Kieran Shannon: New book challenges the hype and explores Irish rugby's complexities and contradictions

The sport’s history has continued to throw up paradoxes. In both the 1890s and 1990s the IRFU greatly resisted professionalism yet since embracing it the sport has thrived and grown.

When Ireland played their final game of the 2022 Six Nations, Iain Henderson was the only starter that had been born in Ireland and had not attended a fee-paying school. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

From the outset of his excellent new history of Irish rugby, Liam O’Callaghan willingly challenges any hyperbole about the sport’s appeal here just as he keenly seeks to identify and explain some of the wonders of that reach.

In March 1995, while welcoming the IRFU’s decision to commission Phil Coulter to write a new anthem for the Irish rugby team, the Belfast Telegraph proclaimed that the sport’s national governing body had “never allowed politics to interfere with its affairs”.