(no subject)
Probably only niamh_x is interested in this, but I finally (HAH! A month later than I promised) typed up that snippet about the Gaelic Athletic Association. It mostly pits the GAA against the rise of football in Ireland, but there's some early history in there.
The ugly and irritating fact [is] that we are daily importing from England, not only her manufactured goods ... but her fashions, her accents, her vicious literature, her music, her dances and her manifold mannerisms, her games also and her pastimes, to the utter discredit of our own grand national sports, and to the sore humiliation, as I believe, of every genuine son and daughter of the old land.
If we continue travelling for the next score years in the same direction that we have taken for some time past, condemning the sports that were practised by our forefathers, effacing our national features, as though we were ashamed of them, and putting on, with England's stuff and broadcloths, her nastier habits and other effeminite follies as she may recommend, we had better at once and publicly abjure our nation, clap our hands for joy at the sight of the Union Jack and place 'England's bloody red' exultantly above the green.
Archbishop Croke
The sheer distance of Australia and America from Britain was a central factor, if not the only one, in explaining the emergence and then triumph of an alternative football code. In both countries the indigenous version of football came with a certain amount of nationalistic baggage, helping assert the independence and difference of the new world from the old; but in neither case could the explicit polarization of the game be considered a central component of its success. The same cannot be said of Ireland on either count. Indeed, it was the closeness of British culture to Ireland, the immediacy and sheer weight of British power exerted upon it, that stimulated the codification and popularity of Gaelic football and deeply politicized it. Football's fate was to arrive in Ireland at the very moment that a broad-based opposition to British rule and the Anglo-Irish landlord ascendancy was being mobilized; sport and politics would become inseparable and the tenor of that politics would be a bitter struggle between the forces of imperialism and nationalism. Football would be aligned with the former. Gaelic games, as they came to be known, were aligned with the latter.
In the 1870s regiments of the British Army, predominantly but not exclusively Protestant communities of the north especially in Belfast and some educational institutions in Dublin, were beginning to play football. In Belfast -- a typical industrializing working-class port city -- its popularity was quickly established and reinforced by the city's close connections with the football hotbeds of the west of Scotland. In the 1880s the Irish Football Association was formed. Tellingly, of all of the national sports associations established in this era, the only one based in Belfast rather than Dublin was football. The IFA established the Irish Cup in 1881 and early competitors included teams from the Black Watch and Gordon Highlanders regiments. A league followed in 1890 and while the cup did go south on a number of occasions before partition, the league championship barely migrated beyond the boundaries of Belfast itself.
Archbishop Croke, with whom we began this chapter, was only one of many Irish voices, if perhaps the loudest, denouncing British sport and British rule in the same breath. In an open admission of the intertwining of sport and politics the left-leaning Irish nationalist paper The Irishmen -- hardly a natural ideological ally of the conservative Catholic hierarchy -- declared that: 'If any two purposes should go together they ought to be politics and athletics. Our politics being essentially national, so should our athleics.' It was alleged that those authentic national games had been steadily eradicated or suppressed alongside other elements of indigenous Irish life by the long imperial occupation. However, the decline of indigenous games was more the consequence of massive rural depopulation, migration and dislocation following the mid-century famine than any active programme of cultural repression by the British. Nationalists argued that the insidious impact of British culture could only be properly opposed by the rediscovery and modernization of authentic and indigenous Irish culture. Alongside the Catholic Church, which was increasingly taking a nationalist position in Irish politics, support for Croke's line of reasoning came from Charles Parnell who led the nationalist opposition in the Westminster parliament; the Land League, who supported the widespread struggle for tenants' rights in the countryside; and the more radical Fenians led by Michael Davitt in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). All these wings of the nationalist movement provided vocal and practical support for Michael Cusak and the small band of enthusiasts who established the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884.
Although created in opposition to the cultural hegemony of Victorian Britain, the GAA was, paradoxically, a very Victorian sporting organization. Indeed its actions paralleled those of the Football Association; the codification and bureaucratization of pre-industrial pastimes and contests was in perfect harmony with the rationalizing thrust of Victorian society. The GAA's equation of national well-being with the playing of authentically national games displayed the same belief in the connections between ethnicity, race, athleticism and the body that underwrote the games ethic in the most British of institutions -- the public school. The GAA's first task was to codify the rules of hurling -- a ball and stick game that had parallels with both lacrosse and hockey -- the best established and most unproblematically Irish game.
