Ireland (14 Viewers)

[JohnnyRaz]

I went to a GAA school, if you wanted to play rugby you had to join the rugby club and do it outside school hours and then the school wouldn't let you play GAA for the school, although I think would be allowed compete in athletics stuff. But there was no rugby school, you just joined the rugby club if you wanted to play rugby and it wasn't a class thing as far as I saw. Is "rugby is for rich kids" just a Dublin thing?

Think there’s a strong association with fee paying schools all over Ireland (the exception being in Limerick really) - that said there were two rugby clubs in Laois, neither of which had posh associations

 

[Cornu Ammonis]

I went to De La Salle in Churchtown, probably the least posh of all the rugby schools in South Dublin. I hated the place. Everything revolved around the cult of the rugby team. I remember a bunch of us being reprimanded for not trying out for the team. Then there were the half days so you could go attend the match, and being gathered in the hall beforehand to practice the chants. Education took a back-seat to all this. Everything was so half-arsed. My maths teacher was League of Ireland's Dermot Keely, who never showed up for class. There were the usual couple of teachers who were known for their fits of violence. The whole place just had a weird vibe. My parents took me out of it after a couple of years and put me in a community school, which was so much better.

I used to play indoor football there until covid hit.

Is "rugby is for rich kids" just a Dublin thing?

I don’t think so - I think most “status” schools have it but the big ones in Dublin suck most of the air out of the room when it comes to rugby. My school had a really good rugby team at the time but as far as I know it’s not played there at all any more. I was on the chess team so not in a good position to know what the sports nerds were doing compared to us brain jocks.

 

[UnicronUnicron is verified member.]

The kids didn’t remark upon it too much I don’t think. No doubt parents were more aware of what people had or didn’t have

Come to think of it in retrospect that'd be my experience. There was plenty of kids being horrible to each other like they can be but no one seemed to have a go over money. I went to a small country primary school of 82

 

[UnicronUnicron is verified member.]

Was it like cheer leading stuff?

Where I went you used to get press ganged into chanting practice on the lunchtime of days in the run up to senior cup matches.

 

[UnicronUnicron is verified member.]

I went to a GAA school, if you wanted to play rugby you had to join the rugby club and do it outside school hours and then the school wouldn't let you play GAA for the school, although I think would be allowed compete in athletics stuff. But there was no rugby school, you just joined the rugby club if you wanted to play rugby and it wasn't a class thing as far as I saw. Is "rugby is for rich kids" just a Dublin thing?

Are you a midlander?

 

[Denny Oubidoux]

Are you a midlander?

I am

 

[UnicronUnicron is verified member.]

I am

Lot of big strong farmer's sons playing in the local clubs of Laois and Offally.

 

[nuke terrorist]

Lot of big strong farmer's sons playing in the local clubs of Laois and Offally.

One of them bullied me at the rugby school I went to for 6 months!
Only bully in that school or same year as me at any school I went to.

A highlight was when he put whitewash on my face during PE. After he tried to put it in my eye I put some whitewash on his face as mutual assured destruction, hoping he would stop. Teacher supervising kept looking the other way instead of doing what he was paid to do when only 7 or 8 of us were there. Then despite state of my face teacher put me in detention and did nothing to rugby kid. On way back inside teacher told me detention was rescinded.
Two bullies for price of one. Not a safe place to be.

Most boggers who play rugby are ordinary working class folks and there's no rugby schools here closer than Limerick 35-40 miles away.
Lots of kids play hurling and soccer and rugby inc. my nephews. who played matches in all three in same weekend!
They now just play hurling and soccer.

 

[ann post]

In my experience people who play rugby are usually the really really large people.

I see bundi aki in the shop sometimes, he's my height, yet i look like a string in the wind compared to him

 

[nuke terrorist]

My cousin was a second row as a teen in a co. Wexford rugby club.
He was once going on about how bulked up smaller lads he had played with became in the 2000's:
"If it sounds like I'm saying they must be on drugs - that's exactly what I'm saying!"

EDIT: fixed typos

 

[UnicronUnicron is verified member.]

In my experience people who play rugby are usually the really really large people.

I see bundi aki in the shop sometimes, he's my height, yet i look like a string in the wind compared to him

I'm a big lad but I remember once standing beside Dennis Hickie, a winger, who is just shorter than me and he looked like a square block of musdle next to me

 

[rettucs]

I'm a big lad but I remember once standing beside Dennis Hickie, a winger, who is just shorter than me and he looked like a square block of musdle next to me

jaysus remember there was a time you'd see him at every gig going. Total billy-no-mates at gigs though (same as me so no issue with that).

then Hot Press did a feature on him calling him 'Rugby's Mr.Rock'n'Roll' and Phantom gave him a radio show.

morto

 

[rettucs]

I went to a non-private ‘rugby’ school that should’ve been a GAA school as one of my classmates was an All-Ireland winning captain for Dublin.

I think I know who that lad was.

 

[magicbastarder]

Very good friend of mine was a rugby player; his last ever match, and his last ever tackle resulted in a dislocated shoulder, broken arm and torn ACL. He only managed to finish one season in the last four he played. He broke his jaw his leg (separately) which finished two of those other seasons.

 

[seanc]

I went to a rugby school. It was also a boarding school, but only 20% boarders. They seemed weird, but then maybe that was just us slagging them for an obvious difference. Family wealth or lack of rarely came up

It was far more successful as a a GAA school but a couple of the teachers really believed it was a rugby school.

I had no idea what that meant until I moved to Dublin. In that context, it was only as much a rugby school as Blackburn are Man City.

 

[magicbastarder]

place i went to - castleknock college - had been exclusively boarding until two years before i started. no boarders left now.
most famous person in my year, by some margin, would be colin farrell.

 

[hydromancer]

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[hydromancer]

Rugby was never played at my school as far as I know maybe they did it when I wasn't looking

 

[egg_]

I played rugby twice in 5th class and loved it. It was probably my most friendless year in school, and the great thing about rugby was nobody needed to pass to you for you to be involved, you could just jump on fellas and cause chaos. I was never big, but at age 11 the size difference isn't so significant that a reckless small lad can't pull a bg lad to the ground

I didn't take it up as a sport though, started learning double bass in 6th class and it was all music from there on

 

[rettucs]

Unless you want to be a rugby player I fail to see any point in fee paying schools. Every kid has to do the same exams.
In my generation boarding schools had a very conservative borstal element to them by all accounts. Being sent there is an affliction of being well off (or protestant). They institutionalise kids when they should be finding some independence.

Depends on the boarding school too. Lots of kids from broken homes, or with negligent parents offloaded their kids in boarding schools too.

Interesting convo about the fee-paying schools. I went to the local secondary school in Templeogue. When I was in first year, the school was in its 5th year of existence, so the first leaving-certers were doing their exams. That was in 1986. Over the next couple of years the area started to evolve from somewhere that country folk in Dublin bought their first house, to somewhere closer to the upper end of middle-class.

There weren't enough kids in our area to fill the school (there was another secondary school in Templeogue too), so kids came from Tallaght, Terenure, even Blessington, to make up the numbers. Anyway, purely by virtue of the type of area it was, and the relatively comfortable backgrounds of the kids, it became a high-performing school with around 70% of each leaving cert year going onto third level. That compared with our closest school in Tallaght (about 2 miles away) which would have around 30%.

Maybe fee-paying schools yield better results overall, but the type of area a school is in has a lot to do with it too