Making sense of ‘Ireland’, sport and identity: the craft of doing sociology

Abstract

Eric Dunning influenced the development of curricula and research agendas in sociology, history, social science and sports studies, internationally, in the UK and in Ireland. Dunning was also doctoral supervisor to, and academic colleague/mentor and friend of, both authors (at Leicester, Dublin and Chester). Inspired by him, this paper reflects on the craft of sociological research. The case study is the struggle for recognition of ‘Ireland’ in international athletics and the associated painstaking ongoing archival and mixed methods research work in multiple venues, involving sporting, state and personal papers, interviews and oral history sources. Such a history of the social dynamics of charisma and shame between the so-called ‘mother country’ (Great Britain) and a restless dominion (Ireland) was by no means structureless or patternless, but ontologically interdependent with life today. Accordingly, we consider several themes: the interplay between theory and evidence, the involvement-detachment balance and exploring knowledge figurations. In line with Dunning (and Elias), the paper adopts an anticipatory motif, that is to say, the work of understanding social relations between the ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ ‘then’ and ‘now’ is not finished. This work is one step in carrying forth the baton – the stock of intergenerational knowledge – about doing sociology, handed to us in trust by Dunning.

Keywords:

• Figurational sociology
• ‘Ireland’
• Olympics
• sport
• statecraft
• research methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Éire (with an accent) is the native Gaelic term for Ireland. British state officials used it (without the accent) to describe the (partitioned 26-county) Irish Free State.

2 This group was also known as the ‘New English’, distinct from the ‘Old English’, who descended from medieval Norman settlers. Members of this ruling class self-identified as Irish (Maguire, 2016) but retained English cultural, commercial and political tastes and habits. This led to the comparison between the Anglo-Irish and the Prussian Junker class (e.g. Barnett, 1970, in Bowen and Bowen, 2005). The term British-Irish relations was generally introduced in the 1990s as a reflection of the need to emphasize the totality of east-west relations, beyond London per se.

3 Elias made only passing references to Ireland in Volume 6 (2010) of the Collected Works: on the lasting legacy of religious wars of the seventeenth century (p7), Catholicism and Irish language as barriers to total integration in the UK (p142) and the Troubles (p.159).

4 The gap in Olympic participation from 1932 to 1948 is explained by the OCI’s boycott of the 1936 Games and the enforced hiatus owing to World War Two.