Rugby union, class and ‘Middle Ireland’ in Irish media

Abstract

Although graduates of elite Irish fee-paying schools are disproportionately represented in the Irish men’s national rugby union team, Irish international games are among the most popular on Irish terrestrial television, signifying rugby’s growth as a spectator sport in Ireland. This article examines the role of Irish print, broadcast media and related publications in popularising elite-level Irish rugby. Employing a principally Bourdieusian theoretical perspective it analyses how media representation obscures the significance of class background and elite schooling in facilitating players’ individual and collective social advancement and material gain prior to, in and beyond rugby careers. One is by highlighting players’ relatability and transcendence of class privilege as the antithesis of the popular Irish caricature of an arrogant, privately educated former schools rugby player, Ross O’Carroll Kelly. The second is the displacement of class, in media representations, onto narratives, and performances, of regional and stylistic variety that are contained within an all-encompassing, inclusive conceptualization of ‘middle Ireland’.

Keywords:

• Rugby union
• class
• Irish media
• sport media
• masculinity

Introduction

Graduates of elite Irish fee-paying schools are disproportionately represented in the Irish men’s national rugby union team. While such schools accommodate below 7% of the total secondary school population in the Republic of Ireland (O’Brien 2023) and 1% in Northern Ireland (Green 2022, 1), a 2017 Irish Times survey of the most recent 100 men’s rugby players capped for Ireland revealed that 56% of those educated in Ireland had attended private schools (O’Sullivan, 2017). In 2023 nine of the 11 Irish-born starting players in Ireland’s World Cup quarter-final team were privately educated, eight in Dublin or its environs. Seven played for Leinster, the most competitively and commercially successful of the four Irish provinces that play as clubs in European competition. Although rugby is a minority participation sport compared with soccer or Gaelic games in Ireland,¹ as a spectator sport its popularity has grown since professionalization in 1995. The 2023 World Cup quarter-final recorded the highest ever ratings for Irish terrestrial television channel Virgin, peaking at 78% of viewers, or 1.541 million (Slattery 2023), thus bucking a trend of terrestrial television ratings decline.

This article examines how Irish media representation has potentially contributed to this popularity, despite the national team’s overrepresentation of an elite class fraction. Rugby’s international dimension is undoubtedly significant. Ireland was ranked the world’s number one team prior to the 2023 World Cup. This standing contrasts with that of the men’s Irish soccer team, which has not qualified for a World Cup since 2002, and Gaelic games, only played in Ireland and throughout the Irish diaspora. However, the article argues that (with the partial exception of such issues as concussion injury – see Matthew Nesbitt article in this special issue), overwhelmingly positive media representation of Irish rugby has been key to its growing popularity.

The article is exploratory, drawing on selected television documentaries and related broadcasts, talk radio shows and podcasts, national print media and social media threads and player (auto)biographies from the 2000s onwards. The Irish rugby team draws players from both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Although the latter is within the United Kingdom, its six counties are within the province of Ulster, one of the four Irish provincial teams. The article focuses on media circulating principally within the Republic. It combines a mainly Bourdieusian theoretical perspective (Bourdieu 1978, 1984, 1988; Kennedy, MacPhail and Power 2019; Light and Kirk 2001; Shilling 2012), with strands of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2010; Free 2018), media genre analysis (McDonald 2007; Nichols 1991; Whannel 1992), and masculinity and humour studies (Easthope 1990; Higgie 2017; Kennedy 2000). It analyses how the significance of class background and elite schooling in facilitating players’ individual and collective social advancement and material gain prior to, in and beyond rugby careers is obscured in different ways. One is by highlighting players’ relatability and transcendence of class privilege as the antithesis of the popular Irish caricature of an arrogant, privately educated former schools rugby player, Ross O’Carroll Kelly, fictional author of 21 novels written by Paul Howard. The second is the displacement of class, in media representations, onto narratives, and performances, of regional and stylistic variety that are contained within an all-encompassing, inclusive conceptualization of ‘middle Ireland’.

Frequently invoked in Irish political and media discourse, ‘middle Ireland’ is a nebulous term that disguises the extent of material social inequality by overstating the progressive embourgeoisement and shared cultural habitus of the bulk of the population, routinely conflating a wide range of income and material wealth categories. Media representations of Irish rugby contribute to the rhetorical elision of class differences by presenting the game itself as embodying a shared cultural sensibility, while providing vehicles for players to engage in frequently humorous performative accommodations between urban, rural and class backgrounds as stylistic variations. The class bias of Irish rugby at elite-level is periodically broached in media discussion, but largely dismissed or trivialized by asserting rugby’s broadening inclusivity, or through accusations of ‘reverse snobbery’ (McCarthy 2023).

Rugby, class and education in Ireland

The article draws on various interrelated theoretical strands. Foremost are Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus as applied to sport, education and media. Field is Bourdieu’s (1991) term for a configuration of actors within a particular sphere of social or cultural endeavour. Actors within any field will have varying levels of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital, and their positions will vary according to their relationship to each form of capital (Bourdieu 1991, 229–31). Key to whether, and how, ‘physical capital’ accrued through sporting excellence is converted into other forms is sport’s intersection with the field of education, which is stratified according to social class. Taking Bourdieu’s lead, Chris Shilling (2012, 145–146) distinguishes between uses of the body in class specific sporting contexts, the typically manual working-class ‘instrumental’ understanding versus a more middle-class disinterestedness, historically associated with amateurism. In a professional sport context, injury can end both the economic and physical capital accumulated through a career. However, through sport in an educational and elite social context there are contemporaneous and future opportunities for ‘converting’ physical into other forms of capital, even without, or with small financial rewards from sporting participation per se.

Shilling follows Bourdieu’s (1984, 218) view that ‘sport is more likely to be adopted by a social class if it does not contradict that class’ relation to the body at its deepest and most unconscious level’. Bourdieu posited that individual sports that ‘emphasize manners and deportment and hence facilitate the future acquisition of social and cultural capital’ (145) are the most typically socially exclusive. Favoured by working-class participants in a French context, as physical contact sports, rugby and soccer combine ‘all the reasons to repel the upper classes’, including ‘the values and virtues demanded (strength, endurance, the propensity to violence, the spirit of “sacrifice”, docility and submission to collective discipline, the absolute antithesis of the “role distance” implied in bourgeois roles’ (Bourdieu 1978, 837).

However, in many national contexts, rugby has evolved as a largely elite sport, and indeed in France it was first adopted in the socially exclusive Parisian lycées (Dine 2001, 26) prior to democratisation as it spread southwards and westwards. In Ireland, decades prior to independence from Britain in 1922 many elite Catholic schools emulated those of the Protestant Anglo-Irish Establishment in adopting rugby. Irish rugby dates to elite origins in Trinity College Dublin, a bastion of the Protestant Ascendancy in pre-Independence Ireland, but spread in the late nineteenth century through the growing number of fee-paying schools catering to the growing Catholic nationalist middle-class (Doolin 2023). It was a ‘means of demarcating’ exclusivity for both elite Catholic and Protestant schools (McElligott 2018, 280). The Catholic Blackrock College’s longstanding association with rugby was established through winning the Leinster Schools Rugby Senior Cup 20 times between its 1887 inauguration and 1914 (284). Doolin (2023, 69–73) highlights the enduring infusion of contemporary school websites with the language of nineteenth century ‘muscular Christianity’ (leadership, determination, sportsmanship, humility), and how ‘Leinster rugby has long retained a class-defined blind spot’ due to the ‘pedestalling of the Senior Schools Cup competition’ (296).

