Irish sport, historically, has been skewed heavily towards non-Olympic sport - notable GAA, horse racing, golf, rugby, snooker and in the North motorcycles. In olympic terms we were good boxers, and we occasionally pulled a good runner. Facilities and talent pools for anything else was pretty limited. And with a small population, we weren't getting any benefits from numbers.
Recently, we've started to produce decent rowers, particularly at lightweight, plus talented one offs in non traditional sport, the stand out of which is of course Rhys McCleneghan. Rhasidat is lightly different as there has been a flurry of good female sprinters, one of which you'd have hoped would have turned up trumps - we saw Gina Akpe-Moses, Molly Scott, ciara Neville and Patience Jumbo Gula come through, plus we now have Sarah Healy and Sonia O'Sullivan's daughter at middle distance.
But we still don't have a single Indoor velodrome, hardly any world class pools, and a limited gymnastics infrastructure, and we share the Home Nations tendency to spread ourselves thin, having a crack at everything.