JAMES QUINN
Merrion Press
€21.99
ISBN 9781785374739
Reviewed by Paul Rouse
To begin with a truism, sport can offer people a great opportunity to assert their identity. That the creation of the structures of the modern sporting world coincided with the rise of nationalism and the nation-state had a marked influence on both processes. The history of sport across what was the British Empire offers fertile ground to explore how this worked. Take, for example, the circular that was issued after the inaugural meeting of what ultimately became the Irish Rugby Football Union. It set out the ambition to promote rugby in Ireland by playing international matches against England and Scotland, and noted how the bond between the rugby clubs of the three countries could be cultivated by shared rules and shared contests:
‘The committee venture to remind Irishmen that these international contests, conducted as they always are in the most friendly spirit, have a direct and very powerful tendency to remove international asperities, and to inspire the youth of either country with mutual feelings of respect and toleration’.
Instead of binding peoples into empire by virtue of shared cultural experience, sport also routinely had the capacity to reinforce national divides and to create a sense of national identity across the colonies of the empire. This is readily apparent in, for instance, the work of C.L.R. James on cricket in the West Indies and Ramachandra Guha on cricket in India. In the United Kingdom itself, a similar experience saw rugby in Wales and soccer in Scotland represent key expressions of identity. Given that neither Wales nor Scotland had a parliament and neither the Welsh nor Scottish languages enjoyed more than a marginal presence, sport emerged as the great opportunity to define a separate identity. This phenomenon was beautifully distilled in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase in respect of international soccer, where he wrote that ‘the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’.
James Quinn’s excellent history of soccer in Ireland chronicles how this worked in Ireland. That soccer was rooted first in Belfast was vital to its subsequent development on the island. It was the only Irish city comparable in culture to the northern industrial towns of England where soccer enjoyed phenomenal growth in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the early 1890s thousands of people went weekly to watch league matches in Belfast, with still greater crowds attending representative matches. By the end of the 1890s, such was the interest in soccer that in 1899 more than 15,000 watched the Leinster–Ulster interprovincial match and 16,000 watched Ireland play England in an international. This was the people’s game and the dominance of Belfast in those early years is well chronicled by James Quinn.
There is no denying that its belated spread to Dublin—and then across the rest of Ireland—was shaped by the political divides of the era. Many Irish nationalists were entirely comfortable with the sports of empire; they chose to play as they wished, regardless of any association with Britishness, and did not consider their Irishness in any way compromised by their sporting affiliations. Accordingly, many were willing to play soccer. Others, though, saw in sport the possibilities of furthering the project of national liberation. In practical terms, this resulted in the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), which promoted games described as ‘Irish native games’ and bathed them in ideas of Irishness. What ensued was friction between rival sporting organisations set in a broader social, cultural and political context. This struggle was partly rhetorical. The GAA sought from the beginning to make Irish people choose between ‘Irish laws’ and ‘English laws’, between ‘native’ and ‘foreigner’. There was no denying that the forms of sporting organisation that had spread to Ireland from Britain were wrapped in the flag of empire. There was no denying, either, that among those most prominent in new sports such as soccer were men and women who were utterly loyal to the empire.
Nevertheless, as James Quinn shows in page after page, sport routinely defies the propagandic history of ideologues and of those who wish to reduce the history of the island to neat stripes of orange and green. What this book does more than anything else is expose the manner in which soccer has allowed multiple identities to overlap, whether these are national, local, class, gender or religious identities. It also skilfully examines urban and rural divides, as well as those between amateurism and professionalism in sport. Across all of these areas great complexities are revealed. This stands in marked contrast to the denigration of soccer and its players as somehow ‘foreign’, or at least not fully Irish. Reducing complexities to a sort of cartoon version of the past is the stuff of political posture. But it was said not only that soccer was a ‘foreign game’ but also that it was a ‘garrison game’—and this notion endured long into the twentieth century. What is its truth? That soccer was a ‘garrison game’ is made plain by the number of British army teams competing in the 1880s and 1890s; army teams won the Irish Cup and routinely played against Irish clubs. Soccer, however, was obviously not just a ‘garrison game’; it was much more than that. It was adopted by schools and businesses, and it gathered a momentum all of its own when clubs were founded by all manner of people in all manner of ways. Clubs were founded in pubs (Shelbourne), by companies (St James’s Gate), by temperance societies (Downpatrick), by landlords’ sons (Athlone), by churches and a synagogue, by local areas and by groups of friends. But for the guts of a century those friends were just male. Soccer offered a profoundly male experience; the legacy of that truth remains despite the advancement of women in so many areas of Irish life in this new millennium.
