Ireland Has The Best Rugby Team In The World? How’d That Happen?

Ireland defeated Italy, 34-20, on Saturday in Rome in the third round of the 2023 Six Nations championship. The win keeps Ireland undefeated in this year’s rendition of the annual rugby tournament and still in the running for a Grand Slam, an unofficial honor conferred upon a team that beats all five of its rivals in the same round-robin competition. 

Ireland’s boffo performance thus far isn’t surprising to rugby fans: Ireland entered the tournament as the top-ranked rugby team in the world. But, to non-followers, there’s plenty of oddness about that ranking. Not only because Ireland is so small; the most recent census put the population at 5.1 million, its highest since the census of 1841 (or before the Great Famine) but still tinier than any of the planet’s other top rugby nations. But what really makes Ireland’s standing atop the rugby universe difficult to grasp is the country’s historically antagonistic relationship with the sport.

All this goes back to the Gaelic Athletic Association, a group whose only rival as the most powerful influence on Irish culture is the Catholic Church. The GAA was founded in 1884 by Irishmen who hoped to use indigenous pastimes to maintain an Irish identity apart from that of the British occupiers. Rugby, a game which was allegedly born in the English town of Rugby, was spreading in Ireland at the time the GAA came about. The Dublin University Football Club had formed at Trinity College in the Irish capital city in the mid-1850s, and is now considered the oldest rugby organization in the world. And beginning in 1883, an Irish team began participating in the new Home Nations Championship, regarded as the first international rugby competition. This forefather of the Six Nations event was initially open only to countries of the United Kingdom–England, Scotland, Wales and, via imperialist means, Ireland. France and Italy signed on through the years to make it six teams. 

Hurling and Gaelic football, sports with purely Irish roots, were sanctioned and promoted by the GAA. Rugby was seen by the Irish organization as an invasive non-native species of a sport and treated accordingly. Around the turn of the last century, the GAA decision makers promulgated Rule 27, a bylaw formally prohibiting members from playing “foreign” sports, including rugby, soccer and cricket. Noted Irish rebel leader Michael Collins railed against what he called the “Garrison games” that the oppressors brought to Ireland. Historians quote Collins, an occasional hurler who did a stint as a GAA administrator while plotting to rid his homeland of all things British, as saying participation in such endeavors helped the “peaceful penetration” of Ireland by the invaders. Rule 27 was in place until 1971.

Also around the turn of the century the organization implemented what would become known as Rule 42, prohibiting non-Gaelic games from taking place on all athletic grounds run by the GAA. This edict had longer…