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The following is a transcript of "Printing the 1916 Proclamation"  a talk by Dr Mary Clark at Dublin City Hall on Monday, 25 April 2016.AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode Dublin City Archivist Mary Clark talks about the 1916 Proclamation so kindly donated to Dublin City Council by the family of Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell, and tells the story of how the original signatures were chewed to a pulp by Michael Molloy. One of three talks given at a seminar held in Dublin City Hall on 25 April 2016.Good afternoon. I’d like to open this seminar by welcoming the O’Farrell family to City Hall. We are greatly in their debt as they so generously donated Elizabeth’s 1916 Proclamation to Dublin City Council, which we now have on display in the City Hall Exhibition downstairs.Of all copies of the Proclamation which survive this is one of the most historic. It was in the GPO with Elizabeth O’Farrell and she herself is one of the most heroic figures in the story of Easter week, as we will hear later on from her grand-nephew Ian Kelly. This seminar is designed to look at the Proclamation in general and at Elizabeth’s Proclamation in particular, through talks on its printing and conservation. We will also look at Elizabeth’s life and career, including her activities after the Rising and we will close with an original poem inspired by Elizabeth’s life and courage.So I’m up first, my name is Mary Clark and I’m the City Archivist and I am going to talk about printing the 1916 Proclamation. Now there is the 1916 Proclamation and obviously it’s a really historic document, but it’s also a work of art, it’s a simply beautifully object.  You can see that it sits comfortably into its frame with even margins all around, and none of the words at the end of any of the lines has been hyphenated, so it’s been extremely well-designed. This is the achievement of three men, Christopher Brady who was the printer and Michael Molloy and Liam O’Brien, who were the two compositors.  These three men worked for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, printing up trade union cards and programmes for weekly concerts at Liberty Hall, but also getting out the weekly newspaper The Workers’ Republic.  They were used to working under pressure and meeting tight deadlines, but even so printing the Proclamation was the most important and critical task ever entrusted to them.Each of these three men gave his witness statement to the Bureau of Military History during the 1950s.  Although each man has his unique perspective, the statements dovetail in essentials. At James Connolly’s request, the three men met at Liberty Hall on Easter Sunday. According to Christy Brady, Connolly introduced them to Thomas MacDonagh, who had the manuscript of the Proclamation in his hand, which is an absolutely riveting historical moment, Thomas MacDonagh standing in front of the three men with the manuscript Proclamation in his hand. So MacDonagh said ‘Well men, the time is about opportune to strike a blow for Ireland’. MacDonagh read the Proclamation to the three men, and when he was finished, he gave it to each man to read. So they were each being empowered to make a personal decision about whether they wanted to print the Proclamation or not.  So he asked them if they would print the document each man agreed to this, reckoning that it was an honour to be asked. Liam O’Brien noted that the ‘manuscript was entirely legible, the script being upright and almost perfect, without any changes or corrections’. He also formed the opinion that the handwriting was that of Padraig Pearse, which he had seen before.That evening, Easter Sunday evening, work began on typesetting the Proclamation.   The type that was used has been obtained on Good Friday by Michael Molloy, who was asked to find more type by James Connolly, without being told exactly what it was going to be used for. So Michael Molloy went to Stafford Street where there was an Englishman by the name of West, who was a printer, and he asked for type and he then said if you don’t give it to me I’m afraid I’ll have to take it. So with that Mr West handed it over, but he said that he wanted it back, so when you’ve used the type please bring it back to me. But of course, as we know, that never happened. The type was in fact smashed up by the British Army when they raided Liberty Hall during Easter Week.However, once typesetting began, on the evening of Easter Sunday, it soon became clear that there was a shortage of type, and to remedy this smaller letters, mainly the letter e were used in between the larger ones.  There is a tradition in the family of Councillor Patrick V. Mahon that the smaller letters were obtained from him, as he had a printing works around the corner but I have not found any verification of this – certainly the three men who worked on the document do not mention it.  