Ireland has many claims to fame as far as hockey is concerned. The island’s traditional stick and ball game of hurley can be dated back to very early times.

It is little surprise therefore that when the organised game of hockey began to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Irish were particularly adept at it. In a year when Ireland will be playing in the Olympic Games and only for the second time, it must be remembered that both the Irish men and women featured in both of the first ever international hockey matches in 1895 and 1896 respectively. That is a deserved honour that many countries would covert.

An examination of the early years of Irish men’s hockey reveals a very interesting thread, that is the numbers of sets of brothers who played for their country in that period. It could be said that with only a few people playing the sport there were bound to be lots of brothers but in fact hockey in Ireland flourished very quickly and the clubs proliferated from the start of hockey in 1892. By 1894 there were 16 clubs and by 1896 the number had risen to 27. By 1898 there were 4 provincial branches of the Union with clubs flourishing in all.

By 1914 and the start of WW1, Ireland men had played 55 international matches, most within the British Isles. 55 matches in the days before substitutes meant that 605 individual team selections had been made. Of these, at least 164 selections were brothers – well over a quarter. The ‘brotherhood’ started with the first match of 1895 with the Birmingham brothers and went on to include 6 lots of 3 brothers and the unparalleled Paterson brothers, of whom 6 played for Ireland and on one occasion with 5 in the same team.

The writer suspects the faint possibility of another record lurking within these statistics; that is, was one of the same name pairings actually a father and son?