Sport In The Republic Of 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 The Republic Of Ireland: Gaelic Football, Hurling, Association Football, Rugby Union, Stadia, Media Coverage, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words sport in, sport, republic and/or ireland:
“Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)
“Drag racing is a sport of egos, and it’s all male egos.”
—Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney (b. 1940)
“People think they have taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“Come, fix upon me that accusing eye.
I thirst for accusation. All that was sung.
All that was said in Ireland is a lie
Breed out of the contagion of the throng,
Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)