When Ireland’s Tailteann Games eclipsed the Olympics

What difference does a century make in the life of a nation? asks Paul Rouse

If Ireland gets chosen as the country to stage the 2023 World Cup, there will be an opportunity to gauge how far the people of this island have travelled in terms of their capacity to organise major sporting events.

Almost 100 years previously — back in 1924 — the biggest sporting event organised across the world in that year was staged in Ireland. This event — the Tailteann Games — was bigger even than that year’s Paris Olympic Games.