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Queen’s College Galway Rugby Club was founded in 1874, 150 years ago, making it the oldest rugby club in Connacht. They have a long and proud history and have helped nurture and boost many rugby careers helping players to the highest levels. They were a founding club of the Irish Rugby Football Union. They won their first Connacht Senior Cup in 1897 and have managed to hold that trophy aloft many times since. Their first victory in the Dudley Cup, played for by the three Queen’s Universities, was in 1905. They have featured many times in the Bateman Cup, an exclusive competition in which clubs participate by invitation only.

The distinguished historian Gerry Hayes McCoy, a graduate of the Bish, once wrote of his alma mater: “Going to school is the greatest emotional experience of a lifetime, the greatest and least forgettable. Do you remember how the sun shone through that wire-meshed window, shone in on your childhood, the bright sun of long ago? Do you smell again the smell of school-warm varnish, leather, bread and butter, ink, powder, books, boys? Do you remember the flinty yard, tree-shaded; the speaking river; the screaming seagulls on a frosty morning? How cold could it be! Do you remember the lighting of the fire — how it smoked without heat, how it smouldered. Do you remember the wonderful morning when the key of the school was lost and who-was-it was sent up town to the shop where — how unsporting — they kept a box of keys to thwart just so delirious a possibility.”

The first team to represent Connacht in rugby played against Leinster on December 8 1885. At that time, the game in the west was played by just a few schools. In the city, it was really only UCG and the Grammar School who played with any regularity. By the beginning of the last century the Jes, the Bish, and St Mary’s were competing. The growth of the game was interrupted by World War I and by the War of Independence, but it improved a lot after the truce.