Christy Brady also made a new letter by converting F to E using sealing wax. The document was ready for printing around 8.30pm and between 12 midnight and 1.00am on Easter Monday, the task was finished with a total of 2,500 copies made. Now that number of copies is what is stated by Christy Brady, and as the printer of the Proclamation he should know. On the Internet you are going to find all kinds of different numbers given, but the total of 2,500 is what is believed to be true.Because of the shortage of type, the document was printed in two parts, using a Wharfedale cylinder printing press. James Connolly checked the proofs against the original manuscript Proclamation. So on Easter Monday morning, the Proclamation, the manuscript Proclamation was still in Liberty Hall. And apart from the incorrect spelling of Eamon with one N instead of two, he pronounced himself satisfied.  As far as I can make out, this is the last known sighting of the original manuscript Proclamation. Where it is, if it has survived nobody knows. However, the seven signatures were on a separate piece of paper appended to the document and Michael Molloy put them in his pocket for safe keeping.  When he was later imprisoned in Richmond Barracks, he remembered that he had the signatures in his pocket and that this would be dangerous if found.  He began to tear up the paper but a fellow-prisoner advised him to chew the paper up instead and spit it out on the floor for added safety, so Molloy followed his advice. So that was the end of the seven signatures to the 1916 Proclamation.When the Proclamation was ready, the 2,500 printed copies were brought by Helena Molony to the General Post Office, which was to be the centre of the 1916 Rising.  Sean T O Ceallaigh, who was aide-de-camp to Patrick Pearse, was charged with arranging for the Proclamation to be pasted up around the city on walls and boards – wherever possible.  There are around thirty extant Proclamations left out of 2,500 and people wonder why so few have survived.  The historian Lorcan Collins tells a very good story about the nurses in the GPO making a bed out of comfy Proclamations to prevent their patients from lying on the bare floor. There were just so many Proclamations that it was felt that these few wouldn’t be missed. And certainly the Proclamations pasted up around the city centre would have been torn down by the British Army or else in time worn away by the weather. Even as early as 1917, the first anniversary of the Rising, Helena Molony was concerned that the Proclamation was in danger of being forgotten, because there were so few copies of it.  It’s interesting that she decided to have facsimiles made for distribution around Dublin. She just didn’t have any, or very few from 1916 - so she just needed more. She asked Tower Press to prepare these facsimiles and when they reported having a shortage of type, same problem a year on. Helena found some type still intact from the 1916 printing in Liberty Hall and she gave it for inclusion in what is knows as ‘The 1917 Proclamation’.As for the three men involved in printing the 1916 Proclamation.  Christy Brady went home but after three sleepless days he headed out to Howth, where he had a tent, the tent seems to have been there in permanence and he tried in vain to relax in his tent.  He then walked home to Little Mary Street as no trains or trams were running.  There he noticed some ‘shawlies’ pointing out his house to the British military and he decided to go on the run and he was on the run for six months.  He escaped capture, but his father, who was also a printer, was arrested on suspicion of having been involved in printing the Proclamation. So he was mistaken for his son and arrested. After working for various printers, Christy Brady got a job with the Bank of Ireland in 1922.  He lived firstly in Cabra and later in Dundrum, dying in December 1974 at the home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor.  Michael Molloy served during the 1916 Rising with the Irish Volunteers under Thomas MacDonagh in Jacob’s Factory. So once they had finished printing the Proclamation they started to get involved in the 1916 Rising. Liam O’Brien served in St Stephen’s Green.  Both men were interned at Knutsford and afterwards at Frongoch, and were released some months later.So that’s the amazing story of how this beautiful object was created. So I’m just going to show you one or two things that I think are interesting about it. This is the first line of the Proclamation Poblacht na hÉireann. This word Poblacht is very important. It means of course Republic. But it was the name chosen by the signatories for the 1916 Rising to express what they meant by Republic. Poblacht is a portmanteau word and it is pobal acht, so it’s the 'actions of the people'.  