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In the early 1980s Ron Barassi and Barry Richardson announced to the football world that the Dees were to prospect the Emerald isle for potential players. This proposal was met with a combination of amusement, skepticism and scorn by the wider VFL (as it then was) community. That attitude changed markedly when we in our early batch we produced 2 All Australian recruits and had possibly a 3rd in Paul Earley if he hadn't been consumed by homesickness and returned home. The recruiting move was a radical success. Fast forward to 2024, and ironic as it seems many clubs have Irish players, (in some cases like Brisbane and Geelong more than one), and we as the founders of the scheme have no-one at all. In fact it is more than 20 years since our last Irish hopefuls Kevin Devine and Nick Walsh tried out. I acknowledge that the AFL made things difficult for us, which is of itself not unusual, after the Wight-Stynes recruiting coup, by requiring us to use draft picks to recruit this untried talent. But now we can use Category B selections so this is no longer a valid excuse. What happened? Where did it go wrong? Why aren't we even in the market for these players? Don't we have a past network of contacts to assist in the process? Irish players are not even mentioned in men's recruiting discussions at all although in fairness the women's team has been creditably proactive. We just seem to just have this fascination with basketballers who are tall but not much else as our category B rookie targets. Can you throw light on why we are no longer interested in rebooting the Irish experiment?