What lends a further dimension to this book is how it considers partition, a unique opportunity to examine what happens to sport when a country is sundered into two states. In respect of soccer in Ireland, the divides between north and south were not merely ones rooted in political identity. There lingered in Dublin a sense that Belfast control of Irish soccer was both impeding the game in the south and harming the national team. For example, when Ireland conceded thirteen goals once again to England in an international in 1899, a Leinster representative to the Irish Football Association (IFA) said: ‘All this has come upon us because of the hidebound prejudice of five men who select the teams preventing anyone outside the close circle of Belfast being chosen to represent his country. Northern prejudice is the bane of Irish football.’ Later, against the backdrop of rising political tensions in the early twentieth century, this fault line widened into a chasm through Irish soccer.
The establishment in 1922 of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI)—for a time known as the Football Association of the Irish Free State—brought immediate change to the internal organisation of soccer on the island. From that point onwards the IFA controlled internal competitions north of the border and the new FAI performed the same function in the south. While the transition to this new arrangement could not be described as seamless and certainly wasn’t harmonious, it was nonetheless relatively clear. What proved much more difficult were the international teams. For 30 years, both the FAI and the IFA fielded teams known as ‘Ireland’, and both freely chose players from either side of the border in Ireland. Indeed, before 1950, more than 40 players lined out for Ireland teams selected by both competing soccer bodies. A solution was then brokered whereby the IFA fielded its team as ‘Northern Ireland’ and the FAI fielded theirs as the ‘Republic of Ireland’, and the practice of claiming jurisdiction over players from across the island ended with players now restricted to playing for one team or the other. Amidst this agreement, the idea of fielding a single team to represent Ireland remained unattainable.
James Quinn does a fine job of exploring the place of soccer on both sides of the border after partition—not least the travails of the domestic game. He approaches the task with nuance and style and explains how the meaning of soccer evolved decade after decade, navigating controversies such as the notorious 1953 friendly between the Republic of Ireland and Yugoslavia. The archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid—the dominant influence in the Irish Catholic Church in the mid-twentieth century—wanted the match cancelled in protest against Marshall Tito’s communist regime. That regime had recently placed the Croatian Catholic archbishop Aloys Stepinac under house arrest and McQuaid called on Irish people to boycott the match. The calls were ignored and a large crowd attended Dalymount Park.
Later there was a new dimension, when in the 1980s the Northern Ireland soccer team enjoyed spectacular success, reaching two World Cups. The songs sung by the supporters were avowedly anti-Catholic and pro-union, the colours sported on the terraces were red-white-and-blue, and yet the winning goal that day against Spain in the 1982 World Cup was scored by the former Gaelic footballer Gerry Armstrong. Further, the team captain was also a former Gaelic footballer, Martin O’Neill, while the team’s greatest icon was another Catholic, the goalkeeper Pat Jennings.
Perhaps no occasion did more to underline the manner in which sport provided a platform for political division in Ireland than the meeting of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in Windsor Park in November 1993 in a qualifying match for the World Cup. In the weeks before that match, violence in the north had peaked once again, with an IRA bombing of a fish shop on the Shankill Road in Belfast leaving ten dead and the loyalist Ulster Freedom Fighters murdering eight people in a gun attack at the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel, Co. Derry. So great was the tension that there had actually been talk that the match might be moved to a stadium in Britain. Relations were not eased by the fact that the Republic of Ireland had won 3–0 in Dublin in the reverse fixture earlier in the campaign and gloating fans had sung: ‘There’s only one team in Ireland’.
Ultimately, James Quinn makes plain the myriad complexities in the relationship between sport and identity in this book. It is well written, accessible and authoritative. Indeed, it can lay fair claim to be the best history of soccer in Ireland yet to be written.
Paul Rouse lectures in the School of History, UCD, and is the author of Sport and Ireland: a history (Oxford University Press, 2015).