The GAA did more than merely preserve, codify, invent and sponsor Irish games and culture. It also drew up and enforced a set of rules designed to exclude and marginalize British sport and to challenge British rule. Regulations set down between 1884 and 1887 forbade the playing of any British games on GAA property; banned any member of the British Army or the Royal Irish Constabulary from joining the organization; and promised to expel any member of the GAA participating in British sports or indeed watching them. The GAA was fantastically successful in its first decade of existence; membership soared, clubs were formed across the south of the country, and its adopted sports proved robust enough to prevent the emergence of a strong footballing culture in the towns and cities of the south. While the closeness of the GAA to politics was its strength, it was also its Achilles' heel. It certainly ensured that the British authorities and their secret police and spies would make it their business to infiltrate the organization and keep a careful watch on its senior cadres and their activities. When Parnell and his movement were undone in the late 1880s by the Kitty O'Shea scandal -- in which Parnell's affair with a married woman rendered him unsuitable for political leadership in late Victorian Britain -- the GAA was similarly broken apart. Some officials and clubs sided with Parnell, others took a stand against him, nd all were involved in a vicious post-Parnell struggle for power. The predominantly legalistic and gradualist wing of the nationalist movement that Parnell had headed was now displaced by the radicals inside the GAA. The dominance of the IRB within the GAA became so great that the Church hierarchy actively campaigned to diminish its role, forcing the Fenians to share power with more moderate nationalists.
In 1891 Charles Parnell died a broken man. But he would have been amazed and no doubt proud that at his funeral Gaelic games -- and their implicit declaration of an independent Irish identity -- should take centre stage in the procession that accompanied his coffin in central Dublin: 'The hurley stick became a symbol of Irish freedom, a weapon to drive out the British. Two thousand hurleys draped in national colours were borne aloft at Parnell's funeral.' With the most vicious infighting behind them the GAA concentrated on entrenching its sporting activities, starting leagues and cups and building a national stadium named after the archbishop himself -- Croke Park. By the early twentieth century the all-Ireland Gaelic Football finals held in September would attract as many as 80,000 supporters who along with watching the game participated in much kissing of rings and patriotic ritual. The FA Cup Final may have drawn a few thousand more spectators, but then England had a population perhaps ten times the size of Ireland.
Although the hierarchy were concentrating on sporting matters, the wider and increasingly volatile politics of Irish independence in the years before the First World War could not be kept at bay. By 1914 a majority of the GAA's mmbers were joining Sinn Féin or the Irish Volunteer Movement in expectation of some kind of armed conflict or uprising, and in January of that year the GAA's president James Nowlan came out in support of them, calling upon GAA members to 'join the volunteers and learn to shoot straight.' While officially refusing to get involved in the conflict and refusing the use of Croke Park for drill by the Irish Volunteers, the GAA became increasingly associated with the struggle in the popular mind and in the eyes of the British authorities. Certainly many of the most active members of the 1916 Easter Rising were GAA members, and so many prominent Gaelic football players were interned in the aftermath of the uprising that that year's Wolfe Tone Tournament final between Kerry and Louth was played in Frongoch Prison in Wales where the British authorities had interned much of the republican movement.
The Easter Rising may not have caused the immediate defeat of British rule, but the occupier's days were now numbered. The brutality of the British authorities' response to the rising and the subsequent repression that followed galvanized mass support for the cause of independence. With the end of the First World War, hostilities grew to fever pitch in Ireland and both codes of football were directly caught up within it. By 1919 animosity towards Dublin reached such proportions in the north that Shelbourne refused to play an Irish Cup semi-final at Windsor Park in Belfast, fearing for the safety of their players in this cauldron of loyalism. The following year, as the war of independence between Sinn Féin and the British government intensified, independence and resistance was fixed. In mid-November the now ared and active IRA had killed a number of key British agents and members of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Dublin. Later the same day Tipperary were due to play Dublin at Croke Park and despite the violent unrest around 10,000 people showed up for the game. They were not alone. The infamous 'Black and Tans' -- the key militia units of the British occupation -- also decided to put in an appearance. The soldiers scaled the stadium's walls during the game, entered the walls and opened fire. Thirteen people were left dead, including three children and Michael Hogan, captain of the Tipperary side. Clubs south of the border now withdrew from the Belfast-based IFA and its competitions, and rapidly formed their own organizations -- the Football Association of Ireland and the League of Ireland. But there was no official enthusiasm and less money available to the game in de Valera's Irish Free State. It would be seventy years before an Irish national team would grace the World Cup and football would find a place in the heart of a new Ireland and a new Irishness.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 101-105.
