Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Fionn Davenport [26]
In Northern Ireland, Belfast is the principal city, with a population of around 267,000. It has the youngest population in the UK, with 24% aged under 16. These figures (and population counts throughout the book) are based on the last census of 2006.
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SPORT
Ireland, by and large, is a nation of sports enthusiasts. Whether it’s shouting the team on from the sideline or from the bar stool, the Irish have always taken their sport seriously.
Gaelic Football & Hurling
Gaelic games are at the core of Irishness; they are enmeshed in the fabric of Irish life and hold a unique place in the heart of its culture. Their resurgence towards the end of the 19th century was entwined with the whole Gaelic revival and the march towards Irish independence. The beating heart of Gaelic sports is the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), set up in 1884 ‘for the preservation and cultivation of National pastimes’. The GAA is still responsible for fostering these amateur games and it warms our hearts to see that after all this time – and amid the onslaught of globalisation and the general commercialisation of sport – they are still far and away the most popular sports in Ireland.
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You can find out more about the history and rules of Gaelic sports on the Gaelic Athletic Association website at www.gaa.ie.
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Gaelic games are fast, furious and not for the faint-hearted. Challenges are fierce, and contact between players is extremely aggressive. Both Gaelic football and hurling are played by two teams of 15 players whose aim is to get the ball through what resembles a rugby goal: two long vertical posts joined by a horizontal bar, below which is a soccer-style goal, protected by a goalkeeper. Goals (below the crossbar) are worth three points, whereas a ball placed over the bar between the posts is worth one point. Scores are shown thus: 1-12, meaning one goal and 12 points, giving a total of 15 points.
Gaelic football is played with a round, soccer-size ball, and players are allowed to kick it or hand-pass it, like Aussie Rules. Hurling, which is considered by far the more beautiful game, is played with a flat stick or bat known as a hurley or camán. The small leather ball, called a slíothar, is hit or carried on the hurley; handpassing is also allowed. Both games are played over 70 action-filled minutes.
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Star hurler Sean Og O’Hailpin was born in 1977 to an Irish father and Fijian mother on the tiny island of Rotuma, an isolated atoll about 400 miles north of Fiji.
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Both sports are county-based games. The dream of every club player is to represent his county, with the hope of perhaps playing in an All-Ireland final in September at Croke Park in Dublin, the climax of a knockout championship that is played first at a provincial and then interprovincial level.
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ERIN GO BROKE
In early 2009 a joke was doing the rounds: ‘Q. What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland? A. One letter and about six months.’ The Irish fondness for gallows humour has never been so propitious, as Iceland’s spectacular collapse in the face of the global financial crisis was a portend of what was to come: by the end of October 2008 the six main Irish banks had seen their share prices collapse and the government had to step in with a massive bailout. Although Ireland wasn’t alone in its exposure to financial crisis, it was in deeper trouble than most because of its dangerous over-reliance on a property bubble that was about to run out of air.
Ireland’s dirty economic secret was that ever since 2002 the Celtic Tiger – that indomitable feline that transformed the country into the poster-child for the boundless possibilities of untrammelled economic development and dynamic entrepreneurialism – had run out of steam. There was a marked slowdown in growth in all industrial sectors but one: the construction industry, which was growing