And it is much more meaningful than the word Republic, which is from res publica, in latin 'public things'. So there is a great deal more impact in the Irish, it means 'people acting together' and that’s what a republic really is all about. So I just think their choice of word is very important there.Now you will see a couple of capital letters there. If you look at ‘Irish Republic’ you will see that the ‘r’ is slightly banjaxed, if you can see that there. That is a proof that this is an original Proclamation, because the type was indeed banjaxed and this flaw runs right through all of them. And if you look at the other end of it, the ‘c’, that is an ‘o’ which has been cut, not particularly well I must admit, to create a ‘c’ out of it, so you can work that one out. This is the first incidence of the small letter e that I was able to find in the Proclamation and it’s in the third paragraph. You can see quite a difference between the e and the rest of it and it’s quite likely that this was a letter e that was actually fashioned by the type setters in order to continue on the story.‘Extinguished’ has a small letter ‘t’ - there you see that, and also at the very end of the word [extinguish]‘hed’ it’s actually a letter ‘a’ with the tick deleted. You will see a number of ‘e’s together there. A correct ‘e’ in ‘the’ but then ‘three’ has two small ‘e’s and ‘hundred’ and ‘years’ have small ‘e’s as well. And you can also see in the ‘r’ of ‘years’ that it was originally a ‘p’ and a little bit has been cut off to try and make it look like a ‘r’, the same with ‘three’ there.I just thought this was too good to miss for my final comment, ‘sovereign independence date’ and this, of course, is what the men and women of 1916 fought and died for, and it something that we need to maintain for present and future generations. Thank-you very much. Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The following is a transcript of the nineteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture "The Women were worse than the Men" given by Pádraig Yeates at Dublin City Library & Archive on 21 January 2016.

The following is a transcript of a lecture Timothy Young (Yale University) delivered at Dublin City Library & Archive on 28th September, 2015, titled 'Happy Deaths and Urban Dangers: The Darker Side of Children's Literature'.

Transcript of Mary Louise O’Donnell's talk and recital titled "Ireland's Harp: shaping a nation's identity", recorded at the Central Library, Ilac Centre, Dublin 1, on Thursday 12 March at 1.00pm

The following is a transcript of the eighteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture "Dublin as a global city: through time and space," given by Kevin Whelan, Director Keough-Naughton Institute, Notre Dame Centre in Dublin at Dublin City Library & Archive on 22 January 2015.

The Transformation of the Irish Army During the Emergency by Colonel Donal O’Carroll.

The following is a transcript of The Underestimated Mr. Wesley: Charles Wesley 1707 - 1788 given by Dudley Levinstone Cooney at Dublin City Library & Archive on 18 December 2007, the 300th anniversary of the birth of Charles Wesley. AudioWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast.  In this episode, The Underestimated Mr Wesley, Dudley Levinstone Cooney discusses Charles Wesley, leader of the Methodist movement and younger brother of John Wesley. Wesley is primarily remembered as a writer of hymns including the Christmas favourite Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. He was also one of the most prolific poets in the English Language. Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive on 18 December 2007 to mark the tercentenary of Charles Wesley's birth.Alastair Smeaton, Dublin City Public Libraries: Today, as you all know, 18 December is the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Wesley. I’m told by a reliable authority that this is the one event that takes place on the tercentenary that is being run by a body other than a church authority; we are pleased to host this occasion. Our speaker tonight, the Reverend Dudley Levinstone Cooney is president of the Wesley Historical Society in Ireland; he is president of the Old Dublin Society and as a historian and writer, The Methodists in Ireland: a short history springs to mind. Dudley Levinstone Cooney is pre-eminently qualified to deal with the subject of his lecture this evening, Charles Wesley. Ladies and gentlemen, Dudley Levinstone Cooney.[Applause]Dudley Levinstone Cooney: Thank you Alastair for that introduction. Thank you for coming. Can I say that as you came in you were listening to some music composed by Samuel Wesley, the son of Charles and played by the Milton Keynes Chamber Orchestra conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton. So we were setting the scene with some Wesley music.  