Rugby exemplifies how sport is understood through the participant’s habitus, the embodied dispositions and tastes acquired through class-specific social and cultural practice. Its socially and geographically varied adoption typifies an embodied ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu 1990, 66) of social interaction in specific settings. Rugby is part of a wider ‘field’ intersecting education and other social spheres. Illustrating the contingency of how physical capital in sport is converted into other forms, Light and Kirk (2001, 85) identify how an elite Australian school’s rugby training in ‘particular ways of moving, standing and using space, which suggested masculinity, power and competence’, was closely linked to career advancement through school connections and shared social class habitus. Aline Courtois (2018, 168) observes how rugby is similarly widely promoted as a path to ‘gradual embodiment of social excellence’ in Irish elite schools. Developed in beautiful surroundings, but under an austere regime (Courtois 2018, 75), this embodiment is envisaged as a path to realising one of her case studies’ (Clongowes Wood) Mission Statement aim to ‘educate each pupil to think and speak for himself, use his initiative, and provide leadership where required.’ Kennedy, MacPhail and Power’s (2019, 10) ethnography of sport in one such school records the extraordinary prominence afforded rugby coaching. They contend that such ‘elite physical culture […] not only foster[s] conformity to the cultural values which are compatible with it, but also serve[s] to naturalise and legitimise their privilege’.

However, Courtois (2018, 199) posits that Irish fee-paying schools’ part ‘in the production of elites and the reproduction of social inequality is largely unacknowledged’ in a postcolonial society ‘characterized by denial of class relationships’. These schools are heavily subsidised by the Irish state, which pays teachers’ salaries. An Irish Times article (O’Brien and Clarke 2023) detailing school fee increases and oppositional leftist parties’ proposals to abolish subsidies quotes a school principal’s reference to the state’s duty of ‘ethics, morality and fairness for taxpaying parents who are simply making a choice’. This is a typical neoliberal defence of free choice (Power et al. 2013) that also denies the paradoxical unfairness of state subsidy for financially exclusive institutions. Another representative counter-­position (cited in O’Brien 2023) argues that fee-paying actually relieves the state of the burden of maintaining private school buildings and infrastructure. This sometimes includes golf courses and professional sports facilities, with additional rugby coaching by ­ex-­professional players (Bielenberg 2023).

These defenses reflect the common rhetoric of ‘middle Ireland’, frequently used in Irish political and media discourse to designate a notional majority whose political and cultural values and understanding of their economic interests are sufficiently consensual and influential as to the shape of the country’s political and economic trajectory. It highlights the peculiarities of Irish society, particularly the avoidance of engaging with social class hierarchy in public discourse. It signifies a supposed convergence of interests popularized and legitimized by Irish economist David McWilliams during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic boom years (c.1994–2007). McWilliams (2005, 19) eulogized the bourgeoisification of Irish society as the ‘Wonderbra effect’, whereby a population majority was ‘pressed together in the middle and lifted up, allowing us to display our impressive material cleavage’ as a growing ­middle-class. Such commentators propagated a ‘naïve capitalism’ (Allen 2007, 63) and acceptance of ‘common sense’ neoliberalism despite growing evidence of material inequality. ‘Middle Ireland’ was later invoked by successive Fine Gael Taoisigh (Irish Prime Ministers) Enda Kenny (tenure from 2011 to 2017) and Leo Varadkar (tenure from 2017 to 2020, 2022 to 2024) as those who had suffered most from the 2008 financial crisis and the imposition of severe austerity measures (Mercille and Murphy 2015). Their needs would be prioritised in the uneven economic ‘recovery’ in the 2010s. Minus ‘class’, or sometimes conjoined with ‘coping classes’, ‘middle Ireland’ both acknowledges and disavows any class specificity in a characteristically elusive use of language in Irish political and media discourse. Cannon and Murphy (2015, 16) observe that those ‘opposing’ austerity were ‘varied in nature and rarely anti-neoliberal’. Despite the ‘hollowing out’ (Negra and McIntyre 2020, 60) of public services post-2008, Irish fee-paying schools remain heavily subsidised and are vigorously defended by their proponents as an ‘excellent example of a public private partnership’ (Arthur Godsil, in Ó Ríordáin and Godsil 2023) subsidised by parents rather than the state.

Approaching rugby and media discourse in Ireland

Irish elite male rugby players are perhaps the most publicly visible products of these schools. The Leinster Senior Cup school competition receives extensive coverage in Irish national newspapers, alongside the annual Six Nations tournament. School backgrounds are regularly referenced in international player media profiles, interviews and published (auto)biographies. There is a continuing interplay between athletes’ accumulation of physical capital, their conversion of this into other forms of capital while playing, or in such post-career positions as punditry, and sports journalists as media employees and occasional collaborators on ghost-written autobiographies or columns.

Following Ireland’s 2015 World Cup quarterfinal exit journalist Ewan MacKenna (Molloy 2015) controversially criticised his colleagues for failing to acknowledge the team’s underperformance, arguing that most were too strongly aligned with players, having attended the same schools. MacKenna’s arguments were aggressively refuted by presenter Joe Molloy in a Newstalk radio interview (Molloy 2015). However, there is a remarkable closeness between Irish journalists and players. For example, Alan English, editor of Ireland’s best-­selling newspaper The Sunday Independent, has written or co-written five rugby books, including two elite player autobiographies. Irish Times rugby journalist Gerry Thornley has also co-written numerous player autobiographies. Bourdieu (1984) coined the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ as a catch-all for producers of symbolic goods, including journalists and workers in PR, advertising and marketing. Scherer and Jackson (2008) limit their usage to those directly ‘embedded’ with the national team in producing the New Zealand rugby website allblacks.com. In Ireland, however, there is a case for viewing rugby journalists as cultural intermediaries with limited objective distance. Player interviews and profiles routinely mention brand sponsorship and ‘ambassadorship’ (Free 2018), weaving product placement into articles and broadcasts, presumably as a condition for participation, and as such a variant of sporting organisations’ ‘defensive strategy’ of ‘steering’ media ‘towards desirable ends’ (O’Boyle and Gallagher 2023, 671). The Newstalk national radio station (Newstalk 2018) ran a series of Leinster rugby coach Stuart Lancaster’s interviews with ‘leaders’ from various industries, exploring synergistic learning between the rugby and corporate sectors. The normalisation of these practices evinces the shared class habitus of the participants, borrowing the logic of James Kerr’s (2013) Legacy, whose subtitle, ‘what the All Blacks can teach us about the business of life’, signifies a more general aim to show how New Zealand national team’s training techniques of ‘maps and mantras’ as a technology for producing self-reliant, self-disciplining players could become a role model for the gamification of business (Kerr 2013, 119).

