Irish treble encouraging

On an encouraging day for Irish rowing, the home country won three of the four team prizes on offer at the Home International meet at Inniscarra on Saturday. The senior men, senior women and junior men all won, with only the junior women missing out, and then by only two points.

The blazing sunshine and smooth operation of the competition at a venue looking increasingly like a fitting home for international meets lifted the mood of the home crowd; but it was the manner of the victories in some of the key races which was most heartening.

In one of the best races of the day, the all-Muckross senior men's pair of Sean Casey (21), the stroke, and Paul Griffin (19) saw off repeated pushes by their England rivals, University of London's Dave Hutchins and Charles Foinette, to break free and win convincingly by six seconds. "We got a half length on them and Sean kept bringing up the rate," said Griffin. "We had another one or two gears, too," said Casey, a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, to a disbelieving look from Griffin.

The win helped set up a crowd-pleasing finish: while the Irish senior eight could not master an England crew, built around the Oxford Brookes coxed four which had earlier won, the Irish had done enough to know that a win in the last race of the day, the quadruple scull, would bring them the top prize - and the quad duly engineered an emphatic win to rousing cheers.

Ireland also failed to win the women's senior eights, but full points totals in the quadruple, double and lightweight single scull were sufficient to see off England. Ireland did not win the quad or double but second place to Belgium, who were not part of the Home International series, was enough. However, Kilkenny woman Ailis Holohan had a good win in the lightweight single, with seven seconds to spare at the end.

Similarly, it was the scullers who engineered Ireland's win in the junior men's section: the all-Skibbereen quad had a brilliant win over an England crew which, as Tiffin School, won the National Championships this year.

John Whooley won the B final in the heavyweight single scull competition at the Nations Cup (under-23 international) in Hamburg yesterday in seven minutes. The 20-year-old Skibbereen man had come through the repechage to make the semi-final but could not secure an A final spot.

Ross O'Donovan lost out when finishing fourth in the repechage of the lightweight single sculls.