I also want to thank a number of people who have been most helpful to me: the curator of The New Room in Bristol, which is also responsible for Charles Wesley’s house in Bristol, who provided a number of photographs; the Dublin City Libraries who provided a number of photographs and Martin Thorpe who made the maps that you will see in due course, marking the places that Charles visited during his time in Ireland. My warm thanks to Alastair himself who put all these illustrations together. This is the first time that I have tried to use PowerPoint. If anything goes wrong it’s not their fault; it’s mine.Considering the lavish encomiums which have been bestowed on him as a poet and hymn writer, it may seem strange to describe Charles Wesley as underestimated. The fact remains that he is generally remembered by Methodists as well as by others, simply as a hymn writer.  In his brief obituary in the minutes of conference of 1788, John Wesley wrote of Charles, 'his least praise was his talent for poetry'. Before we have finished we will consider some evaluations of his verse, but even here there are reasons for believing that he has not been fully appreciated. Writing near the end of his life to his friend, the Reverend Dr William Chandler, who was about to leave for America, Charles made this revealing comment:I took my Master's Degree, and only thought of spending all my days at Oxford. But my brother, who always had the ascendant over me, persuaded me to accompany him and Mr. Oglethorpe to Georgia. I exceedingly dreaded entering into holy orders: but he overruled me here also.The dominance of John was in part due to the fact that he was the elder by four and a half years, but certainly also owed something to the difference in character of the two men. It seems to have continued through the years since their deaths. That Methodists have failed to give Charles due credit, is certainly due to two factors of which we must take account and which are not to his discredit. One was his withdrawal from the itinerant ministry; the other was his opposition to those actions of John which paved the way for the separation of the Methodist Societies from the established church and their development as a distinct denomination.Charles Wesley was born at Epworth, in the Isle of Axholme in the North Riding of Lincolnshire on December 18 1707. He was the eighteenth child of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth and his wife Susanna. His birth was two months premature so that at first he appeared rather dead than alive. He neither cried nor opened his eyes and was kept wrapped up in soft wool until the time at which he should have been born according to the course of nature, when he opened his eyes and caused his voice to be heard.  To this has been ascribed the fact that he never enjoyed robust health and his recurrent illnesses reduced the amount of travelling he was able to undertake. His physical frailty did not affect his mental capacity and by the age of five, he had not only mastered the English language, but had begun to read the first verses of the Book of Genesis.  Like all the Wesley children he received his first lessons at home, his teachers being his father and mother. In 1716, at the age of eight, he went to Westminster School, where his eldest brother Samuel, then aged twenty-six was a teacher. Samuel helped to pay his fees and gave support and encouragement to him, becoming something of a second father to his little brother.  Charles was a bright student, excelling in Biblical knowledge and acquitting himself well in Greek and Latin verse. At the age of thirteen he became a King’s Scholar of the school, as had Samuel before him, and in his final year was captain of the school. He was not only a good scholar he was also popular with the other boys. One of his contemporaries was a Scottish lad called William Murray, whose parents were Jacobites. A bully used this as an excuse to pick on Murray and make his life miserable. Charles Wesley, even then a champion of the underdog, came to Murray’s defence and fought the bully. Murray never forgot his champion, and in later years when as Lord Mansfield he was as Lord Chief Justice of England, renewed his friendship with Charles.Before he left Westminster a distant cousin in Ireland, Garret Wesley, having no children to inherit his estate, wrote to the Rector in Epworth, offering to make Charles his heir. The family left the choice to Charles, who surprisingly for the youngest son of an impecunious family, turned down the offer. Garret approached a cousin on his mother’s side, Richard Colley, who accepted. Richard was the father of the 1st Earl of Mornington, Professor of Music in Trinity College Dublin, who we shall meet again in Charles Wesley’s London drawing room.Charles went up to Oxford in 1727 and entered Christ Church, where both of his brothers Samuel and John had been before him.  