Cricket reached Ireland early. The Military of Ireland and the Gentlemen of Ireland played each other in Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1731, and the club founded there is still going - one of the oldest in the world. The first Ireland national team played England's Gentlemen in 1855. But the game had a problem. In 1902 the Gaelic Athletic Association, the body governing hurling and Gaelic football, introduced Rule 27, banning its members from playing 'foreign' games. Cricket counted. So did soccer and rugby. Anyone who turned out for an Irish cricket team risked being thrown out of the GAA - and in much of rural Ireland, the GAA was social life. The ban lasted until 1970. For nearly seven decades cricket survived in Ireland mostly in Protestant schools, Anglo-Irish estates, and unionist communities, treated by much of the country as a 'garrison game' of the departed British Army. The Northwest, around Derry and the border counties, kept the game alive in its clubs - Bready, Strabane, Limavady - long enough for the modern team to be built on those foundations.

The 2007 World Cup was Ireland's first. Their match against Zimbabwe ended in a tie - Jeremy Bray scoring Ireland's first World Cup century, Trent Johnston and Andre Botha bowling out the closing overs with miser-like economy. Then came Pakistan on St Patrick's Day. Wicketkeeper Niall O'Brien played the innings of his life, scoring 72 from 107 balls as Ireland chased a small target across a slow pitch. Boyd Rankin and Johnston had taken three wickets each in the morning to keep Pakistan to 132. When Ireland won, the Caribbean and most of Ireland went briefly mad. Pakistan, ranked fourth, were eliminated. Ireland advanced to the Super 8s, where they also beat Bangladesh by 74 runs - a second Test nation knocked over in the same tournament. They flew home to a heroes' welcome in Dublin. Cricket Ireland introduced player contracts in 2009 and a fully professional system shortly after. The amateur era was finished.

Four years later, in the 2011 World Cup, Ireland needed 328 to beat England in Bangalore. They were 111 for 5. Kevin O'Brien - red-haired, hard-hitting, slightly chaotic - walked out and played one of the most extraordinary innings in cricket. He reached his century in 50 balls, the fastest in World Cup history. Ireland won with three wickets and five balls to spare, beating their old colonial cousins in a chase nobody had thought possible. In 2015 they did it again to the West Indies, chasing 304 with 25 balls to spare. Three of the only five successful 300-plus run chases in World Cup history belong to Ireland. The Northwest's club cricketers had grown up into a team that could embarrass anyone.

On 22 June 2017, at an ICC meeting in London, Ireland and Afghanistan were both granted Full Member status - the eleventh and twelfth Test-playing nations. Ireland's first Test was played at The Village in Malahide, near Dublin, against Pakistan on 11 to 15 May 2018. Kevin O'Brien made 118, the first Test century by an Irishman, in a losing cause. They would lose their first seven Tests. On 1 March 2024, in Abu Dhabi, they finally won one - beating Afghanistan by six wickets in their eighth match. Four months later, at Stormont in Belfast, Ireland beat Zimbabwe by four wickets for their first Test victory on home soil. The team trains across grounds at Malahide in Dublin, Stormont in Belfast, Clontarf, and Bready in the Northwest, with a new ground planned for the National Sports Campus at Abbotstown in 2030. Ireland remains, as of 2025, the only Test nation whose women's team played Test cricket before its men's did - the women received their first Test cap in 2000, seventeen years before the men. The garrison game became something else along the way: an Irish team that wins on its own terms.