FOR LEINSTER FANS of a certain vintage, Donnybrook will always be the home of Leinster rugby. Friday night fixtures in the ground were capable of producing an intense, if not overly populous, atmosphere and even though it was redeveloped during the 2007-08 season, Leinster have moved permanently to the 18,000 seater RDS.

Leinster CEO Mick Dawson said that the initial plan was to move the province back to their old ground but after that first year in the RDS it was an unrealistic proposal. Now, Donnybrook has an expensive stand that caters almost exclusively to club and schools games.

“As the Donnybrook thing unfolded the more I realised we spent too much money on Donnybrook because we were going to the RDS at the time,” Dawson said.

“Donnybrook [the redevelopment] was a concept that started in the late 90′s and the stand there had to be knocked down anyway because it was too old. The idea was to keep Leinster there but in hindsight, that was never going to be a reality because there are two clubs there and the pitch couldn’t take the traffic that was on it. The RDS was one of the best moves we ever made.”

Dawson hopes to increase the capacity of the RDS to 25,ooo eventually and thinks the province will likely sign a 20-year agreement with a ten year break clause to remain in the Ballsbridge ground when that is done.

In the meantime, Leinster play Munster in the Aviva Stadium on 4 October and Dawson sees it as a unique opportunity to grow the team’s fan base once again.

“There is obviously a financial windfall if we fill the stadium [for Leinster vs Munster] but also, if this game was in the RDS it would get 18,000 and here it will get north of 40,000 but what do those other people do every week? That is the conundrum,” Dawson said.

Drawing over 40,000 fans to a Guinness Pro12 game is a testament to how big Leinster and Munster have become on the sporting landscape. Dawson thinks the 2006 Heineken Cup semi-final between the two teams was the catalyst for the provincial rugby boom but he also says that he and other Leinster officials learned a lot from that game in terms of how to organise a big match.

“We realised that day that we were naive in how we sold our tickets,” Dawson said.

“We sold them through the clubs and our usual outlets but half the people who live in Dublin are from Munster anyway and they were hoovering up all the tickets. We sat down after that and said ‘this will never happen again’.

“The next time we played we made sure that our distribution channels were far narrower and much more Leinster-centric. We thought we were doing great to just sell the tickets, we didn’t care who we were selling them to.”

Around the time of that game, Leinster supporters were often criticised for being fair-weather fans but since then they have developed into one of the largest and most passionate groups in Europe. Dawson thinks that after being outshone by the Munster crowd in 2006, the Leinster faithful were determined to make up for it.