Professional sport psychology in Ireland

Abstract

Sporting prowess has been venerated in Ireland for over a thousand years yet despite the ancient respect for athleticism, ‘sport psychology’, or the application of psychological principles and techniques to sport settings, represents a relatively recent development in Ireland. What is more, relatively little is known aboutthe mental skills of Irish sport performers or their use of mental skills training. In an effort to rectify this oversight, the present paper traces the rise of sport psychology in Ireland and reports the results of a testing programme in which the mental skills of a large sample N = 456) of Irish athletes were profiled using the ‘Psychological Skills Inventory for Sports (PSIS-R5; Mahoney, 1989).