As a female from America I enjoy rugby-style football , hockey NASCAR & bull riding & didn't hear about hurling until I you tubed a video by comedian Josh pray & now I'm hooked like a fish
I taped some Hurling and Gaelic Football off of Sportvision one year, but this RU-vid has the best we can get in the US. There is a Pub in San Francisco and they get Satellite feed. I asked one time and they would not tell me. Would be nice to get live games. And why do they say Munster instead of Mumhain?
Glad you enjoy the sports! There's a subscription service called GAA Go that a lot of emigrants around the world use to watch live GAA games outside Ireland. Re: munster/mumhain - it's a bit of a curious one I suppose in that hurling and gaelic football are among of the purest expressions of Irish culture out there, but most of the language used to do with it is in English. Just for convenience sake and because English use was built up over years and was generally speaking lost among the majority of the population since the famine; so people would probably look at someone a bit funny if the province was referred as Mumhain outside of the context of a conversation that was happening in Irish/gaelic itself. There's quite a reflexive process overall however - the ball used in the game is only referred to by its Irish language name, sliotar, for example. The managers have 'Bainisteoir' written on their shirts, but they're usually just referred to as 'the ____(team) manager'. Each county and indeed basically every place name in Ireland has an English and Irish version of its name. At a lot of GAA games there tends to be one scoreboard with the counties' names written in English, and another scoreboard at the other end where the names are in Irish. So for this game it'd be "An Chláir vs Luimneach". Also it's common for people in the crowd to use an Irish language expression like "Luimneach abú" ('Go Limerick!' / 'Victory to Limerick') but when chatting happens among fans it'd be rare for someone to use the Irish name, people would more so say something like "Limerick played poorly today" etc. Overall I'd say Irish language is an important touchstone for embodying the strong tradition of the game - and does indeed have real relevance in many ways - but generalised English language use is a reality of today's world
