”, “nationalist” or “foreign”. It would not have occurred to rugby players of Limerick in the 1880s that their love of the sport was unusual in Irish terms. This was a conclusion drawn in retrospect. Ireland’s current excellence as a rugby nation, though clearly rooted in a strong but unrepresentative schools culture, owes much to the diversity provided by players from rural GAA backgrounds, such as Tadhg Furlong, and by players born overseas – such as Bundee Aki and Jamison Gibson-Park – who have become world class while playing for Irish provinces. Something to be borne in mind by those of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly persuasion – but also by those who have betrayed a cultural discomfort at Ireland’s success.
Blood & Thunder: Rugby and Irish Life, A History by Liam O’Callaghan is published by Sandycove