The King’s Inns, a byword for snobbery and elitism, last week registered a hurling team with GAA headquarters. The legal academy will take the field for the first time next month. That’s quite a journey for a body which claims to be the country’s “oldest institution of legal education” having being founded in 1549 during the reign of Henry VIII.
Justice Joseph Finnegan, the president of the High Court, has lent the club an aura of prestige by agreeing to become president. Those opponents who think the wigs-and-gowns brigade will be a pushover on the pitch will be in for a surprise: two talented inter-county hurlers will be togging out for them.
The King’s Inns hurling club has entered division three of the Fitzgibbon Cup, a championship among Ireland’s third-level colleges. The first match will be away to St Mary’s of Belfast on February 11.
One of the driving forces behind the team is James McDonald, a Wexford hurler whose career seemed over after he was knocked down by a lorry in 2001. McDonald made a good recovery and returned to senior hurling last year.
“I think this will be positive for the college,” he said yesterday. “There has never been a GAA club in King’s Inns. People may not realise that students from all over Ireland come here and they have a wide interest in sport. So we decided to make a bit of a stand.”
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Ostai an Ri, the club’s Irish name, will play in a red and black strip. Rory Hanniffy, a senior Offaly player, is among those eligible to play.
The team jerseys even sport the name The King’s Inn — since the gear was sponsored by the students’ local pub of the same name. But when it comes to facilities, the barristers have to scrounge like every other GAA club in Ireland. The team has been training in Phoenix Park, but hopes to graduate to a floodlit pitch in Ballymun.
The Honorable Society of King’s Inns comprises benchers, barristers and students, and is regarded as Ireland’s most elite educational institution. The benchers include all the judges of the Supreme and High Courts and a number of elected barristers. Former taoiseach Jack Lynch, who won five All-Ireland hurling medals for Cork, studied law there.
Tommy Horan, the hurling club’s chairman from Tralee, said: “A four-man committee met before Christmas with a view to setting up a hurling club in the Inns. We wanted to make a statement that playing hurling in the Inns would change the whole public image of the institution.
“It’s high time hurling came out of here.”