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‘Who were the Shoneens?’: Irish militant nationalists and association football, 1913–1923
Abstract
No other sporting organization on the island of Ireland has received the historical attention which the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) continues to enjoy. The disproportionate amount of historical writing on the GAA has sidelined accounts of other sports on the island such as association football, rugby and cricket; although recent publications have made some headway in the reversal of this trend (For instance, see: Hunt, Sport and Society in Victorian Ireland: the Case of Westmeath; Garnham, Association Football and Society in pre-partition Ireland; and Curran, The Development of Sport in Donegal.). A knock-on effect of the aforementioned historical trend is the suppression of the involvement of Ireland’s revolutionary ‘soccerites’ in the early twentieth century. This article attempts to fill the gap in historical writing regarding these individuals, and the difficulties and opposition faced by those who chose to play non-Gaelic games during the Irish Revolution 1913–1923.
In this article new biographical research relates Dublin-born Peter J. Peel’s early sporting activities to his professional career trajectory as a thrice-elected president of the United States Football Association (U.S.F.A.). His presidency culminated in leading the USA soccer team to the 1924 Paris Olympiad and subsequently to Dalymount Park in Dublin for the Irish Free State’s first home international soccer fixture. The paper will also detail the nature of Peter Peel’s simultaneous 1918 tenure as presidents of the United States Football Association (U.S.F.A.) and The Irish Fellowship Club of Chicago during the Irish conscription political crisis and the Paris Peace Conference. Peel’s career is interpreted through the prism of his early Limerick formation in a rugby-playing family and his own fluid sporting and civic activities.
Traditionally, the historiography of sport in Ireland has largely been dominated by writings on the Gaelic Athletic Association. This phenomenon is even more pronounced when one considers the historiography of sport during the Irish Revolution (1912–1923). Owing no doubt to the numerous intertwining relationships between the GAA’s codes, its administrators, players, and the campaign for Irish independence this is hardly surprising. However, more recently historians have begun to shed light on some lesser-known connections between non-Gaelic games and the movement for Irish independence. This article focuses specifically on the period known as the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) and examines the political and cultural significance of sport during the fraternal conflict.
In 2021, the Republic of Ireland is scheduled to host four European Championship finals matches for the first time. However, studies of players’ experiences of top level soccer there are- scarce. This paper discusses playing and working conditions within League of Ireland football. In particular, it explores the non-football related work experiences of part-time League of Ireland professional footballers. It discusses how a number of players have coped with having to work part-time and illustrates how they have utilized various forms of employment in order to play for professional clubs in a more homely environment. It will show that players have faced tough challenges in match and training preparation and have had at times to temporarily step down, or in some cases, retire from the game to fulfil non-football related work duties during the playing season. It demonstrates that some players have also turned down full-time League of Ireland football. -.
Like Chap. 10.1007/978-3-030-31699-0_5, this chapter is also concerned with amateurism and professionalism. However, the focus here is on changes in the amplification and de-amplification of professionalism and amateurism by particular groups over the decades. The chapter goes on to explain how this was interconnected with inter-organisational and intra-organisational competitive interdependences, the rising stress on both seriousness of involvement and achievement orientation, and the changing power balance between administrators and ‘elite’ players. The chapter concludes by explaining how these processes were also linked with the emergence of the concept of ‘player power’.
This chapter explains the changes in how GAA administrators and activists sought to attract and integrate Irish people, mainly young people, into the association over the decades. Since the foundation of the GAA through to the 1960s, GAA administrators relied heavily on social constraints to achieve this. From the 1960s, the emphasis on social constraints subsided relative to self-restraints. One manifestation of this was a greater focus on the individual needs and motivations of younger people in Ireland. Another aspect of this was a process of diminishing displays of superiority towards other sports. These changes were impelled by changing social and psychological processes concerning people in Ireland more broadly.
Recent scholarship on the origins of association football has been marked by a highly ideological debate on its ‘class’ nature.