A common qualification regarding Irish rugby’s class specificity is that the southern Munster province is rooted in a more working-class club tradition, especially in Limerick. However, Liam O’Callaghan (2017, 17-18) has highlighted the Munster team’s high percentage of fee-paying school graduates, particularly from Cork. Lunn and Kelly (2019, 23) show that while higher educational attainment and playing rugby are not as clearly linked in Munster as Leinster, ‘there remains a substantial socio-economic element to rugby in Munster’ generally. Despite higher middle-income category participation than Leinster and the other provinces, Munster also has ‘substantially lower’ (24) participation among the lowest income groups. Yet the Leinster-Munster rivalry, framed as a clash of styles partly reflecting class differences, has been a regular focus of Irish media representation since the 2000s. It is thus important to consider Irish rugby media’s constructive role in narrativizing this rivalry. This article argues that journalists have contributed significantly to the notion of competing ‘traditions’ successfully reconciled through national team cohesion and success. While the Ulster and Connacht provinces are half of the north-south-east-west provincial configuration, the Leinster-Munster rivalry has been the principal focus, due largely to their success in European rugby’s Champions Cup competition (six titles between them, versus Ulster’s one, and none for Connacht).

That print, broadcast, film and social media have a transformative impact on the experience of sport’s spatio-temporal dimensions is well established (Boyle and Haynes 2009). Media narrativization through discursive and visual means, assembling retrospective highlights and prospective framings of events in terms of clashes between contrasting opponents has long played a constructive role in priming viewer expectations and interpretations (Whannel 1992). Given how sparsely attended interprovincial rugby contests in Ireland were prior to professionalism and European competition (O’Callaghan 2017 – Munster’s famous 1978 victory over the touring New Zealand ‘All Blacks’ is somewhat misleading regarding the pre-professionalisation popularity of the provincial teams), live television coverage and extensive print media build-ups and reviews have undoubtedly contributed to their popularity as mediatised spectacles with ‘traditional’ provincial contrasts.

Many studies of sport media representation limit the timescale to individual tournaments or career highs and/or lows for individual celebrities or teams. They generally analyse representation in specific media forms – print, television etc. (in the context of rugby, for example, Cullen and Harris (2020); Falcous and West (2009)). This article encompasses a wider range of media and related material from 2000 to 2023. It is an exploratory inquiry into various forms of media representation over that period, employing an analytical framing informed by a combination of what Bruce et al. (2017) helpfully distinguish as ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) and ‘cultural studies’ inspired ‘textual analysis’ as theoretical and methodological strands of ‘physical cultural studies’. Both are concerned with the ‘dialectical, and mutually constitutive, relationships between language, culture and social realities’ (468); and, as Teun van Dijk (1993, 249–250) explains of CDA, ‘the role of discourse in the (re)production and challenge of dominance [as] the exercise of social power by elites, institutions or groups, that results in social inequality, including political, cultural, class, ethnic, racial and gender inequality’. While CDA is methodologically concerned with close linguistic analysis of rhetorical form in a thematically interlinked corpus of texts (Fairclough 2010), as Stuart Hall notes, cultural studies’ ‘discursive approach’ emphasises

the historical specificity of a particular form or ‘regime’ of representation: not on ‘language’ as a general concern, but on specific languages or meanings, and how they are deployed at particular times, in particular places. (2013, xxii)

This discursive approach is less procedurally methodologically rigorous and informed by linguistic analysis. While the analysis in this article is sensitive to discursive form, therefore (argumentative structure, use of varieties of tropes etc.), it is less bounded in defining a ‘data set’, and open to contingencies and discoveries in the research process.

The article utilises various intersecting media and cultural forms. Many Lexis Nexis database searches of Irish national and regional newspapers were conducted, using various terms in order to identify articles directly or indirectly broaching rugby’s association with Irish elite schooling. One trope proved particularly significant as a reference point. This is a literary character widely represented in Irish media as a caricature of conceited rugby-­playing products of Irish elite schools, Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll Kelly, fictional ‘author’ of a long running newspaper column (1997), 21 novels and star of several plays. Articles were chosen on the basis that the character was clearly being referenced as a way of confirming, refuting or exploring the nuances of rugby as an elite sport. This led to a focus on Howard himself (a former sports journalist) in these articles as a proxy figure for widespread ambivalence, in Ireland, concerning rugby’s elite history and associations. This was directly explored in the television documentary We Need to Talk About Ross (McCarthy 2019), whose rhetorical framing is notably ambiguous. Howard also collaborated as a novelist with former Leinster/Ireland player Gordon D’Arcy on three children’s books fictionalising both D’Arcy’s time at Clongowes Wood school and playing career. The article focuses on the explicitly moral lessons and pedagogical discourse in these books through their fictionalised version of rugby coach Joe Schmidt. This led to additional Lexis Nexis searches on coaching discourse terms, especially the proliferating term ‘learnings’, in media representations of Irish provincial and national rugby. Hence a developing thesis concerning the narrative of Leinster rugby’s popularisation in the 2000s, through the rhetorical use of Howard’s character Ross as a figure of privilege who serves as a moral lesson for players who come from this class background; while normalising the pedagogical discourse of rugby as a morally uplifting pursuit perpetuated in the elite school system. A related search focused on articles featuring the Leinster-Munster inter-provincial rivalry, with particular clusters surrounding the provinces’ meetings in the 2006 and 2009 Heineken European Cup semi-finals. This, in turn, combined with the gathering of television documentaries and radio broadcasts selected on the basis of their commemoration of this rivalry. The interpretative focus was on how class differences and similarities became obscured as such in constructions of regional and stylistic differences, and in mutual accommodations between provincial players in the context of national team participation and shared commitment. In summary, therefore, the article is an exploratory, interpretative approach to how issues of class and privilege in Irish media representations of rugby are ignored or obscured. It draws on discursive and audio-visual texts whose qualities of ambiguity, ambivalence and evasiveness are arguably characteristic of the broader Irish media and political sphere.

