Clontarf

Clontarf went the whole 2024–25 season chasing a fourth All-Ireland League Division I title, and got it by beating Terenure College, adding it to a run of three earlier wins in 2013–14, 2015–16 and 2021–22. The first of those, in 2014, came down to a single point. The 2016 final was closer still on the scoreboard, 22–21 against Cork Constitution at the Aviva Stadium, and in 2022 nearly 6,000 people watched them see off St Mary's College at the same ground. The same season that brought the league title also delivered a Leinster Senior Cup, won 19–17 against Lansdowne, and that competition has a longer, stranger history for the club: a first win in 1936 was followed by nothing until 1999, a gap of 63 years before Clontarf worked out how to win it again.

The Bateman Cup went the other way — Clontarf had never held it until the 2025–26 campaign.

Castle Avenue holds 3,200 and doubles as the Clontarf Cricket Club's ground. The Bulls, or Tarf, take that second nickname from Cluain Tarbh, the meadow of the bull the area is named for, and their sharpest fixture is against Dublin University, still called the Capital City Derby by those who go to both. Cian Healy, Tadhg Furlong and Brian O'Driscoll all came through here on their way to Ireland shirts. None of that explains 1876, when a group in Dublin first put a rugby side together on a patch of ground that, twenty years later, would become the one they still play on.