Hurling in Ireland: Is the ‘Clash of the Ash’ Becoming a ‘Battle of Bamboo’?

The horde of helmeted players raced up the field like warriors headed into battle, with the slap of a ball against the wooden sticks they wielded, known as hurleys, ringing out as they sped toward the goal posts.

With powerful grace, the players deftly switched between passing, carrying and smacking the small leather ball, which sometimes whizzed through the air half the length of the enormous pitch to the delight of the crowd.

It was the All-Ireland Hurling Senior Championship, the pinnacle of the sport, with County Clare eventually winning the final against County Cork in front of about 82,000 spectators at Croke Park stadium in Dublin.

Hurling — one of Ireland’s national sports — has long been known as “the clash of the ash” for the sturdy hurleys that craftsmen have fashioned for centuries from Ireland’s ash trees. The formidable, three-foot-long sticks are core to the game, which to an outsider can look like a cross between baseball, lacrosse and rugby. They are used not only to pass the ball, but also to carry it, and of course to score, either by whacking the ball over the goal’s crossbar or whipping it into the net below.

But when the country’s elite players took the field in Dublin in July, the hurleys in the hands of some of them were made of an innovative material not native to the island: bamboo.

After hundreds of years of players using ash hurleys almost exclusively, the shift has been borne of necessity. A disease known as ash dieback has decimated forests across Europe and is expected to wipe out 90 percent of Ireland’s ash trees within the next two decades.

For a traditional sport like hurling, woven deeply into the fabric of Irish life, the prospect was alarming, threatening the very heart of the game. But the early adapters of the new sticks had good news.

“There’s no difference,” said David Fitzgerald, one of the victorious Clare players who switched to bamboo from ash a few years ago. “If anything, from my point of view, it’s a positive, because it’s more consistent.”

When it became clear that the future of ash was bleak, and with the price for the wood skyrocketing across Europe, those who fashion the hurleys were under pressure to come up quickly with an affordable alternative while also knowing that whatever material they settled on would be scrutinized by the sport’s old guard.

“The journey from ash to anything else needed to be as short as possible in every way,” said Sean Torpey, a second-generation hurley maker. “It could be new but not outrageous.”

It took years of trial and error to find a product that felt true to ash — the balance of strength and flexibility, the color, the weight, even the sound it made when striking the ball, said Mr. Torpey, 41. He and his father eventually settled on a bamboo composite imported from Asia, and in 2020, they launched their “Bambú” hurley — using the Irish word for the plant.

At least nine players in the championship match last month used bamboo hurleys made in Ireland by his company, Torpey.

Although the use of bamboo hurleys is still not widespread, the embrace of the ash substitute at the pinnacle of the sport should help ease the inevitable transition — and so ensure the survival of hurling, featured in ancient Irish folklore and whose mythical origins date back more than 3,000 years. After centuries of nonstop play in many communities in Ireland, hurling began dying out early in the 19th century, with the game continuing only in rural pockets.

It was revived in the 1880s, with the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association, or G.A.A., coinciding with a renewed push to restore Irish culture as the country made its way toward independence from Britain in the decades that followed.

The sport, played only by amateurs even at its highest level, is strongly rooted in a pride of place. In smaller villages, hurling often has a rich local history, a passionate following and a place at the heart of the community.

On a sunny evening in late summer, a crowd gathered in the village of Ballyagran, County Limerick, as two local teams squared off. Children ran the perimeter of the field with small hurleys in hand, skillfully smacking the sliotar, the hard ball used in the sport, off the wide end of the stick as they watched the match.

“I suppose hurling is in our blood,” said Joe O’Kelly, leaning against a fence on the sideline of the game. “For some of these players, the hurley is like an extension of their arm.”

Mr. O’Kelly, who volunteers with the local G.A.A., said he wasn’t entirely sold on the idea of bamboo, which is still used by just a small fraction of players.

“It’s a good thing they are trying it,” Mr. O’Kelly added. “But it’s hard to replace the ash.”

Playing that night was Seán Finn, 28, something of a celebrity in hurling circles for his part in a series of recent championships won by Limerick. He had tried bamboo hurleys, but reverted to ash, explaining that he was a bit of a traditionalist.

“I’m using the ash for give or take 20 years,” Mr. Finn said. “I never really warmed to the bamboo.”

There are still dozens of small hurley makers dotted across the country, working out of sheds and primarily using ash. One of these makers, Willie Bulfin, 64, crafts the hurleys Mr. Finn uses.

In Mr. Bulfin’s workshop, tucked alongside his home in rural Limerick, the pale sawdust collects in small clouds around his hands as he smooths the surface of a hurley. For the past 24 years, Mr. Bulfin has been making them by hand.

“I’d still be hoping there’s another few years in it for me,” Mr. Bulfin said, speaking warmly of the relationships he has built with local players.

Hand-drawn hurley templates scrawled with the names of players and their exacting specifications are stacked on his workbench. Sawdust has collected on every surface, clinging to cobwebs and creating the effect of icicles dangling from the ceiling.

It’s a window into an earlier era, when local ash was handled by local producers in a cottage industry across the country. For a time, his two sons worked by his side, but both have now moved on.

“They loved being here,” he said, recounting how they shared stories of local matches as they worked. “But the money just wasn’t good enough, there wasn’t a livelihood in it for them.”

Now, he can point to the early sign of the effect of ash dieback on the wooden planks he handles — squiggling lines and stains that signal the disease — and he, too, has begun experimenting with new materials.

Mr. Bulfin said, a hint of sadness in his voice, that he wouldn’t start up this craft in the current climate.

“It would be too risky with the shortage of raw material,” he said.

In the late 1980s, Ireland’s government initiated an ash planting plan that it hoped would make the island self-sustaining in hurley production, while restoring forests cleared hundreds of years ago for farming.

As part of that effort, landowners were encouraged to grow ash for profit, with the base of the trees sold to make hurleys. Landowners like John Reardon, 72, planted seedlings on his family farm in Limerick in 1998 under the program. He saw it as an investment his children could benefit from when the trees matured.

“I planted 20,000 trees,” Mr. Reardon said, “and in the first five years, they had to be minded, like children.”

Then, in 2012, around the time he expected his trees to begin returning a profit, ash dieback was first found in Ireland. An airborne, fungus-like disease, it cuts off the circulation of the tree, and it begins to rot from the inside out.

The view across Mr. Reardon’s forest now has a touch of the apocalyptic — bare trees with leaves long fallen sway like lines of ghosts, their bark covered in dark lesions. The sight stretches for acres.

“It’s over, we are finished as far as hurleys are concerned,” Mr. Reardon said of his trees, adding. “If I was a crying sort of person, I would be in tears.”