Ireland head to France as the world’s No 1 side and looking to banish memories of 2015 and 2019 disappointment
We are in the midst of the boom years of Irish rugby, yet the current run of success at the top of the men’s game is no accident.
In 2011 a gathering of all of Irish rugby’s most important bodies, including the men’s head coach at the time in Declan Kidney and provincial coaches, came together with the incentive to devote more energy into the success of the national team. This was partly due to the team’s importance in terms of generating revenue, which was then pumped back into the provinces and used to develop the national game. In essence, that group met to modernise a governing process which increasingly appeared to be a holdover from before professionalism.
“You couldn’t drive the professional game forward on the old-style committee processes which were set up in the amateur era,” explains Kevin Potts, now chief executive of the Irish Rugby Football Union and previously chief operating officer. “You needed a decision-making body, and a leader in a performance director with the autonomy to drive forward the professional game at all times with the primacy of Ireland coming first, but also ensuring parallel with that we would have successful provinces competing with each other, and a truly high-performance structure provided for the players and pathways.”
Thus, ‘Plan Ireland’ was born. A National Professional Game Board was created and former Wallabies hooker David Nucifora hired to take up the performance director post. In the time since his appointment at the start of June 2014, Ireland have won two Grand Slams, a series in New Zealand and a first-ever Test victory in South Africa. Failure to progress beyond the quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup in 2015 and 2019 has been the only disappointment, although that could soon be rectified with Ireland heading into the World Cup as the No 1 side in the world for a second consecutive tournament. Aside from France and South Africa, Ireland are the envy of the rest of the world. Nucifora will notably depart after the 2024 Olympic Games.