Opinion
Rural rugby in Connacht hit by numbers drop off
Talking Sport with Stephen Glennon
One of the stalwarts of local rugby, Monivea RFC’s Padraic McGann, has called on the IRFU to tackle the problems of falling numbers in the domestic game in rural areas due to emigration and he proposes they look to instate the sport into every national school countrywide to combat this decline.
While other sporting organisations, such as the GAA, may be better able to absorb the losses, McGann insist most rural rugby clubs are struggling after a half decade of mass emigration. For Monivea’s part, they had the large numbers to cope at the outset but this ongoing trend is now having a major impact.
The collapse of the construction industry not only forced many of their tradesmen abroad but those who have chosen to stay at home have ended up working jobs not really conducive to a sporting lifestyle – or at least team sports.
“It has been three or four tough years,” says the Monivea RFC Treasurer. “The majority of our players were tradesmen and now this recession has come and it has closed our ‘university’. I looked on our university as FAS. Gone are the electricians, blocklayers, carpenters and plumbers, so many trades.
“We had 20 [tradesmen] at one stage and of those you always had 10 or 11 players – your hard core – available. They had a job locally and the local man would let them off to play with us. They were different times. What has replaced that? There is a total vacuum now and nothing has replaced it.”
He ponders what the future holds for rural rugby and believes after four or five years the penny is now beginning to drop. “Now, rugby people in Connacht are beginning to understand that. To play U-20 in Connacht is a huge problem because the clubs are struggling to field teams at that grade.
“At underage, we are doing a bomb up to U-17, as is every other club, and then from 17 to 19, you are losing about 50%. After 19, what you are holding onto, you just don’t know where they will end up with jobs and everything. You see, when we had the ‘university’, they had jobs as plasterers and plumbers.”
He recalls a few years ago contacting 41 young men from the club who were eligible for the U-20 rugby team. “I think 19 of them were in the big supermarkets – SuperValu, Tesco, Dunnes Stores, Lidl and Aldi – and most of these were country people, farmers, who you thought would never end up working there.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.