We Need to Talk About Ross: Ross O’carroll Kelly and Leinster rugby players in Irish Media

Following professionalisation, the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) decided that only four provincial teams could be supported in the new European Heineken Cup competition. Leinster’s challenge was widening its appeal beyond Dublin’s elite suburbs, a task heightened, as Irish Times journalist Gerry Thornley (1999) observed, by the regular dominance of the ‘elite within an elite’ in schools cup competition, a ‘monster out of control’ about whose ‘purity/glorified escapism’ he and his colleagues compulsorily ‘waxed lyrical’, despite his misgivings. In 1998 The Sunday Tribune journalist Paul Howard created his spoof column, written by the self-deluded Ross O’Carroll Kelly (whose initials, RO’CK, suggest Blackrock College). Ross’ column transferred to The Irish Times in 2007. Mike Cronin (2009, 298) encapsulates his depiction as a ‘privileged south Dublin teenager through manhood, marriage, fatherhood and divorce’, with a ‘voracious appetite for goods and lifestyles denoting wealth and status’ and an ‘obsession with the game of rugby and his own fleeting moment of sporting heroism’. Ross later evolved from an initial satirical commentary on the Celtic Tiger economic boom. Post-2008 Ross and father Charles (‘CO’CK’), ‘a grotesque avatar of Celtic Tiger avarice’ (Ward Sell 2023, 333) satirised the continued delusions of their class, despite the crash. Howard has also repeatedly stressed his working-class roots and astonishment, as inspiration, at the arrogance he encountered when first instructed to report on school rugby games in the 1990s: ‘a guy stomped off the pitch and walked right up to his father, who was on the side line, saying something like “I don’t care what you think, just give me your bloody wallet”’ (quoted in Power 2007).

Rather than comment on Ross’ satirical qualities (see Kelly 2017), I focus here on the apparent irony that both Ross and Howard’s own media contributions and appearances have contributed to what Declan Lynch (2023) describes as rugby’s ‘normalisation’ as a focus of collective identity. The first aspect is how the absurd caricature became a foil through which the ordinariness, the ‘soundness’ of real players from this environment are differentiated, both in media representations and players’ self-representations: their non-’Ross’ qualities become apparent, even as this ‘type’ is acknowledged within the schools rugby world. The second is how Howard is a proxy for the wider public in his accommodation to, and apparent acceptance of the world he satirises.

Howard’s often noted irony that Ross became popular with the private school educated objects of his satirical depiction (Cronin 2009, 307) is central to We Need to Talk About Ross (McCarthy 2019). While contributors attest to Ross’ satirical qualities and Howard stresses his outsider status, both to rugby’s and sports journalism’s class environment, the documentary framing and tonality are ambiguous, given the absence of standard ‘expository’ narration addressing the viewer ‘directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument’ (Nichols 1991, 34). Echoing his earlier (Thornley 1999) comments, Gerry Thornley here acknowledges some culpability as justification for how Howard satirises his journalistic celebration of schools rugby, describing the Leinster Senior Cup as the ‘embodiment of why an awful lot of people in Ireland didn’t like rugby’. However, Ross’ popularity with Blackrock College’s students, staff and alumni is also apparent. The documentary’s conclusion seems to illustrate the limitations of satire through his and Howard’s apparent ‘co-option’ (Higgie 2017). Offering a critique of optimistic perspectives on television satire, Rebecca Higgie (2017, 82) notes how, in the 2000s such ‘celebrity politicians’ as Boris Johnson could ‘co-opt the satire’s cultural capital’ in their appearances. She employs Raymond Williams’s (1977) conceptualisation of how ‘dominant’ culture can incorporate ‘emergent’, even ‘oppositional’ cultural and political forms, to show how the involvement of politically right-wing figures in satire can neutralise its critical potential. Howard acts here as a self-reflexive commentator on his co-option. The documentary is akin to Nichols (1991, 44) ‘participatory’ documentary category, showing subjects as active participants seeking to understand their situation. It climaxes with Howard visiting Blackrock College, admitting to camera that his younger self might be ‘horrified’ to be ‘their dancing fool’. A teacher presents him with the Leinster Schools trophy. He holds it aloft, shouting ‘for Mum, for Dad, for ‘rock, for God!’ The students applaud his mockery with no apparent irony. Has the older Howard, by implication, ‘matured’ or been co-opted?

Intentionally or inadvertently, the documentary also reveals how, by amusing his class targets, Ross facilitates their distancing from him, even as they embrace him. While Howard confesses his ‘chip on my shoulder about class’, through their amusement they show themselves to be ‘good sports’. The targets include such Blackrock alumni as former Ireland rugby captain Brian O’Driscoll, who laughingly remarks that ‘we [had] many similarities … from [Ross’] perspective’. The ease he and other elite players display in embracing the caricature echoes the featured teacher’s remark: ‘I think the staff kind of like it [although] we’d been exposed to a certain extent’. In a variation, the notoriously bombastic former television rugby analyst George Hook acknowledges his resemblance to Ross’ snobbish father, before highlighting the irony of his own hailing from ‘the wrong side of the tracks in Cork’ and ‘cheek’ to ‘talk about the skangers from [Dublin’s] northside’. The ease of such self-mockery by association with a caricature from whom their self-reflexivity distances them is distinct from what Bourdieu (1996, 21) calls ‘a particular mode of acquisition’ of a ‘cultured’ style with ‘no mark of the effort and no trace of the work that go into’ it. The players accept the joke and Hook lessens the significance of his class snobbery, and class inequality per se, by stressing his own humble origins. Such texts may not quite reproduce hegemonic ideas concerning elite rugby schools, but the recourse to humour lessens any critical potential.

Howard, by contrast, apparently labours with the ‘hidden injuries of class’, not in Sennett and Cobb’s (1972/2023) more typical sense of shame, even among upwardly mobile people from working-class backgrounds, but in struggling to enjoy his success. There is some implicit irony as he labels honey from his bee hives at his country home (suggesting significant affluence and embourgeoisement), recalling his ‘guilt’ on receipt of his first five figure advance payment. ‘Work’, he reasons, ‘has to hurt’ before payment. Howard names the class divide but is apparently confounded by his and Ross’ easy accommodation to the world he satirises.

The documentary thus illustrates how Howard’s frequent confession of class resentment has progressively contributed to a theme of inter-class rapprochement. Material wealth, class and status differences become objects of humour, not resentment. For example, when Leinster/Ireland star Johnny Sexton moved to Paris club Racing 92, Howard’s (2013) Irish Times feature included a photograph of Sexton at an impressive mansion. Howard’s statement that ‘Johnny and Laura live here, in an enormous house in Châtenay-Malabry, a quiet suburb 10 km southwest of the city centre’, is subsequently revealed to be a joke rooted in class envy. The article continues:

‘We only have an apartment in here’, [Sexton] says, as he slips the key in the door. He laughs because he knows what you [the reader] were probably thinking. […] ‘Please don’t say we live in a mansion!’

Howard then stresses Sexton’s ordinariness through his account of the ‘mundane practicalities of turning their modest-sized apartment into a home. […] You quickly realise that Johnny and Laura are just like thousands of other emigrant Irish couples’. By indirectly referencing Ireland’s post-2008 mass youth emigration (O’Leary and Negra 2018), Howard downplays Sexton’s move to maximise earnings, despite his having ‘cried’ (Howard 2013) when the IRFU refused to raise his salary. The underlying logic here, like many Irish rugby player profiles, is interesting. Earnings maximisation is not greed because rugby’s inherent brutality can suddenly end a career. Contrasting with the wealth of elite professional footballers, rugby players’ accrued economic capital may not compensate for the impact of loss of both earnings and the concomitant physical, cultural and social capital of elite player status. Hence a common focus on ‘mundane’ relatability.