To the disapproval of John he spent his first year at the university enjoying the social round.  Whether or not John’s admonitions had more influence than Charles was ready to admit, or he simply tired of wasting time, in the second year he became a reformed character, his letter to Dr Chandler has this:My first year at college I lost in diversions. In the next I set myself to study. Diligence led me to serious thinking. I went to the weekly Sacrament, and persuaded two or three young scholars to accompany me.This was to have far-reaching implications. When John was recalled to Oxford to take up his tutorial duties as a fellow, Charles apparently readily deferred to his seniority and better qualifications and John assumed the leadership of the group. It studied the Bible and patristic writings, as well as classical literature and began regular practice of the rules in the prayer book concerning worship, fasting, and works of piety. It was this that earned them a variety of derisive nicknames including the best known, the ‘Holy Club’ and ‘Methodists’. Charles’ reference to the latter nickname in the letter to Chandler, has led some to suggest that he was individually averse to be called a Methodist, but recent research has established that the name was not coined until after John had assumed the leadership. It was applied to the whole group.Having graduated BA in 1729, and received a college appointment as tutor in Oxford, Charles would happily have stayed there for the rest of his life, but John was becoming discontented. Chiefly because the young undergraduates were too sophisticated and irreligious to join the ideal Christian community, which John envisaged for the ‘Holy Club’.  His courtship of two young women in succession had come to nothing and he was being criticised for his encouragement of a measure of asceticism. Then he saw a way of escape. General James Oglethorpe was looking for clergy to assist him in the management of the new colony of Georgia in North America, of which he was proprietor, and John Wesley thought it might be possible the ideal community among the unsophisticated natives of the place. He persuaded Charles to come with him but first to be ordained. However reluctant Charles may have been, he was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Oxford, Dr John Potter on Saturday, September 21 1735 and priest by the Bishop of London, Dr Edmond Gibson on Sunday, September 29. Yet somewhere in the back of his mind there leapt a sense that he had been frogmarched into holy orders by his brother, and the letter to Chandler would suggest as much. Events were to prove that John’s judgement was sound. Charles’ subsequent career fully justified his ordination.Within three weeks, on October 14th, the Wesley brothers and two companions, Charles Delamotte and Benjamin Ingham, embarked on the Simmonds for Georgia. It took over sixteen weeks to cross the Atlantic. Sixteen weeks of rough winter weather, with at least one storm in which the passengers were sure that the ship would go down and all would be drowned. The effect of the voyage on Charles is reflected by the words with which he opened a letter to Sally Kirkham, the eldest of the three daughters of the Rector of Stanton in Gloucestershire and sisters of one of the members of the ‘Holy Club’. Dated from the isle of Tibey in Georgia on February 5, 1736 it opens:God has brought an unhappy, unthankful wretch hither, through a thousand dangers, to renew his complaints, and loathe the life which has been preserved by a series of miracles. I take the moment of my arrival to inform you of it, because I know you will thank Him, though I cannot.As he continues to write his spirits begin to lift and he leaves off after several paragraphs. When after an interval of nine days he resumes the letter off Peeper’s Island he is more cheerful:My friends will rejoice with me in the interval of ease I at present enjoy. I look with horror back on the desperate spirit that dictated those words above, but shall let them stand as the naked picture of a soul which can never know reserve toward you. I will still call myself a prisoner of hope.When eventually they landed the brothers were separated. John remained at Savannah as chaplain to the settlement there. As Oglethorpe’s secretary, Charles had to accompany the General, about eighty miles, one hundred and thirty kilometres to the south, where Fort Frederica was being built. If Savannah, the chief settlement was then little more than a village, Frederica hardly qualified as a village at all. A measure of homesickness, the isolation of the situation, the monotony of the work and having to deal with the rough colonists who were so very different from the