The Ireland international rules football team is the representative team for Ireland (both Northern and Republic jurisdictions) in international rules football, a compromise between Gaelic football and Australian rules football. The team is made up of Irish players from the Gaelic Athletic Association and Australian Football League.
Prior to 2006, an under-19 and under-17 team had participated in a similar series, while a women's representative team participated in 2006 only. Currently, the Ireland team plays at least one of its home games at Croke Park, with recent alternative venues being Pearse Stadium in Galway in 2006 and the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick in 2010.
At present the only team Ireland plays is the Australia international rules football team, on an annual basis in the International Rules Series. As of 2011, Ireland have won six of 12 series, lost six to Australia, won 12 of 24 test matches played and participated in two draws, all since the 1998 Series.
Famous quotes containing the words ireland, rules, football and/or team:
“The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that it is now a society in which the dead console the living.”
—Jack Holland (b. 1947)
“However diligent she may be, however dedicated, no mother can escape the larger influences of culture, biology, fate . . . until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)