The implicit, but absent reference point here, as elsewhere, is Ross, whose absurd caricature throws the normality of actual Leinster players into sharp relief. In Colm Kearns’ (2019, 182) study of Irish rugby sponsorship and advertising an IRFU marketing official remarks that ‘we’re positioning the team as representative of the country; humble and hardworking, so it doesn’t suit us’ if agencies produce ‘cocky and snide’ campaigns with ‘edgy and alien-type players’. Kearns shows how online supportive ‘teaser’ player profiles for a 2015 Irish rugby ad (‘All It Takes’) featuring players’ superhuman strength emphasised their rural connections, including Sexton. Despite his featured County Kerry family relations, Sexton actually attended a south Dublin fee-paying school. The supposed axis of average suburban and rural is a recurring feature of Irish rugby sponsorship and advertising. Shot in a pseudo-observational style a 2011 ad, ‘Play them next’ (O2 Ireland Rugby 2011) stressed players’ ordinariness as they call on children in a suburban street to come out to play. Vodafone’s 2019 sponsor’s television ad, ‘The Journey’/ ‘#TeamOfUs’ (Vodafone Ireland 2018) imagines players Rory Best and Tadhg Furlong’s growth from babies, through farming childhoods, to national representation.

Gordon’s Game: rugby, elite schooling and the burden of privilege

This theme of Ross as anti-role model is key to Paul Howard’s collaboration with former Leinster/Ireland player Gordon D’Arcy on a series of Gordon’s Game (D’Arcy and Howard 2020, 2021) children’s books fictionalizing D’Arcy’s career. A graduate of Clongowes Wood, a fee-paying school with 37 alumni in Burke’s Peerage (Courtois 2018, 71), D’Arcy was chosen to train with the Irish senior national team as a schoolboy in 1999 but, due to indiscipline (Fanning 2004), only emerged as an international in 2004. These books display an interesting tension between celebrating the school’s physical and cultural environment and a chastening narrative of the dangers of class privilege, displaced onto the temptations of narcissistic self-regard. In a tie-in interview D’Arcy traces his late development to ‘boarding school for six years, with 36 bells going off daily. It was fairly regimented’ (Sweeney 2020). Tanya Sweeney (2020) praises the books’ ‘overall message’ of ‘learning from mistakes, taking responsibility for one’s actions, keeping perspective amid difficulty, and not going with the crowd’. The ‘crowd’ here are the unreflexive, conceited products of privilege. Young D’Arcy’s challenge is to ground himself in the fellowship of equals, fulfilling the school’s professed ethos through rugby’s moral framework, its key lesson of selfless service to others. This and the following sections explore these themes and how they echo and intersect both with strands in Irish media representation of rugby and rationalisations of private education in Ireland.

The books distort D’Arcy’s actual career trajectory. His years of underachievement followed his post-schooling time at the Leinster rugby academy. In the books, however, he becomes an Irish international and British and Irish Lions player² while at school. His ‘mistakes’ originate in his pranks and boyish transgressions there. Young D’Arcy must both adjust to the professional training environment, including dietary and bodily discipline, and resist the temptation of narcissistic investment in his own celebrity, a temptation enabled by a self-entitled Ross-like fellow pupil who becomes his ‘agent’. The language of moral reckoning, through confession, with personal failings, discursively displaces the material comforts of class status onto dangerous complacency and narcissism. The implicit privilege of elite schooling is an obstacle to gaining insight and self-awareness. Hence the fictional D’Arcy’s refusal to sign merchandise other than his own branded variety and consequent alienation of his dormitory friends, whom his agent moves out (D’Arcy and Howard 2020, 229). His maturational path is an imaginary bridging of the school’s mission to facilitate intellectual growth, embodied by kindly but strict teachers, and professional rugby’s heightened disciplinary demands, a fantasy merging of the two.

The link is a fictionalized version of former Leinster (2010–2013) and Ireland (2013–2019) coach, New Zealander Joe Schmidt. Distorting the history of Leinster’s path to victory in the European Heineken Cup (which they first won in 2009, before his arrival), Schmidt is inserted into an imaginary narrative, facilitating Leinster’s and D’Arcy’s evolution by inculcating values of selfless team commitment, a discourse pervading former teacher Schmidt’s (2019) autobiography. The books have a Harry Potter/Hogwarts quality. In the English public school fiction tradition, from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes 1857/1999) onwards, the boy is temporarily orphaned and must navigate the temptations of peer waywardness to embrace steadfast friendships and teacherly models of intellectual leadership through character building moral lessons (Galway 2012). Conflating D’Arcy’s elite schooling and career, the Gordon’s Game books obscure educational inequalities by stressing the school and team’s inculcation of service to others.

It is significant that Paul Howard should become D’Arcy’s collaborator. In Gordon’s Game: Blue Thunder (D’Arcy and Howard 2021, 107), D’Arcy is bullied at Leinster by the self-­regarding fictional Graham Bull, unsubtly nicknamed Bully, shown in a cartoon illustration (similar to Ross O’Carroll Kelly’s) kissing his biceps after scoring. D’Arcy struggles both with his ill-fated belief in his celebrity, wearing laughably fake tan, and Bully’s narcissistic delusions and rivalry for his team position. D’Arcy’s tempting role model is the fictional Dan Hansen, self-nicknamed ‘Damn Handsome’. Bully and Handsome allude to the much-maligned Leinster players derided as ‘ladyboys’ (Kiely 2006) prior to their 2009 Heineken Cup victory: when the going gets tough in one match Handsome mutters ‘please take me off’ (D’Arcy and Howard 2021, 110). Handsome’s career ends when late for a flight due to a modelling appointment, Bully’s when he refuses to shake hands with D’Arcy, a compulsory expectation introduced by Schmidt which became the players’ ‘most commonly referenced affirmative change’ (Schmidt 2019, 155).

Schmidt’s book includes much pedagogical language about inculcating ‘values’. Both this and the D’Arcy/Howard books have a circular quality. He provides the context in which the players decide their values (‘humble, disciplined, relentless’ (Schmidt 2019, 156)), but he holds them to account for failure to embody them. His recalled admonishment of O’Driscoll, in a video replay review, for failing to catch a poor pass from D’Arcy (‘good players take those passes’ (2019, 158)) – is reiterated by D’Arcy (‘good players catch those’ – D’Arcy and Howard 2021, 222), leading to an extended practice session that illustrates Schmidt’s (2019, 159–160) moral framing:

they had decided on the values that they were going to demonstrate, and they understood that the behaviours underpinning those values had to be what they ‘repeatedly did’, not just occasional acts. To be connected in the chase line, there had to be a trust that they were all going to work to get into the line, that we’d work hard enough to make sure that ‘effort errors’ […] didn’t occur.