people to whose company he had been accustomed, undermined his health. A disagreement with Oglethorpe completed the breakdown and Charles was obliged to face the rigours of a voyage back to England across the Atlantic once again between August and December 1737. The picture of Charles preaching to the Indians is a piece of Methodist propaganda. It has no foundation in actual fact.Brother John was hard on his heels. He too had failed to relate to the rough settlers of Savannah and he had seen few, if any of the Native Americans. His dream of the ideal Christian community in the wilderness had proved impossible and in December he too left Georgia arriving back in England in February of 1738. Both men came home with a sense of failure. However, on the Simmonds going to Georgia they had encountered a group of Moravians, by whose assured Christian faith they had been deeply impressed. They continued to meet the Moravians in Georgia and when they got back to London made a point of meeting some Moravians led by Peter Böhler there. The stage was set for dramatic religious experiences which changed the lives of both men. Interesting that it should happen in what was then quite a rough city.The story of John Wesley’s evangelical conversion, as it is generally called, has become much better known than that of Charles, though Charles had the experience three days before his brother.  The breakdown of himself in Georgia was not helped by the religious tension in which he lived for several months after his arrival back in England and in the early part of May he was confined to bed. On May 11 he moved to the house of John Bray at Little Britain, close to Aldersgate Street, but was so weak that he had to be carried in a chair. He describes Bray as, 'a poor ignorant mechanic, who knows nothing but Christ'. He was in fact a craftsman working in brass. Charles received the sacrament on Friday and Saturday, May 19and 20 but his dejection in no way abated. It was John Bray and his sister Mrs Turner who were instrumental in leading him to assurance that he needed and by the middle of Pentecost Sunday, May 21 the young Charles could write, 'I now find myself at peace with God'. His brother John found the same assurance on the following Wednesday, May 24 at a Moravian meeting in Littleton Court, off Aldersgate Street, while one of the Moravians was reading Luther’s Preface to his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.For the next fourteen months, the Wesley brothers maintained their links with the Moravians, forming a society in Fetter Lane. For three months, from the middle of June to the middle of September 1738, John left London to visit the Moravian centres of Marienborn and Herrnhut in Germany - Herrnhut was the estate of their leader Nicolas, Count von Zinzendorf. John was anxious to see Moravian faith in practice as the headquarters from which groups of families and individuals had been sent as missionaries to plant societies in Holland, England and North America. While he was away, Charles threw himself into the work of the burgeoning evangelical revival in London. He preached in whatever Church of England churches were prepared to welcome him, visited the prisons, and in an unofficial role of chaplain accompanied condemned felons to their execution in Tibourne. When pulpits were closed to him because of his zeal he took field preaching. This is a Methodist term for preaching outside a church or preaching house and need not necessarily take place in an actual field - market-places or crossroads, barns, assembly rooms, sessions houses or market houses - all were used. For a few months he served as curate to the Reverend George Stonehouse at Islington - the only curacy he ever held. Stonehouse was sympathetic to Charles’ evangelicalism but yielded to pressure from two bullying church wardens and Charles was dismissed.During 1739, a spirit of quietism grew among the Moravians, its more extreme exponents advocating that people should wait quietly doing nothing, not even attending religious meetings until moved by the grace of God. John Wesley believed that the way to wait for the grace of God was by using the means of grace – the sacrament, public worship, Christian fellowship, bible reading, private devotion and works of charity. On July 20, he and Charles left the Moravians with about seventy like-minded people and established a new society in the old king’s foundry at Windmill Street, behind City Road, which had been vacated only a short while before when the Royal Arsenal moved to Woolwich. From this base John Wesley began the frequent and extensive tours of England that developed the connection of Methodist Societies, which in time became the Methodist Church. John maintained this itinerating ministry for more than fifty years. For the first ten years, Charles participated fully