A commendable history of Irish soccer

Dilwyn Porter
International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University

There is much to commend in this collection, first published as a Soccer & Society special issue in 2021, but there is also a problem. Given the book’s title, potential readers might expect a more specific focus on the League of Ireland, especially since the original date of publication coincided with the centenary of the Irish Republic’s premier soccer competition. As it stands, most of the contributions here bear only indirectly on the League itself.

At the core of this collection are a set of essays that focus on Irish soccer from the late nineteenth century through to the formation of the Dublin-based Football Association of Ireland (FAI) in 1921. This, as Conor Curran points out in his introduction, was ‘a pivotal moment in the development of soccer in Ireland’ (p. 2), not least because the newly-constituted league – at first consisting of only eight teams – was established almost simultaneously. Before 1921, soccer in Ireland had been governed by the Belfast-based Irish Football Association (IFA). That there were now two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland seemed to reflect the political realities of partition in the uneasy peace that followed the Irish War of Independence.

Irish soccer in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries established its stronghold in and around Belfast. It was less popular in the south, where it faced competition not only from rugby but also from Gaelic football and hurling, both closely identified from the 1880s onwards with the movement for Irish independence. Perhaps this is why historians have tended to underestimate the popularity of the association game in the south. Julien Clenet’s essay, which argues convincingly that soccer was the sporting activity most favoured by lower middle- and upper working-class young men in Dublin by 1900, is especially important in supplying a new perspective.

While the new Irish Free State government threw its weight behind Gaelic sport, hard-line republicans in prison camps – who might have been expected to follow the same path – showed a recreational preference for the ‘foreign’ (that is ‘British’) game of soccer.

Indeed, the idea that soccer had established a much stronger foothold in the south than we might previously have thought helps to underpin Cormac Moore’s view that the decision to break away from the IFA to form a separate FAI in 1921. Even though it might seem to have been dictated by the exigencies of the political situation at the time, it is clear that it was mainly a response to deep-rooted tensions between Belfast and Dublin which had bedevilled the IFA for many years and were merely exacerbated by ‘The Troubles’ besetting Ireland more generally. Conor Heffernan and Joseph Taylor’s account of League of Ireland’s first season serves to reinforce Moore’s argument. While press coverage in Belfast newspapers suggested that clubs now governed by the FAI were ‘in the hands of the Philistines’, Dublin journalists were keen to point to the ‘limitless’ possibilities of soccer self-governance (pp. 52-3). The role of the sporting press as cheerleaders for the competition proved critical in its early years.

Contributions from Aaron Ó Maonaigh, Tom Hunt and Michael Kielty point to further complexities arising from the situation in which Irish sport found itself in the 1920s. Ireland’s mercifully short-lived but bitterly contested Civil War (1922-23), fought between factions which had been on the same side in the War of Independence but were now divided over the terms of the settlement with the UK, generated a sporting anomaly. While the new Irish Free State government threw its weight behind Gaelic sport, hard-line republicans in prison camps – who might have been expected to follow the same path – showed a recreational preference for the ‘foreign’ (that is ‘British’) game of soccer. Ó Maonaigh explains this phenomenon as ‘a rejection of Free State authority’ (p. 42). Indeed, given the new state’s attitude to soccer – at best ambivalent, at worst hostile – it is instructive to be reminded by Hunt of the symbolic significance of Irish participation in the Olympic soccer tournament of 1924, despite the ‘less than enthusiastic support’ of Ireland’s IOC representative (p. 91). Kielty draws attention to the career of Irish-American, Peter Peel, Dublin-born, ‘rugby-bred, a cricket and soccer playing Irishman, instrumental in Irish nationalist machinations within the Irish diaspora in Chicago and president of the United States Football Association’ (p. 116).  It is important to be reminded of the Irish contribution to the web of transnational connectivity that has underpinned soccer globalisation.

The essays which come closest to providing the ‘Contemporary Assessment’ of the League of Ireland referred to in the title are provided by Conor Curran and Gerald Farrell, both of whom concern themselves with the movement of players out of and into the League over the course of the last century. Curran focuses on the cross-border migration of players from the south to the north and it does appear that until recent years the traffic was mainly in this direction, despite the conflict which blighted the last three decades of the twentieth century in Northern Ireland. His account draws heavily and to good effect on the oral testimony of professionals who moved from the League of Ireland to the Irish League. The higher wages on offer in the North meant that playing there remained an attractive proposition, even when it became effectively a war zone in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Farrell is concerned with the relatively small number of foreign-born players moving into the League of Ireland, often ageing journeymen from UK, but sometimes from elsewhere. The intriguing mystery of Siegfried Dobrowitsch, a ‘Hungarian international’, who turned up in Sligo, surprisingly, in 1949, is unravelled, and particular attention given to the personal links which brought players from the Caribbean in the 1990s and early 2000s to a league where club sides were ‘still dominated largely by Irish nationals’ (p. 85).

Ken McCue’s ‘Who’s SARI now [?]’ – I love that title, by the way – the final essay in this collection, draws profitably on the author’s long-standing connection with the anti-racism movement in sport and, in particular, with Soccer Against Racism in Ireland [SARI] since it was founded in 1997.  As such it is an important historical document in itself , though there is a danger that it might be overlooked, located as it is  in an edited collection the title of which suggests a narrower focus.

Copyright © Dilwyn Porter 2023