The traditional story – of a game created by ‘gentlemen’ but taken up, and ultimately dominated, by ‘ruffians’ – has been
challenged by a revisionist account which presents football as an ancient ‘people’s’ or ‘plebeian’ game, briefly hijacked
by upper-middle class men in the mid-Victorian period, before returning to its ‘popular’ roots from the 1880s onwards. This
article suggests that, as currently conducted, the debate is both conceptually confused and bedevilled by paucity of sources.
The conceptual problems derive partly from an endemic vagueness in the historical use of the term ‘football’, and partly from
a persistent tendency to conflate football play with rules of play. The paucity of sources is well-known in the study of football
as a medieval and early modern folk pastime. But it is also an issue in studying early forms of club football. This article
uses a hitherto underused source – the match reports of the earliest amateur football clubs in Britain – as part of an attempt
to address the conceptual confusion and also to present a genuinely new account of the impact of traditional ‘folk’ football
on the modern game. It is suggested that the impact was both real and very short-lived.
2009 was the 125th Anniversary of the founding of the GAA and will be marked by numerous high profile public events throughout the year, including the History of the GAA conference at Croke Park in April, where this book will be launched. Brings together some of the leading writers and commentators in the area of Irish history to assess the importance of the GAA in Irish society. Covers the origins of hurling, through to the foundation of the GAA, its role in the political life of the nation and ending with an assessment of some of the main issues facing the GAA into the twenty- first century.
The argument outlined in this article builds on the recent detailed historiography of the role of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) around the turn of the twentieth century in Ireland. In the minds of some persuasive authors, the organization exercised an important supportive role in the expression of physical force Irish Republicanism and was therefore a not insignificant player in the activities of bodies expressly committed to this course of action. Yet others, such as the scholar William Murphy, have claimed this interpretation of the GAA's role is wholly overstated and instead it contained within its ranks members who, entirely coincidentally, were also involved in a range of similar entities at that time and were therefore committed to the cause of Irish sovereignty in a relatively benign form. In other words, the GAA offered a useful setting in which prominent Irish nationalists could hone their organizational skills rather than operating as a body that, in any coherent fashion, constituted an active agent in the promotion of an aggressive form of Irish nationalism during this period. By profiling the lived experiences of a select number of prominent GAA personalities, it is possible to illustrate this important distinction and establish the precise role of the association in those seminal decades either side of the turn of the twentieth century.
This article examines attempts to develop formalised structures for association football in regional Ulster in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods. Using the counties of Donegal, Tyrone, Fermanagh and Cavan as case studies, it will be shown that many clubs in these areas
were rather isolated from the hearth of activity in the north-east of the province and developed independently without the assistance of the Irish Football Association. These regional soccer administrators struggled to organise their own county structures and instead relied heavily on cross-county
fixtures. The failure of association football to develop a coherent identity throughout each of these counties is discussed while the importance of patronage and the railway network in the organisation of matches is highlighted.
In 2009 the gaelic athletic association (GAA) celebrated its 125th anniversary. That this sporting organization is an integral part of Irish life cannot be disputed, and through its primary codes of Gaelic football, hurling, camogie, and handball the GAA has provided a major social outlet, not just in Ireland but for many who form part of the Irish diaspora in countries such as the United States and England.1 One historian has described it as “an organization that stands second only to the churches, and perhaps the trade unions, as a force in the associational culture of Ireland for a century and a quarter.”2 Donegal, the most northwesterly county in Ireland, situated in the province of Ulster yet part of the Republic of Ireland, provides an interesting example of the failure of the GAA to conquer all areas. This article will focus on a rather unchartered aspect of the association’s history: its relationship with association football, or soccer, which had its roots in England but was growing in popularity in Ireland by the late nineteenth century. While the competition between organizers of other sporting codes such as rugby union and rugby league in England has been well documented, the historiography of sport in Ireland still lacks a publication dedicated to an examination of the rivalry between soccer and GAA administrators.3 The conflict between organizers of Gaelic football and soccer in Donegal in the first fifty years of the GAA’s existence will therefore be assessed here. Similarities between these two codes meant that good players could adapt to the skills required in both relatively easily, but those interchanging risked the wrath of the GAA, as soccer was banned as a “foreign” game from 1905 until 1971.4 The failure of the ban and of the GAA’s attempt to tarnish the reputation of soccer in Done-gal is of key significance, and the complexities of making straightforward links between nationalist ideology and sporting preferences will be shown. The ways and means used to propagate the playing of Gaelic football in some sections of the Donegal press, and discussed at meetings of the Donegal county board, and their levels of success, will be analyzed.5 The methods employed by those involved in the promotion of the GAA, their criticism of soccer, and the tactics used to prevent interest and participation in the latter sport will also be examined. Similarly, the responses and views of those involved in the organization of soccer will be assessed.
