Triumphs, Trophies and Troubles

Introduction

The trophies have lain strewn at their feet, just like the conquered in times of war. In recent years, they have come in all shapes and sizes for Ireland's rugby players.

The Six Nations Championship Trophy, The Triple Crown plate, the Millennium Trophy, the Centenary Quaich Trophy. And that's just for the Irish national team. What of the provinces, the likes of Leinster, Munster and Ulster, all of whom have won the European Rugby Champions Cup?

Alexander Pope's memorable quote stirs images of Ireland's rugby participants in future retirement:

Our generals now, retired to their estates,

hang their old trophies o'er the garden gates.

In life's cool evening, satiate of applause.

As the year 2024 unfolded, Ireland's international rugby players could reflect upon an astonishing era of success. 'Satiate of applause', for sure.

They had won nothing in almost twenty years from 1986 to 2004. As for a Grand Slam, those Irishmen who achieved the unique feat for them for the first time back in 1948 were almost all long gone when a new Ireland finally laid the bogey, winning the Six Nations Grand Slam in 2009.

But since 2004, the trophies have fairly tumbled into the grasp of eager Irishmen. There were more Grand Slams, in 2018 and 2023, with the nation also finishing as Six Nations champions (without a Grand Slam) in 2014, 2015 and 2024.

As for the ultimate cherry on the cake, Ireland sat proudly as the number one side in the world rankings from 2022 to the start of the tenth Rugby World Cup in September 2023. Not least because, in 2022, they went to New Zealand and beat the mighty All Blacks 2-1 in the three-match Test series. Then, in July 2024, they went to South Africa and beat the reigning world champions in Durban to tie the two-match series.

These remarkable, record-breaking achievements catapulted Ireland into rarefied air at the top of the world game. Yet in the late 1980s, Ireland had languished in an anonymous eighth place in the world rankings, with New Zealand in their customary first place.

Go further back than that, to 1984, and Ireland were in an undistinguished tenth position in an unofficial ranking of the world's top ten countries. Even a nation like Romania was listed above them.

This was intriguing. For decades, the country with a minuscule population sitting at the top of world rugby was New Zealand. They might have had a population of only 5.12 million even early in the twenty-first century, yet they dominated the sport throughout the twentieth century with the consistent excellence of their teams.

Until, that is, a country with an equally small population nudged them off the world rankings top spot. Ireland, north and south, could muster a combined population of just 7.1 million at the time of the 2023 Rugby World Cup.

For many long years, New Zealand seemed to hold a mesmerising control over the men in green. From 1905 when they first met to 2016, New Zealand enjoyed an overwhelming supremacy. At one stage, Ireland had played twenty-eight Tests against them and lost twenty-seven. One match was drawn.

But from 2016 onwards, suddenly the tables were reversed. Then, with characteristic unpredictability, Ireland beat the All Blacks five times in their next eight encounters. The tormentor had been toppled; the era of tumbling trophies was nigh.

Whatever had caused this seismic change, this shifting of the rugby tectonic plates that run across the world? For it had occurred at a time when many were forecasting doom for the game in whichever land, at whatever level. With excessive physicality at times bordering on violence and legal cases mounting against some of the governing bodies concerning alleged cases of dementia, rugby had acquired an unwanted reputation for danger.

As you will read later in this book, one former Leinster CEO, asked to identify the biggest problem confronting the game of the future, replied with a single word.

Concussion.

Furthermore, the truth was that Ireland's greatest era was taking place against a backdrop of growing calamity and concern at the state of the game at club level. Indeed, financial problems in countries the world over were threatening the traditional core elements of the sport.

In England, for example, three professional Premiership clubs - Worcester, Wasps and London Irish - went to the wall in a single season, 2022/23. That left just ten clubs in English rugby's number one club competition. Then, the Jersey Reds club, Championship winners in May 2023, likewise collapsed five months later.

In August 2024, England announced they were selling the naming rights for Twickenham Stadium, an act long refused, for about £100 million. These and other subsequent events confirmed no one could make the sums add up. Thus, images came to mind of flogging the family silver, just for survival.

