at Irish Australians. Its stated aim is to provide serious comment and an independent perspective on a wide range of Australian/Irish topics. It publishes some material in the Irish language.An Lúibín is a fortnightly Irish-language newsletter, distributed online in Australia and overseas. It deals with language matters and also contains articles on folklore, literature and current affairs. Sports Irish Catholics have been the nation's largest minority throughout most of Australia's history. Their resistance to the elite Anglocentric establishment has keenly marked the development of sport. Mostly working class, the Irish played sports such as rugby league and Australian Rules football, while the Protestant majority often preferred cricket, soccer, rugby union and boxing. The tensions and contrasts between these two sporting cultures eventually built the attitudes and beliefs toward games and sports that Australians share today. Many Irish in Australia play gaelic games and the local gaelic athletic association is the Australasia GAA. Present day At the 2006 Census, 50,255 Australian residents declared they were born in the Republic of Ireland and a further 21,291 declared to have been born in Northern Ireland. Cities with the largest Irish-born populations were Sydney (12,730), Melbourne (8,950) and Perth (7,060). At the 2011 Census, 2,087,800 Australians (10.4% of the total population) declared they had Irish ancestry either alone or in combination with another ancestry; only Australian and English ancestries were more frequently nominated. Irish Australian settlement patterns are not significantly different from those of the Australian population as a whole – that is, a third live in New South Wales and a quarter live in Victoria, with 13 per cent living in Queensland (compared to only 18 per cent of the general population). Relatively few as a proportion reside in Western Australia (7.6 per cent of Irish Australians compared to 9.9 per cent of the general population). The 2001 Australian census recorded that persons reporting some Irish Australian ethnicity accounted for 10.7 per cent of all responses in the Australian Capital Territory (42,540 responses), 10.2 per cent in Victoria (469,161 responses), 9.9 per cent in New South Wales (622,944), 9.7 per cent in Queensland (433,354), 7.8 per cent in Tasmania (42,552), 7.6 per cent in Western Australia (171,667), 7.5 per cent in the Northern Territory (18,325) and 6.7 per cent in South Australia (119,063). Irish language use In the 2011 Census 1,895 persons were reported as using Irish as a household language, most of