Ireland in 1884 was still part of the British empire; the sporting “revolution,” which was in full swing in many areas across Britain at the time, also had an effect on sports such as cricket and rugby. Athletics and association football were disseminated through the country’s educational establishments.6 Although a talented sportsman, Michael Cusack was eager to reform Irish athletics, which was dominated by elitism and poorly governed in the early 1880s. He was also keen to revive traditional Irish football and hurling for workers excluded from athletics. Cusack’s desire was fundamental to his and Maurice Davin’s organization of the GAA at a meeting on 1 November 1884 in Thurles, Co. Tipperary.7 The GAA was part of the Gaelic Revival taking place in Ireland during this time, and Richard Holt has noted that the GAA’s development came about “both as a reaction against modernity and as a consequence of it.”8 Ireland, in rejecting the American commercialization of sport, the European trend of gymnastics, and the British culture of disseminating sports such as rugby and cricket as a means of imperialism, developed a series of games that were codified from its own traditional forms of sport and embraced the nationalist politics of the day.9 The organization of the GAA was “a clear reaction” against the British way of life; it developed strong connections with the Catholic church and nationalism from its early days.10
While the GAA’s early development in Donegal, and the spread there of all sports, suffered from its isolated location, the popularity of association football seriously hindered the growth of Gaelic football until the 1920s. Association football clubs were in operation...
Based on a sample of about 5,000 members, this article offers the first comprehensive social profile of the IRA covering the entire period of the Irish revolution. The picture that emerges is of an organization composed largely of unpropertied, unmarried, young men of the middling classes, increasingly disproportionately dominated by urban, skilled, and socially mobile activists. Officers tended to be slightly older and of slightly higher social status than their men. Sinn Fein activists were older again but otherwise shared these characteristics, as did the IRA in Britain. This dependence on urban and skilled or white-collar members, the reverse of what republicans and most historians have believed, may be attributable to a combination of the greater risks and greater organizational opportunities faced by the IRA in towns. Nevertheless, the movement did attract rural and labouring members, and did to some extent transcend class and geographical boundaries. IRA units were almost never segregated along class lines, and were usually built around familial and neighbourhood networks. Also, as the revolution progressed, activists' previous social identities were superseded by a new and essentially egalitarian identity as comrades and guerrillas.
The 1920s was a time of significant growth in Irish soccer, and for 3 years Football Sports Weekly recorded the development of new clubs, new leagues and new competitions. It provided a platform for fans and players alike to discuss the game, its future direction and current concerns. It gave Irish soccer a critical, informed voice, and strived to look beyond Ireland and Britain and towards the continent, to the type of football played in ‘Europe’. There was a new dynamic in Irish soccer, and Football Sports Weekly drew its energy and optimism from it. At the same time, Irish soccer found itself in a country that had recently broken away from the United Kingdom, and where soccer was seen as a British game. This paper will describe and analyse Football Sports Weekly, placing both it and soccer within the political and cultural realities of Ireland at that time.
This book situates the Irish civil war in the general process of decolonization in the 20th century and explains why divisions over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 proved so decisive in the creation of the Irish state. It suggests that the Treaty settlement and the manner in which it was implemented touched the raw nerve of a society with long-standing ambiguities on the question of Empire. On the pro-Treaty side, the Treaty opened up the prospect of co-operation with Britain in an increasingly democratic Commonwealth. On the anti-Treaty side, dominion status was incompatible with the conception of nationality, which had animated the Sinn Fein movement since 1917. The presence of dexterous individuals, such as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, meant that these divisions could initially be bridged, but their viewpoints became marginalized as the conflict progressed. As a result, the bulk of this book is devoted to analysing the process of polarization in Irish society occasioned by the civil war.
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