Ian McIlrath
rugby player
John Alexander "Ian" McIlrath (born 10 March 1946) is a former Ireland rugby union international from Northern Ireland.
Educated at Ballymena Academy, McIlrath was a Ballymena RFC centre who gained five caps for Ireland, making his debut against touring Australia at Lansdowne Road in 1976. He featured on the 1976 tour of New Zealand and made his final international appearance in the 1977 Five Nations Championship.
McIlrath was a primary school principal by profession, until his retirement in 2006. He began serving on the Irish Rugby Football Union committee in 2008 and was appointed president in 2018, replacing Philip Orr.
“Ian McIlrath” enters the record as rugby player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what McIlrath, rugby and player can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Ian McIlrath” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, McIlrath, rugby and player provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123290317. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1976, 1977 and 2006.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Ian McIlrath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.