Sport and War in an Irish Town

Abstract

The relationship between Britain and Ireland — two islands united in one kingdom and bound — ensured that the British sporting revolution spread immediately to Ireland. On both islands the new sporting world was capable of transcending political, economic, social and cultural divides. It was also capable of underlining — even aggravating — such divides. Sport in Enniscorthy was a complex of class and gender and religion and geography and personality and political allegiance. The extremes of nationalist rhetoric and then rebellion, on the one hand, and the depth and strength of a sporting tradition associated with the sports of the British Empire, on the other, ensured that the sporting clubs of the town were presented as being organized for ‘foreign games’, or for the ‘games of the Gael’. This was a binary which did not take account for the broad swathe of motivations which account for the sporting tastes of people, but was, instead, a consequence of the reality of revolution — and its legacy. This article examines the impact that armed rebellion had on the sporting life of a country town in the south-east of Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• Ireland
• sport
• revolution
• Gaelic
• hunting
• athletics
• tennis
• golf
• rugby

Notes on contributor

Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin. He has written extensively on the history of Irish sport, including Sport and Ireland: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015) and The Hurlers: The First All-Ireland Championship and the Making of Modern Hurling (Penguin, 2018).

Notes

1 There does not seem to have been any soccer in the town until the mid-1920s, even if one of the great stars of the English First Division in the 1910s was the Enniscorthy-born William Lacey.

2 The GAA struggled across the country in the 1890s. It had been riven by political disputes at a national and local level, while emigration and economic malaise had also hindered development.

3 ‘Souperism’, and the portrayal of an individual who ‘took the soup’, was a term of abuse used by Irish nationalists to stigmatise people who were deemed to have received food aid from certain Protestant organizations while being proselytized, and that such proselytization was a condition of that food aid. There is scant evidence that such a practice was in any way extensive, but the popular mythology proved enduringly powerful.