Rugby ‘learnings’ and elite education in Irish media

D’Arcy’s simultaneous self-placement in Leinster and Clongowes merges the team’s and school’s moral contexts and emphasis on achieving the mutual respect and support of players and friends. His simultaneous struggles to meet schoolwork and team expectations echo the pervasive discourse of ‘learnings’ in rugby players’ accounts of training. This term – an ugly plural of the gerund form of the verb-turned-noun – has seen a proliferation in usage in national and international rugby media, echoing the neoliberal discourse of ‘lifelong learning’ and educational policy emphasis on ‘a more productive and efficient workforce’ (Field 2006, 3). In a January 2024 Lexis Nexis search, of the 6,635 hits for the term in conjunction with ‘rugby’ in the international archive, 573 were in Irish publications, 460 since January 2017. The gerund as noun both reifies concrete cognitive and corporeal lessons while also stressing the continuous dimensions of the learning process as constant renewal. Rugby players are perpetual students, internalising personal disciplinary lessons in line with the doctrinal discourse of sport psychology, with its acronyms for programmatic goal setting and performance optimisation (e.g. Mellalieu and Neil 2023). The following, from an article entitled ‘Every stepping stone now a schoolday’ (Lewis 2023), is illustrative:

To the Ireland brains trust, so insistent that the journey’s principal objective was lifting the [World Cup], those successes were merely stepping stones, further opportunities for growth and development. This week’s match-up is another examination of their team’s credentials. The education has not stopped yet. ‘The lads know there’s gears in them, in what they’re doing,’ [assistant coach] Fogarty said. ‘We’re not going to look too far into the future. We took learnings […] and we looked at what we needed to improve.’

Comparison with other sports exceeds our scope, but the emphasis on pedagogy, coaching and learning is extensive in rugby journalism, evincing the social class specificity of the players’ and coaches’ development within an educational environment with elaborate coaching structures. Indeed, as an Irish Independent feature (Bielenberg 2023) noted, rugby success has become a significant means of marketing elite fee-paying schools. Referring to the boys as ‘mini-professional rugby players’, Kim Bielenberg’s celebratory article covered the second and third pages of the newspaper’s main section, recording that many

teams are now coached by former professional players and the full-time ‘director of rugby’ in a school could have four or five assistants on the touchline during matches. There are strength and conditioning coaches, defence coaches and the latest trend is for schools to employ mental skills coaches.

The article’s voluntarist logic and subtitle, ‘many of our try heroes have been drawn out of a rich pool of talent’, obscure the social class hierarchy in which Irish rugby (Leinster especially) is immersed and ‘talent’ is cultivated, while rendering criticism churlish.

The emphasis on relentless work to build and maintain bodies is common in rugby media representation. Injury and sidelining are often depicted as problematic, for obvious reasons, but also due to the inevitable weight loss, such is the necessity to build and maintain muscle mass at elite-level. The work emphasis is descriptive but also ideological. By contrast with soccer’s lucrative free market, Irish rugby players are depicted as ‘cocooned’, analogous to public servants (Conlon 2003), but with enormous salaries repeatedly justified through dedication and commitment. The players are clearly not ‘working-class’, or from labouring backgrounds, but the stress on physical labour and self-discipline is striking. On one hand there is a legitimisation of investment, by both the IRFU and supporters, in players (especially during injury) as ‘value for money’. On the other, it is discursively akin to profiles of fee-paying schools where work and disciplinary regimes are emphasised. For instance, in one Irish Independent article, effectively an advertorial (accompanying another article by the same author (Lynott 2024a) on school fee increases), a school principal details his school’s working day, prior to a telling play on the adjective ‘rich’ in the sense of graduates enriching society rather than being materially wealthy:

Our day begins at 8.30am and ends at 8.30pm. The students have lunch, dinner, classes, sports, debating, music, swimming and golf. Within that [fee] you have to think of the value offered there. Our school’s a really important option for busy working parents. They have their own career pressures and don’t have to worry about homework because we have dedicated study time here. [The school has a] rich group of past pupils, who are rich in the sense of giving to lots of different areas of life. Our past students are involved in many sectors of society, including lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, music and sports. (Lynott 2024b)

This justification of the school’s roles in social reproduction also has an interesting logical mix. There is a strong sense of Foucault’s (2003, 146) ‘governmentality’, the meeting of the ‘technology of the self’, which permits ‘individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’, and ‘technologies of power’, determining ‘certain conduct of individuals and submit[ting] them to certain ends or domination’ (2003, 146). Privileged status is justified on the basis of being earned under close in loco parentis supervision. There is thus an entwinement of neoliberal logic and paternalistic reassurance. The detailed emphasis on coaching in Irish rugby media, with many coaches having been teachers, has a similar quality. The pedagogical and ‘learning’ value of participation in elite rugby, from schools onwards, is constantly stressed, even when in jest. For instance, explaining that his defensive system would take 14 wk for players to learn by ‘rewir[ing] their brains’, newly arrived South African coach at Leinster Jacques Nienaber quipped that ‘unfortunately, you have to pay their school fees’ (Tracey 2024).

Bielenberg’s (2023) tone contrasts with his more circumspect piece (Bielenberg 2019) regarding rugby’s social divisiveness during the 2019 World Cup. There, social media ridicule of affluent supporters in Japan was considered alongside criticism of how rugby was portrayed by detractors as ‘the overhyped plaything of “morketing” people in Dublin 4’ (Dublin’s most elite postcode – the phonetic spelling ‘morketing’ (marketing) imitates Ross O’Carroll Kelly’s posh accent). Bielenberg acknowledges how ‘antifans’, opponents of devoted fandom who, as Gray (2005) highlights, may have ‘moral’ objections to fan objects in popular culture, were seeking to connect rugby with growing inequality in Ireland. This included ‘photos of groups of fans with references to the “IFSC [Dublin’s Irish Financial Services Centre] on tour”, and speculation about whether they once worked in Anglo Irish Bank’, whose demise in the 2008 financial crash proved particularly costly to taxpayers given the Irish state’s bank debt guarantee.

Occasional acknowledgement of dissent notwithstanding, celebrations of rugby replicate a common pattern, in ‘business news’ articles, concerning current or former players’ commercial endeavours, advertising their conversion of physical into economic, social and cultural capital. Gordon D’Arcy himself is an illustrative case. In the following quote, his class-specific progression into the financial world at Investec, post-playing career (following in his bank manager father’s footsteps), is somewhat obscured:

Mr. D’Arcy started building his exit plan for after the sport while he was still playing. Aside from investing in bars and a pilates studio, he studied economics at UCD. He was doing some business with Investec and half-joked about having a chat with the company about his post-rugby career. That led to him going on to do an internship there. (Irish Independent 2016)

The ‘building’ an ‘exit plan’, ‘half-joke’ and internship are implicitly illustrative of a class-specific facilitative structure, but framed as an individual block-building career trajectory echoing the commonly used expression ‘exit strategy’ for escaping the defending rugby team’s ‘22’ metre line (World Rugby 2019). D’Arcy adheres to the neoliberal doctrine of goal setting and stepping stones, but within an unexplicated structural framework that includes: his class (banking) background; elite schooling; international rugby career; investment opportunities afforded by Irish government legislation allowing elite athletes to reclaim tax on retirement from the game (Irish Times 2013); personal brand enhancement as a collateral benefit of celebrity; and an undergraduate degree ‘internship’ with a company that is already his business client. This chimes with the open acknowledgement by an IRFU executive (Kearns 2019, 153) of rugby’s close links with ‘corporate Ireland’: ‘a lot of business gets done around rugby matches’.