The ugly and irritating fact [is] that we are daily importing from England, not only her manufactured goods ... but her fashions, her accents, her vicious literature, her music, her dances and her manifold mannerisms, her games also and her pastimes, to the utter discredit of our own grand national sports, and to the sore humiliation, as I believe, of every genuine son and daughter of the old land.
If we continue travelling for the next score years in the same direction that we have taken for some time past, condemning the sports that were practised by our forefathers, effacing our national features, as though we were ashamed of them, and putting on, with England's stuff and broadcloths, her nastier habits and other effeminite follies as she may recommend, we had better at once and publicly abjure our nation, clap our hands for joy at the sight of the Union Jack and place 'England's bloody red' exultantly above the green.
Archbishop Croke
The sheer distance of Australia and America from Britain was a central factor, if not the only one, in explaining the emergence and then triumph of an alternative football code. In both countries the indigenous version of football came with a certain amount of nationalistic baggage, helping assert the independence and difference of the new world from the old; but in neither case could the explicit polarization of the game be considered a central component of its success. The same cannot be said of Ireland on either count. Indeed, it was the closeness of British culture to Ireland, the immediacy and sheer weight of British power exerted upon it, that stimulated the codification and popularity of Gaelic football and deeply politicized it. Football's fate was to arrive in Ireland at the very moment that a broad-based opposition to British rule and the Anglo-Irish landlord ascendancy was being mobilized; sport and politics would become inseparable and the tenor of that politics would be a bitter struggle between the forces of imperialism and nationalism. Football would be aligned with the former. Gaelic games, as they came to be known, were aligned with the latter.
In the 1870s regiments of the British Army, predominantly but not exclusively Protestant communities of the north especially in Belfast and some educational institutions in Dublin, were beginning to play football. In Belfast -- a typical industrializing working-class port city -- its popularity was quickly established and reinforced by the city's close connections with the football hotbeds of the west of Scotland. In the 1880s the Irish Football Association was formed. Tellingly, of all of the national sports associations established in this era, the only one based in Belfast rather than Dublin was football. The IFA established the Irish Cup in 1881 and early competitors included teams from the Black Watch and Gordon Highlanders regiments. A league followed in 1890 and while the cup did go south on a number of occasions before partition, the league championship barely migrated beyond the boundaries of Belfast itself.
Archbishop Croke, with whom we began this chapter, was only one of many Irish voices, if perhaps the loudest, denouncing British sport and British rule in the same breath. In an open admission of the intertwining of sport and politics the left-leaning Irish nationalist paper The Irishmen -- hardly a natural ideological ally of the conservative Catholic hierarchy -- declared that: 'If any two purposes should go together they ought to be politics and athletics. Our politics being essentially national, so should our athleics.' It was alleged that those authentic national games had been steadily eradicated or suppressed alongside other elements of indigenous Irish life by the long imperial occupation. However, the decline of indigenous games was more the consequence of massive rural depopulation, migration and dislocation following the mid-century famine than any active programme of cultural repression by the British. Nationalists argued that the insidious impact of British culture could only be properly opposed by the rediscovery and modernization of authentic and indigenous Irish culture. Alongside the Catholic Church, which was increasingly taking a nationalist position in Irish politics, support for Croke's line of reasoning came from Charles Parnell who led the nationalist opposition in the Westminster parliament; the Land League, who supported the widespread struggle for tenants' rights in the countryside; and the more radical Fenians led by Michael Davitt in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). All these wings of the nationalist movement provided vocal and practical support for Michael Cusak and the small band of enthusiasts who established the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884.
Although created in opposition to the cultural hegemony of Victorian Britain, the GAA was, paradoxically, a very Victorian sporting organization. Indeed its actions paralleled those of the Football Association; the codification and bureaucratization of pre-industrial pastimes and contests was in perfect harmony with the rationalizing thrust of Victorian society. The GAA's equation of national well-being with the playing of authentically national games displayed the same belief in the connections between ethnicity, race, athleticism and the body that underwrote the games ethic in the most British of institutions -- the public school. The GAA's first task was to codify the rules of hurling -- a ball and stick game that had parallels with both lacrosse and hockey -- the best established and most unproblematically Irish game.
