Why is rugby/the Irish rugby team so popular?

All the ones in my townland and surrounding areas, if you don't live in the right spot. Like I said, when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to play with the club my friends all went to because I was from a different area and due to politics, I couldn't play. A family member was doing extremely well in hurling, but had to jump through hoops to be allowed to play because again, he was from the wrong area. This is despite our local team not even having a hurling team for him to play on but for a long time, they refused to give permission for him to play with a club that actually had a hurling team.

There is no good or bad areas here. There's two (an astro and a fenced field) in a mountain range.

Haha you might have a point there 😂

compared to other national hobby's rugby is preferable ,

apart from very recently the football team is a bad joke

horse racing is good but hard to get involved with apart from as a punter

boxing ? i have some interest and been to a few pro shows but it attracts some amount of scumbags , decent people too but the scumbags ruin it. armature boxing can be very good though

brought up playing gaa track and field soccer and rugby as a youngling and was probably best at hurling but enjoyed rugby more , great respect for players and refs , better S and C people , medical protocals and opportunities to make it as a career , even the clubs and club houses are better looked after. the tribal rubbish attached to Gaa isnt really present in the same way. as for soccer , just look at the situation with refs this weekend due to because an threats , never heard of that in rugby .

Why just those 2 places is there no other working class in Dublin. Also why just Dublin. There are 11 other counties in Leinster and 31 in whole thar make up the Irish team

No point in trying to answer an idiotic point like this. This is comparable to saying you won't support Irish soccer unless there's a college-educated rich kid from Kilkenny in the team. Just beyond stupid.

Right, I can understand people who have lived in Liverpool or Manchester for a time following the clubs. That would make up quite a small proportion of the fans though. Other Irish people having emigrated there in a past is a fairly tenuous connection. The vast majority of fans of the EPL in Ireland support the most successful teams. Arsenal would have been quite popular about 15 years ago and Manchester City not so much, the situation is reversed now.

Anything stopping them from following the LOI now? In the UK you get people supporting their local team, they don't all support MU/MC/Liverpool/Chelsea. A lot of the comments from football supporters here were to the effect that a lot rugby fans are jumping on the bandwagon, yet football is the worst for this. Very few fans follow the LOI. Who cares if it isn't as good as the EPL, at least it is our own, the teams aren't owned by russian oligarchs or shieks.

Not being as good can be a bit of a deal breaker. I've been to plenty of LOI matches overthe years and found them to be a bit boring. Someone said earlier about the lack of support being the cause of the lack of quality and they're porbably right. But is it just down to funding? Is the coaching ability there to drive a team on to compete in Europe? Even at grass roots level to feed the top teams?

Go to Limerick and it is too.

I spent as much time on the green in front of my house, in my corporation estate playing rugby in my childhood as I did playing soccer.

That doesn't solve the big problem of other people enjoying it though.

Again, a completely idiotic point. Unless trolling, why embarrass yourself like that?

Vast majority of people would have more family around their local area than they would have in Liverpool or Manchester. You don't get someone from Cavan supporting the Dublin football side because they have a cousin in Dublin. It seems to be only a soccer thing to use that sort of excuse, I think that deep down most "fans" know it is a bit ridiculous to be supporting the EPL teams. I mean nothing wrong with enjoying watching it, but actually supporting a team is something different.