In D’Arcy’s books the fictionalized boy ultimately eschews the neoliberal imperative that ‘all dimensions of life become defined by self-enterprise’ (Wilson 2018, 117). Realising the fool’s gold of ‘own brand’ merchandise he learns the value of mutual respect and support in school and with Leinster. Yet his career trajectory, including the books’ self-marketizing publication, is both a paragon of that neoliberal life prescription and, though obscured, an exemplar of social class reproduction.

‘Where’s your F***ing pride?’ The rhetoric of inter-provincial and cross-class inclusivity

In the Gordon’s Game books, if Ross is the model to be avoided, provincial rivals Munster are the collective role model whose resolve Leinster must emulate, echoing much of the discourse surrounding the Leinster-Munster rivalry in the 2000s. For example, prior to their 2006 Heineken Cup semi-final (Munster won easily), Niall Kiely (2006) derided Leinster as ‘ladyboys, show ponies, D4 dilettantes. […] Over and over, I watched in fascinated horror as a team with obvious talent blew game after game through irresolute fannying about and a disinclination to fix, focus, dog out a result’. Leinster’s reduction to effete softness, with horribly sexist connotations here, is a coded inverted classism. Explaining the stereotypical rivalry to the Guardian newspaper’s British readership Brendan Fanning (2009) observed Irish provincial rugby’s bifurcation into ‘Munster Man’ and ‘Leinster Guy’. Irish media, including Fanning (2007), had contributed extensively to this bifurcation and the narrativization of its progressive undoing as interprovincial rapprochement fuelling the Irish national team’s eventual victory in the 2009 Six Nations tournament. Following Leinster’s defeat of Munster in the 2009 Heineken Cup semi-final, the Sunday Independent’s Alan Ruddock (Ruddock 2009) typically framed it as Leinster’s masculinisation: ‘there will be no more talk of skinny lattes [or] Leinster ladyboys’.

Here Leinster rugby’s class specificity is displaced onto a problematic of privilege as a burden, in turn displaced onto a problematic of gender. ‘Munster’ becomes a rhetorical trope, a challenge to Leinster to prove themselves tough enough. The longer context is Munster’s eulogising in Irish media through a romantic narrative of collective endeavour driven by a ‘classless’ (Duggan 2009) spectrum of supporters successfully bridging the divide between Limerick and Cork as Munster’s principal rugby centres. Yet the notion that Munster predominantly embodied a ‘hard’ working-class rugby tradition depends heavily on more contemporary media narratives inspired by professional rugby in European competition. Until the late 1990s the Munster clubs primarily attracted the supporters, not the representative province that drew from them, with a marked difference between Limerick’s ‘cross-class’ inner city game and Cork’s middle-class ‘suburban bias’ and fee-­paying schools (O’Callaghan 2011, 229, 235).

The Leinster-Munster semi-final anniversaries and rematches later became vehicles for media revisiting of their rivalry. Hence the image of Irish rugby as a confraternity of provincial rivals, with class displaced onto cultural backgrounds and styles. A significant development is the rapid growth and popularity of sports talk radio and podcasts, such as Newstalk radio’s daily ‘Off the Ball’ broadcasts, podcast highlights, staged ‘roadshow’ public events, with former athletes engaging in a distinctly masculine style of ‘banter’, where inter-provincial rivalries have been ritually played out interpersonally, though rendered safe through the collective knowledge that they were always contained by loyalty to the national cause. While Anthony Easthope (1990, 88) observes that ‘outwardly banter is aggressive’, it ‘depends on a close, intimate and personal understanding of the person who is the butt of the attack, […] affirming the bond of love between men while appearing to deny it’.

An ‘Off the Ball’ live roadshow retrospective with former players (May 2, 2018) illustrates the performative dimensions of these interactions – performative in bringing into effect (facilitated by interviewer and audience alike) the distinctly masculine and provincial identities they invoke. The stories related demarcate provincial boundaries around distinctive masculine styles into which implicit but unexplicated notions of class difference are woven. Stacey Pope (2015) highlights how, in English rugby, supporters openly emphasise class differences from local soccer supporters. In Irish rugby media discourse, at least (there is no comparable research on supporters), class specificity and difference are markedly absent, coded or implied. Fanning (2007, 125), for example, explains that Munster’s first professional provincial director, Declan Kidney, was a former Cork teacher, while his assistant Niall O’Donovan came from Limerick’s Shannon club, hence a dynamic interplay between ‘order and planning and control’ and ‘the goods on what it took to win dog fights, to deal with these mongrel men’. In the ‘Off the Ball’ (2018) retrospective, recalling Munster’s training regime in these early professional years Alan Quinlan remarks that ‘you got it harder sometimes in training. […] There was about 16 fellows punching the heads off each other, and ‘this is great’ [Niall O’Donovan] thought, that ‘we’re ready now for the weekend’!’ A teammate recalls a coach leaning into a ‘maul’, throwing a punch to start a fight and running away to make the training fiercer. The interviewer Joe Molloy remarks to Brian O’Driscoll: ‘Brian, it’s clear Leinster had no chance against this madness for about ten years’. O’Driscoll had earlier attributed Leinster’s pre-2009 competitive failure to ‘zero work ethic’, not ‘possess[ing] enough hate in us’, and having yet to learn from Munster ‘to hate a little more’. In this case, emulating ‘hate’, toughening up, becomes a vehicle for sporting success by unpacking and relinquishing the burden of privilege (misplaced self-regard), then playful expression of mutual respect and affection in retrospect, while maintaining the notion of provincial differences.

During the 2023 World Cup former Munster/Ireland player Ronan O’Gara claimed that the team represented the ‘working-class people of Ireland as opposed to just the elite private schools’ (Turnbull 2023), an extraordinary statement given its private school educated quotient (O’Gara himself was privately educated). He was not alone. Justine McCarthy (2023) labelled negative sentiment ‘inverted snobbery’ against the class bias within the team, while paradoxically also decrying educational inequality in Ireland as ‘lamentable in a country that calls itself a republic’. Johnny Watterson (2023) described the national team as ‘more diverse now than it has ever been and managed by a north of England man [Andy Farrell] whose strength, pride and values all come directly from growing up and playing with working-class people’. Watterson was responding to the ‘confused and joyless’ (Watterson 2023) hate expressed online towards the team following their exit. However, the team’s ‘diversity’ was principally provided by several New Zealand and Australian-born players, while Andy Farrell plays a similar rhetorical role to the supposed working-class or cross-class Munster in earlier media narratives.

