Dual county (Irish: Contae déach) is a term used in Gaelic games to describe a GAA county that competes at a similar level in both hurling and gaelic football. For example, Cork and Dublin play in Division 1 in both the NHL and NFL.
Generally recognised dual counties include:
- Antrim
- Carlow
- Cork
- Dublin
- Galway
- Laois
- Limerick
- Offaly
- Tipperary
- Wexford
Only Tipperary and Cork have won both premier men's competitions, the All-Ireland Senior Hurling and All-Ireland Senior Football championships in the same year. Tipperary won both in 1895 and 1900, while Cork won both in 1890 and 1990. Tipperary would today be regarded as primarily a hurling county having not won a major senior football title since 1935 but are the current minor all Ireland champions. In recent years Dublin have been making great improvements in hurling and may well be become a genuine dual county in the years to come.
Dual player is a similar phrase used to describe players who play both sports.
Famous quotes containing the words dual and/or county:
“Thee for my recitative,
Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day
declining,
Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat
convulsive,
Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I could draw Bloom County with my nose and pay my cleaning lady to write it, and I’d bet I wouldn’t lose 10% of my papers over the next twenty years. Such is the nature of comic-strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste.”
—Berkeley Breathed (b. 1957)