Good Sports at Dublin City Library and Archive
Published on 25th July 2024
Are you experiencing withdrawal symptoms following this year’s Euros?
This year’s Olympic Games marks one hundred years since we first entered a team representing Ireland as an independent nation. Although we were less successful on the sporting front that year, Oliver St. John Gogarty won a bronze medal for his poem Ode to the Tailteann Games, whilst Jack B. Yeats won a silver for his painting The Liffey Swim, highlighting one of Dublin’s best known sporting events since 1920.
Many sporting events are represented in the collections of Dublin City Library and Archive including soccer, swimming, Gaelic football, hurling, rugby, polo, cricket, motorcycle racing and boxing. Sports programmes in particular are great sources of information about where and when events took place, of who played, for tracking the history of individual teams and clubs as well as tracing social attitudes towards both the sport itself and the athletes involved.
Images, clockwise from top left: Speedos 1964, Football All Ireland 1974, Rugby Tickets 1949, Rugby Programme 1949.
The winners of the Leinster Water Polo Challenge Cup of 1900 are an imposing group in the swimming costumes of the day, whilst a programme for the 24th National Swimming Championships of 1964 includes an advertisement for modern Speedo swimming costumes that connects this Irish event to the Tokyo Olympics of that year.
A striking cover for the Souvenir Programme of the European Boxing Championships held in Dublin shows airplanes carrying athletes from all over the continent descending on the country in 1947. Shown here also are tickets for ‘touch line seats’ and a programme for an Ireland v France Rugby match played in Lansdowne Road in January 1949, and a programme for the Clonliffe Harriers’ International Sports meeting held in Trinity College in August of that year.
Images, clockwise from top left: Munster Hurling 1981, Football All Ireland 1974, England versus Ireland 1976, Ireland versus Britain 1960.
The programme for the Shelbourne Tiger’s Motorcycle Speedway team of 1952 is evidence of a short-lived craze for this sport during that decade. Soccer has had a more abiding and widespread popularity. The FAI match between England and Ireland in September 1976 in Wembley Stadium is represented in the collections, as is that which took place in the preliminary rounds for the Olympic Games in Dalymount Park in March 1960. The programme for the All Ireland Football Final of 1974 pictures captain of Dublin, Seán Doherty, and of Galway, Gay Mitchell, whilst Joe McKenna of Limerick and John Callinan of Clare battle it out on the cover of the programme for the Munster Hurling Championship Finals of 1981.
Images, clockwise from top left: Community Games 1970, Leinster Water Polo 1900, Shelbourne Speedway 1952, European Boxing 1932.
Our Gaelic games were central to a sort of Irish Olympics style festival that also first took place a century ago. Held in 1924, 1928 and 1932 the Tailteann Games aimed to champion our native talents and unify the country after a traumatic civil war. On the Daily Programme for the 1932 games, a Celtic warrior takes aim with a spear, as if launching it into the future. The idea of creating future sporting heroes also perhaps influenced the cover of the programme for the Community Games of 1970, a young athlete lighting the flame of this mini Olympics for young people.
These items are available to view at the Dublin City Library and Archive.
Submitted by Teresa B from the archives team.