Sport In Ireland
In Ireland most sports, including boxing, hockey, rowing, cricket, rugby union, Gaelic football and hurling, are organised in an all-island basis, with a single team representing the whole of Ireland in international competitions. Other sports, such as soccer and netball, have separate organising bodies in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The many sports played and followed in Ireland also include horse racing, show jumping, greyhound racing, basketball, fishing, handball, motor sport, target shooting and tennis.
At the Olympic Games, a person from Northern Ireland can choose to represent either Ireland or Great Britain.
Gaelic football is the most popular sport in Ireland in terms of match attendance, and in 2003 accounted for 34% of total sports attendances at events in the Republic of Ireland, followed by hurling at 23%, soccer at 16% and rugby at 8%, and Initiative's ViewerTrack study measuring 2005 sports audiences showed the sport's highest-profile match, the All-Ireland Football Final, to be the most watched event of the nation's sporting year. Soccer is the most played team sport in Ireland. Swimming, golf, aerobics, cycling, Gaelic football and billiards/snooker are the other sporting activities with the highest levels of playing participation in the Republic of Ireland.
Read more about Sport In Ireland: Gaelic Football, Hurling, Soccer, Rugby Union, Stadia, Media Coverage
Famous quotes containing the words sport in, sport and/or ireland:
“Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume,—it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist, indeed, is a most unhappy man; and his readers are most unhappy also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)