In Wales, too, dwindling support, financial shortcomings and the presence of an unwanted franchise system threatened seismic change. Nor were things much better across the world in Australia where rugby increasingly struggled for a foothold on the national sporting ladder.

Then, in August 2024, came news that Ulster were facing a deficit of between £2.5 and £3 million, according to their chief executive Hugh McCaughey. Optimistically, McCaughey boldly said he expected the province 'to break even within two to three seasons'.

Fact is, if you or I ran a business and announced a deficit of up to £3 million, it's highly unlikely we would be allowed to continue trading. And as for banks owed money and asked for time to reschedule payments, forget it. As Tony O'Reilly found out to his cost.

Yet in other parts of Ireland and especially on the international scene, the game was roaring. Fuelled by the achievements of the national team and pride in their nation, Irish men, women and children flocked to the game, as players and spectators. Yet rugby was still only rated as the fourth most popular sport in the land, behind Gaelic football in first place, soccer in second and hurling third.

That rugby, with a playing population of around 160,000 in Ireland (compared to 2.2 million in England) should have seized the nation's attention, was extraordinary. Not least of the triumphs was the emergence and growing strength of women's and girls' rugby, an issue which will be dealt with in some depth later in the book.

Successful Irish players, a champagne glass at their lips, luxury sponsored cars outside their doors and the constant target of adulatory supporters, stumbled into this new world like novices on the stage, blinded by the lights. Yet they hardly missed a beat.

True, dreams of World Cup glory in 2023 would ultimately disappear, an agonising four-point defeat to New Zealand in the quarter-finals sending Ireland home after they had beaten the eventual champions South Africa 13-8 in an earlier pool match.

A few months later, they retreated to Dublin in more disappointment, a Grand Slam campaign in the Six Nations unexpectedly derailed by England at Twickenham. Yet just a week later, Ireland beat Scotland to land another Six Nations Championship title.

By now, wherever they played, Ireland's top players took with them the best wishes and undying support of an entire nation. For they were competing vigorously and often highly successfully at rugby's top table.

Sure, you win some, you lose some. But the margins defining victory or defeat at this level were wafer-thin. Beaten by four points by the All Blacks in the World Cup. Defeated by one point by England in the 2024 Six Nations. Victors over South Africa in July 2024 by a single point.

But as the former Ulster, Ireland and British & Irish Lions wing Tommy Bowe said after Ireland's narrow defeat to New Zealand in that 2023 Rugby World Cup quarter-final: 'When I played, if we had lost the scrum battle, the battle in the air and the line-outs against New Zealand we would have lost by forty points. That all happened this time round, and they only lost by four points. They were very unfortunate.'

Quite deliberately, at around the same time as Ireland flew to France for that 2023 World Cup, I began a journey in the opposite direction. I spent time researching in Dublin, visiting renowned clubs like Monkstown, Clontarf and Trinity College, where the game had first begun in 1854.

Then, to begin my circumnavigation of Ireland, I headed up the east coast, stopping off at towns like Skerries, Balbriggan and Drogheda before going further north, past Carlingford and into Northern Ireland.

For rugby is unique in one sense alone in Ireland. It is a leading sport that is unified, played by and against teams from all over the land. Good rugby devotees of the time clung to that moniker during the Troubles that engulfed the north from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

As I journeyed on, across the north, then to County Donegal, down the beautiful Wild Atlantic Way on the west coast to visit clubs in areas such as Sligo and the Dingle Peninsula, I stopped to take the pulse of the game at all levels. I wanted to ascertain whether there was still a future for so many clubs or whether rugby will increasingly focus only really on the top echelon with little interest beneath.

This is not a journey in search only of those with dozens of caps for Ireland or a Lions jersey, now under attack from the moths in some musty old cupboard. By no means did I seek to talk only with the biggest and the best of traditional clubs, the likes of Ballymena, Dungannon, Garryowen, Cork Constitution and Blackrock...