Leaving rugby

Irish prop Cian Healy has found time for art during his rugby career. It will be great to see his art when he has more time after his life in rugby

Jim O’Callaghan is a Dublin city councillor and former Leinster rugby player, he wrote an article in the Village Magazine decrying the change in grassroots rugby: ‘Rugby surrendered its social benefit’. Irish rugby is now about achievement and excellence rather than participation and enjoyment he said. He wrote that sociologists and social historians of the future will examine the change in participation in rugby in Ireland over the past twenty years.

The remarkability of Irish Rugby

The tricolour and provincial Ulster flag fly as Ireland play Canada at the 2015 Rugby World Cup

In 1986 The New York Times wrote:

"From a social and political perspective, every game the Irish team plays is remarkable indeed.

Arlene Foster said on the Nolan Show, November 5 2015:

"Yes [I consider myself Irish when watching Irish Rugby,] because we have some fantastic Ulster Rugby players playing for them."

The Irish Rugby Football Union was formed in its present form in 1879, so it pre-dates partition by 41 years. Edmund van Esbeck is the veteran and highly respected rugby correspondent of the Dublin-based Irish Times. Speaking in 1997 he shed some light on the great healing and congealing force that the game of rugby has exerted on Ireland: 

Jack Kyle on Ian Paisley

Jack Kyle, rugby player and surgeon, born on February 10 1926. Aged 88 he passed away on November 28 2014.

[UPDATE - Read my essay on Jack Kyle and free speech in Northern Ireland published by Eamonn Mallie here]

We know him as the rugby great and for his work as a doctor. But Jack Kyle was also a man of letters and ideas. Throughout his life he shared comments on the Irish Question that were lucid, forceful and profound. 

On rugby in Ireland he said, "There was never any religious business about rugby. That was the wonderful thing about it." At more length, he said about Irish rugby:

"That was the wonderful thing about [Irish rugby, the absence of religion]. When the various unions were splitting up, the Irish Rugby Union said: “we play as one country”. Those of us from Ulster were very fortunate that happened. It was also a much greater honour for us to play for the whole country. I think it says a lot that during all the Troubles, never once did a southern side fail to come north or a northern side fail to go south."