Hurling...a question for Stav.

I'm not particularly interested in either Gaelic sport football or hurling, but they are the first and second sports of Ireland with soccer being third and rugby being fourth.
Both Gaelic sports are big in Ireland though Gaelic football is the bigger of the two. Each of them are played under the auspicious of the GAA or Gaelic Athletics Association. Each of the 32 counties on the island of Ireland to some extent play them and most enter the major competition of each their respective provinces and the winners of those go in to play in the all Ireland semi final and then there is final. Some counties focus on football over hurling or vice versa, few play really well from my understanding. I believe Kilkenny has overall been the most successful county at hurling.

Both the All Ireland finals in football and hurling would fill Croke Park so they would have 82,000 in attendance but regular spectators would be in the low thousands until you get to the finals of the provincial championships. Hurling also has a variant played by women called Camogie (over 100,000 play), so in all there would be hundreds of thousand of players of hurling Ireland..
Its just not a sport I follow, my county of Westmeath doesn't really play it and I've always been more of a rugby follower. However I understand hurling has a great reputation as a sport to watch more so than Gaelic Football. I believe multiple sports correspondents from different countries who have been taken to watch the All Ireland Hurling final have described it as one of the greatest sporting events in the world.
The Irish diaspora in other countries tend to play it as well, and sometimes they got to play the home teams as well but obviously its not a major sport outside of Ireland.
Some Gaelic sports players do cross over into rugby and its often be cited as reason why Irish rugby players can be quite athletic in the air, they pick that up from GAA sports.
Rugby has definitely got more popular in Ireland in recent years, something brought about being relatively successful. Most people nowadays in Ireland have no issue following both but you have small minority of traditional GAA supporters who don't follow "foreign sports (aka English sports)". In previous generations if you played soccer or rugby in Ireland you where banned from playing Gaelic sports. My father played rugby and one of his teammates at the time had to play under a fake name to play rugby as a result.