‘Inverted snobbery’ accusations share the logic of Paul Howard’s confession of class resentment, that observations of class hierarchy and privilege, and non- or dis-identification with these figures for this reason are problematic. McCarthy (2023) invokes former Ireland captain (and Irish army captain in the amateur era) Ciaran Fitzgerald’s rhetorical question/exhortation to his team in the dying moments of a 1985 Five Nations Championship match against England: ‘where’s your f***ing pride?’ McCarthy addresses this to rugby-sceptic readers. The vulgarity and aggression flatten any sense of class hierarchy by recourse to everyday ‘common’ vernacular, vulgar discursive style as leveler, as swearing frequency and social class status are commonly found to be inversely correlated (McEnery 2006, 44).

Ronan O’Gara’s claims for rugby’s cross-class inclusivity stem from his own celebrity persona as a ‘legendary’ former Munster player. He is currently coach of French club La Rochelle. In August 2023, a video of a club team talk where he mixes French, English and abundant swearing in a Cork accent was widely viewed online, accumulating 6.8 million views on Twitter/X (Naughton 2023). His exclamation that ‘l’opportunité, c’est fucking énorme’ soon featured on a t-shirt by Hairy Baby (Collins 2023), a company producing merchandise celebrating quirky aspects of ‘Irishness’. A reply to the O’Gara video (Naughton 2023) remarked: he ‘sounds like some Norrie [Cork slang for someone from the city’s poorer northside] looking for a scrap outside [a fast-food restaurant] on a Sat[urday] night’. The British Guardian newspaper’s Ireland correspondent Rory Carroll (2023) remarked that ‘French may be the language of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Voltaire, but sometimes it takes a rugby player from Cork to inject extra oomph,’ adding, ‘it was not a speech to win a medal from the Académie Française language watchdog’. There is an evident reveling here in both the bastardised French and the deviation from the habitually jargon laden vocabulary of rugby coaching. ‘Cork’, like ‘Limerick’ before it, becomes code for a blurring of class boundaries (even though the Norrie reference is pejorative) in the context of Irish rugby. Carroll’s literary references nod to the implied class background of the British readership while highlighting that class is not ‘done’ as usual, or indeed is undone, in Ireland.

Concluding remarks

This article has sought to explore how the imbrication of rugby, class hierarchy and education in Ireland is displaced, in Irish media discourses, onto regional and stylistic differences where the materiality of class is underplayed, invisible or repudiated. Although impossible to quantify, Irish media have undoubtedly contributed significantly to popularising this minority participant sport.

Frequently cited as a satire of class and privilege in Irish rugby and society, the enduring character of Ross O’Carroll Kelly illustrates the limits of this form given his and writer Paul Howard’s apparent embrace, perhaps even co-option, by the class he satirizes. Along with the lampooned variants in the Gordon’s Game books he has become a vehicle for the media-facilitated performances of ordinary ‘everyman’-ness by celebrity players from precisely this background. Irish media, in conjunction with such retrospective vehicles as autobiographies and television documentaries, have also contributed to the creation of narratives of provinces-as-clubs, with ideal-typical differences whose resolution in national team participation has fueled narratives of national team success. If the arrogance of wealth and privilege in rugby is personified in Ross, class difference in narratives of Munster rugby is less easily discernible and embodied. ‘Ireland’ equals the vibrant dynamic between, and mutual respect of the two.

More broadly, the characterisations of Ireland’s four provinces as clubs and the tensions and linkages between them afford Irish rugby a unique north/south/east/west cultural geography. The western province, Connacht, only retained its funding as a professional club following widespread protest in 2003, thus establishing a ‘foundation myth’ of underdogs successfully defeating the ‘blazerati’ (a supporters’ metonymic pun on blazer, the stereotypical uniform of rugby’s elite bureaucrats (Cooke and Ó Cofaigh 2017, 212)). Ulster rugby, incorporating the six counties of Northern Ireland, and three in the Republic, is predominantly Protestant and Unionist in its players’ and clubs’ composition (Bairner 2003, 529). Such media texts as BT Sport’s Shoulder to Shoulder (Williams 2018) documentary have explored the complex tensions between religious and national identity for Ulster players who identify politically as British but play for Ireland. Here, Brian O’Driscoll as presenter and mediator highlights rugby’s integrative potential, though with an underexplored, implicit cross-border social class affinity. This is also evident in the television documentary Andrew Trimble: For Ulster and Ireland (Little 2024), which partly uses rugby as a prism through which to explore the tensions between Ulster, British and (in a sporting context) Irish identities. Although addressing cultural issues in an ethno-religious sense, former Ulster/Ireland player Trimble is remarkably unreflexive regarding his privileged Protestant private school education and (comparably to many other Irish rugby stars), how his path into business investment as a sports tech firm executive (Taylor 2024) was facilitated by his trajectory through elite rugby.

This cultural geography makes regular interprovincial contests compelling ‘derbies’ in which regional masculinities and rivalries eclipse class affinities and differences. The players are often represented as a friendly confraternity for whom the ‘bragging rights’ (e.g. O’Connor 2022) from inter-provincial victories when reunited on ‘Ireland duties’ as the national team are a key prize. They have contributed to the ascent of rugby as a popular spectator sport in the nebulous sphere of ‘middle Ireland’, a characteristically ‘Irish’ way of hedging around and downplaying potentially vexed issues of class difference and hierarchy. The image of a confraternity whose fierce on-field rivalry yields to amicability off-field also signifies the endurance, from the amateur era, of some elite detachment from, or ‘disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu 1978, 824; Pope 2015, 6.19) in, the significance of competitive outcomes, despite the professional context.

As a final observation, it should be noted that this article is restricted, in range, to media circulating principally within the Irish Republic. As the British broadcasters BBC and ITV have Northern Ireland-based regional variations, and such newspapers as the Belfast Telegraph and The Irish News primarily circulate there, there is ample scope for further comparative research on the complex ethno-religious and class intersections in media across both jurisdictions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Statistics for rugby participation in Ireland have been unevenly and inconsistently gathered over time. Despite its evidently growing television popularity, Liam O’Callaghan (2017, 16) observes that rugby’s share of Irish sports playing participants fluctuated between 1 and 1.5% from 2005–2015. The Irish Sports Monitor (Sport Ireland 2021, 39) reported that just 1% of the population were members of rugby clubs, compared to 10% for a Gaelic games club. Gerry Thornley (2022) notes that Ireland’s 79,000 “registered” club players “only betters Scotland (46,000-­registered players) to any degree among the top 11 rugby countries,” thus rendering Ireland’s international competitive achievements a “miracle.” However, Lunn and Kelly (2019, i) report that over 10% of children aged under 13 “play regular rugby,” a significant contrast with much lower adult participation.

2 The Lions are a squad composed of international players from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. They tour one of New Zealand, South Africa or Australia every four years.