Patriot games – An Irishman’s Diary about a history of Irish sport

On Friday's red-eye flight to Cardiff, hours after witnessing the heroics at the Aviva on Thursday night, I started reading Paul Rouse's Sport and Ireland – A History.

Of all the books that have landed on my desk lately, it was the logical choice to accompany a journey from cheering one Irish team’s victory over a major European power, via a round ball, to another (we hope), this time involving an oval-shaped projectile.

It certainly seems like happy timing for Rouse, a former journalist turned academic, that his book should be published this week, although in a sports-mad country, there are many weeks you could say the same thing.

On the other hand, a glance through his index suggest that Ireland has at least become more selective down the centuries about the games it plays and watches. Among those mentioned, and now rarely seen, are “bull-baiting”, “cockfighting”, “throwing at cocks”, “greasy pole climbing”, “polo played with armoured motor cars” and “horse riding, naked”. All right, that last one was never a sport, exactly. It gets a mention only because of incident at the Donnybrook Fair of 1779 during which a man and woman shed all their clothes before travelling on horseback from the city centre to win a bet.

But the story’s inclusion is an example of the book’s extraordinary range, thematic and chronological. And it may also help explain why, according to the publishers, this is the first attempt at such a history.

Two themes compete throughout – the extent to which Irish sport is unique, and the extent to which it isn’t. The GAA is central to both arguments.

As well as reviving at least one ancient Gaelic game, Rouse suggests, the organisation also stole the clothes of British Victorians – turning ideas about the purity of amateurism, which they had extolled, into a core Irish value, in supposed opposition to English professionalism.

Even more cheeky, but less successful, was an attempt in the 1880s to promote the idea that chess was a Gaelic game, as indigenous as hurling.

The outlandish theory was advanced by Michael Cusack's newspaper, the Celtic Times, which went so far as to claim that the famous board game had been "invented in Ireland in 1430 BC [...]" and that the 32 pieces of the modern chess set "were made to represent the 32 counties".

Cusack himself argued that large-scale chess tournaments had been common in Ireland until the Anglo-Normans suppressed them, and he urged the GAA’s adoption of the sport as “the natural ally of hurling”, to be played in winter, when pitches were off-limits.

It’s fascinating to wonder what would have happened if the GAA had taken his advice. Hurling might now be a lot more tactical, for one thing, while chess in Kilkenny might have a strong physical element, bordering on violence.

Of course the notion of chess being an Irish invention was not much more fictional than the idea the William Webb Ellis founded rugby in a moment of inspired madness, circa 1823. But that was only a small lie, and it obviously filled a gap in the market.

Such founding myths are as essential to sports as they are to nations. A classic example, included in the book, is Croke Park's Hill 16. As is well known now, it started out as Hill 60, because its redevelopment in 1915 coincided with newspaper headlines about a fierce battle in Gallipoli on a hill of the same name. Fifteen years later, it was still widely called Hill 60, to the annoyance of GAA administrators, who had renamed it Hill 16 and chided newspapers that continued to use the now politically incorrect original. The rebranding campaign was assisted by the new Irish Press, which made "Hill 16" part of its stylebook. But it was also helped, more mysteriously, by the legend that the terrace had been constructed out of rubble from the Rising. A 1939 letter to the Meath Chronicle, for example, invoked the memory of "Ireland's fallen heroes, whose blood stains the debris in that immortal hill".

This entirely fictional idea hardened into fact, Rouse writes, until the inevitable happened – there arose at least one veteran who remembered being there. The Sunday Independent journalist Raymond Smith met him in a pub in January 1966, as the 50th anniversary loomed. And while they drank together, the hero claimed to have been paid "6d a load" for transporting the rubble from O'Connell Street to the stadium.

Maybe that’s why chess never took off as the GAA’s winter sport. For cerebral exercise on long dark nights, the Irish have always preferred the even more ancient game of making up stories.

[ @FrankmcnallyIT ]