To the list of the Kearneys, Rory Best, Sean O'Brien and Tadhg Furlong was added Darren Sweetnam this month. The Munster winger is the latest player from farming stock to join Joe Schmidt's Ireland squad.
Sweetnam, along with Bundee Aki, won his first Ireland cap in the record victory against South Africa earlier this month.
Tadhg Furlong was happy to see so many new faces in the Ireland squad, telling RTÉ Sport that he would have played against many of them at underage level.
"I played with Chris Farrell under 18s in the club system and to team up with him has been really good. You get to know people, you get to meet them and play with them. It's been really enjoyable."
The addition Sweetnam, in particular, has excited the Leinster tighthead prop. Furlong grew up on a modest farm of 50 or 60 acres, Sweetnam's is far larger.
You meet Darren Sweetnam, who is from my mother's neck of the woods down in West Cork. I was shocked, Sweets has 8,000 pigs at home in Dunmanway, which is something else! It's a lot of pigs.
I don't have 8,000 pigs, we're a small little operation down in Wexford, just humble little farmers.
Picture credit: Sportsfile