The GAA did more than merely preserve, codify, invent and sponsor Irish games and culture. It also drew up and enforced a set of rules designed to exclude and marginalize British sport and to challenge British rule. Regulations set down between 1884 and 1887 forbade the playing of any British games on GAA property; banned any member of the British Army or the Royal Irish Constabulary from joining the organization; and promised to expel any member of the GAA participating in British sports or indeed watching them. The GAA was fantastically successful in its first decade of existence; membership soared, clubs were formed across the south of the country, and its adopted sports proved robust enough to prevent the emergence of a strong footballing culture in the towns and cities of the south. While the closeness of the GAA to politics was its strength, it was also its Achilles' heel. It certainly ensured that the British authorities and their secret police and spies would make it their business to infiltrate the organization and keep a careful watch on its senior cadres and their activities. When Parnell and his movement were undone in the late 1880s by the Kitty O'Shea scandal -- in which Parnell's affair with a married woman rendered him unsuitable for political leadership in late Victorian Britain -- the GAA was similarly broken apart. Some officials and clubs sided with Parnell, others took a stand against him, nd all were involved in a vicious post-Parnell struggle for power. The predominantly legalistic and gradualist wing of the nationalist movement that Parnell had headed was now displaced by the radicals inside the GAA. The dominance of the IRB within the GAA became so great that the Church hierarchy actively campaigned to diminish its role, forcing the Fenians to share power with more moderate nationalists.
In 1891 Charles Parnell died a broken man. But he would have been amazed and no doubt proud that at his funeral Gaelic games -- and their implicit declaration of an independent Irish identity -- should take centre stage in the procession that accompanied his coffin in central Dublin: 'The hurley stick became a symbol of Irish freedom, a weapon to drive out the British. Two thousand hurleys draped in national colours were borne aloft at Parnell's funeral.' With the most vicious infighting behind them the GAA concentrated on entrenching its sporting activities, starting leagues and cups and building a national stadium named after the archbishop himself -- Croke Park. By the early twentieth century the all-Ireland Gaelic Football finals held in September would attract as many as 80,000 supporters who along with watching the game participated in much kissing of rings and patriotic ritual. The FA Cup Final may have drawn a few thousand more spectators, but then England had a population perhaps ten times the size of Ireland.
Although the hierarchy were concentrating on sporting matters, the wider and increasingly volatile politics of Irish independence in the years before the First World War could not be kept at bay. By 1914 a majority of the GAA's mmbers were joining Sinn Féin or the Irish Volunteer Movement in expectation of some kind of armed conflict or uprising, and in January of that year the GAA's president James Nowlan came out in support of them, calling upon GAA members to 'join the volunteers and learn to shoot straight.' While officially refusing to get involved in the conflict and refusing the use of Croke Park for drill by the Irish Volunteers, the GAA became increasingly associated with the struggle in the popular mind and in the eyes of the British authorities. Certainly many of the most active members of the 1916 Easter Rising were GAA members, and so many prominent Gaelic football players were interned in the aftermath of the uprising that that year's Wolfe Tone Tournament final between Kerry and Louth was played in Frongoch Prison in Wales where the British authorities had interned much of the republican movement.
The Easter Rising may not have caused the immediate defeat of British rule, but the occupier's days were now numbered. The brutality of the British authorities' response to the rising and the subsequent repression that followed galvanized mass support for the cause of independence. With the end of the First World War, hostilities grew to fever pitch in Ireland and both codes of football were directly caught up within it. By 1919 animosity towards Dublin reached such proportions in the north that Shelbourne refused to play an Irish Cup semi-final at Windsor Park in Belfast, fearing for the safety of their players in this cauldron of loyalism. The following year, as the war of independence between Sinn Féin and the British government intensified, independence and resistance was fixed. In mid-November the now ared and active IRA had killed a number of key British agents and members of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Dublin. Later the same day Tipperary were due to play Dublin at Croke Park and despite the violent unrest around 10,000 people showed up for the game. They were not alone. The infamous 'Black and Tans' -- the key militia units of the British occupation -- also decided to put in an appearance. The soldiers scaled the stadium's walls during the game, entered the walls and opened fire. Thirteen people were left dead, including three children and Michael Hogan, captain of the Tipperary side. Clubs south of the border now withdrew from the Belfast-based IFA and its competitions, and rapidly formed their own organizations -- the Football Association of Ireland and the League of Ireland. But there was no official enthusiasm and less money available to the game in de Valera's Irish Free State. It would be seventy years before an Irish national team would grace the World Cup and football would find a place in the heart of a new Ireland and a new Irishness.
The Ball Is Round, David Goldblatt, p. 101-105.