in this work, of which the main bases were in London, Bristol and Newcastle-on-Tyne. However, his less robust health necessitated some reduction of both the frequency and the extent of his travels beyond the main bases.In 1747, John paid his first visit to Ireland visiting a society which had been formed a little earlier in the year. His meetings were held in the disused Lutheran chapel in Marlborough Street. He stayed for just two weeks and then left John Trembath to take charge of the society. Within days the building had been attacked by a mob and the furniture and timber wainscoting carried into the yard where the mob set it alight. Trembath wrote fearfully to John assuring him that, “Nobody was fit to be a preacher in Ireland who was not ready to die at a moment.” John felt unable to return to Ireland immediately and proposed to send Charles. He wrote to the younger man asking for a meeting at Garth in Breconshire in the home of Marmaduke Gwynne who had become a Methodist. It was to be a momentous meeting in more ways than one. Charles got to the venue first and while waiting for John became better acquainted with the Gwynne family, including one of the daughters, Sarah. She was to be the love of his life but there was no time for wooing.  The situation in Dublin was critical and to Dublin Charles accordingly went.His letters to Ebenezer Blackwell reveal the two main problems which he had to face, one was the number of people who were afraid to attend any more Methodist meetings in case of another attack and the second was the lack of premises. Not surprisingly the trustee of the Lutheran chapel Dorothea Felster asked the Methodists to go before any more damage was done to her property and nobody else would give them house or room. In little more than three weeks Charles’ calm and courage and the fact that there had been no more riots, restored the confidence of the society and a new premises had been found. This was a disused weaving shed at Cork Street in the Dolphin’s Barn area which was adapted to accommodate Methodist meetings. It provided living rooms for the preachers which delivered Charles from the conditions of his first lodgings, he had written to John a dryly humorous description of these: “A family of squalling children, a landlady just ready to lie-in, a maid who has not time to do the least thing for us, are some of our conveniences.”The mixed reactions of the people of Dublin were perhaps reflected in one of Charles’ letters, dated October 25, which served also as a journal, and was meant to be shared by his correspondents in England:Passed three hours under my usual burden, among the dry bones of the house of Israel at St. Patrick’s. How different the spirit here from that of our chapel in London. I seldom enter this place, but the zealots are ready to drag me out like that old profaner of the temple, Paul. Such murmuring, disputing, railing and loud abuse the very sight of me occasions, but I can compare the house of God to nothing but a den of thieves and murders.  The Dean indeed I must except, and give honour to whom honour is due. He has always behaved towards us with great courtesy and love; looks pleased to see us make up the bulk of the communicants; appointed us a seat for ourselves – but the underling officers soon thrust us out; and constantly administers the sacrament to me first as the order of our church requires.In later years, the Dean William Cradock invited John Wesley to assist him in the administration of the sacrament but there is no record of his extending the same invitation to Charles. It was probably too early in the development of Methodism in the city for that. In the afternoon of the same day he went to a service in St Catherine’s Church in Thomas Street and in the evening conducted the opening of a new preaching house in Cork Street, where the congregation was so large that only a quarter of them would fit inside, so Charles moved out into the garden, standing with his back to the wall. He estimated that over a thousand people were present. Estimates of open air functions tended to err on the high side. It was in this building that Samuel Handy of Coolalough in County Westmeath was persuaded to hear a Methodist preacher, was convinced of their value and invited them to make his house the base for work in the Irish midlands. Within a very short while, societies had been established at Templemcateer, Tyrrellspass, Philipstown (now Dangan), Tullamore, Moate and Athlone.The portrait you are looking at by the way is roughly what Charles looked like at the time when he was here in Ireland.Good reports from the preachers who went to these places and from Mr Handy made Charles eager to see for himself. And on February 8 1748 he set out from Dublin. He remarks that as they rode to Tyrrellspass, he and his companions overtook a lad “whistling one of our tunes”. Arriving at Tyrrellspass they were welcomed by the local landlord Stephen Fois. He addressed the local society there, some of whom expressed their satisfaction in a way peculiar to them - they whistled for joy. On the following day he visited Templemcateer and on February 10 took horse with six companions to Athlone. Samuel Handy and his brother Jonathan rode at the front. At one point on the road, three or four men ordered them to go back to where they came from and threw stones. One of the preachers John Healy was knocked off his horse and Stephen Fois was struck on the head, but Samuel Hendysetting spurs to his horse, led a charge which scattered the enemy. When the authorities in Athlone heard of the incident they ordered the solders from the barracks in the castle to guard the visitors. Charles preached in the market house. Visits to the other towns were without untoward incident.On March 8 John Wesley landed in Dublin for this second visit and Charles was free to return to England for a few months. John toured the midlands societies, further consolidating the work there, as well as in Dublin, and returned to England in May. Charles came back to Ireland in August and this time stayed with William Lunell, who had been John’s host and who had recently lost his wife and baby son in childbirth. In the interval two of the preachers, Thomas Williams and Robert Swindells had introduced Methodism into Cork City. I think that’s a lovely name for a Methodist preacher, Swindells (laughter). On August 18, Charles set out on his longest Irish tour. At Ballyboy, some miles south of Tullamore, he was welcomed by a friendly Quaker whom he does not name, but in whose house a number of people gathered to hear him preach. On the following day he road through heavy rain on roads reduced to quagmires and stopped to eat at Roscrea. Here the people would not let him leave town until he had preached to them. By evening he had reached Cashel, where he stayed for the night but could find no means of drying his clothes. He reached Cork on August 20 and stayed there for almost a month in the house of a printer named Harrison. He found 200 members in the Methodist society and noted with satisfaction the improvement in the manners of the citizens since the arrival of the Methodist preachers. This was not an illusion. It was also observed by a young Quaker woman who wrote to her family making the same comment.Charles rode out to Riverstown to call on the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork and Ross, Dermot Brown. Brown and his family received him with great affability. While staying in Cork he ventured into some of the neighbouring towns. At Bandon, he preached at both ends of the town. In Kinsale he writes, 'it is worth observing that I am of every religion; the Presbyterians say I am a Presbyterian, the churchgoers that I am a minister of theirs, and the Catholics are sure that I am a good Catholic at heart'. In Youghal he preached on the Strand and at Middleton the Town Hall could not contain the numbers that wished to hear him. Listening to preachers was obviously a form of entertainment in those days. From Kinsale, he wrote happily to Ebeenzer Blackwell, ‘rejoice with me for I have found the sheep that was lost. And not one only but a whole flock of them’.It was eight months after Charles had left Cork that a rascally ballad mongernamed Nicholas Butler fomented a succession of riots against the Methodists from which they suffered considerable personal injury and damage to property. The grand jury to whom they appealed to help, turned on them and accused the victims of being the cause of the trouble. ‘We found and present’ they said, ‘Charles Wesley to be a person of ill-fame, a vagabond and a common disturber of his Majesty’s peace and we pray that he may be transported.’ Remember these are members of the established church describing an ordained priest of the established church. When the Assize Judge saw the disreputable quality of the witnesses against the Methodists, he threw the charges out of court.Charles left Ireland in October 1748. On arrival at Holyhead, wrote to William Lunell, in the course of his letter describing the horrors of his voyage across the Irish Sea. ‘The water in Dublin Bay was so rough that it took two hours for the small boat by which the passengers were embarking to get from the quay to the ship.’ Charles was seasick for the whole journey and rather curiously blamed some cake he had eaten rather than the storm. First the main sail was carried away by the force of the wind, and then the master of the ship was blown overboard and seen no more. After two days of this the ship got safe to harbour. Fascinating description of a safe journey! Charles never again went on a sea voyage.Charles had continued his courtship of Sarah Gwynne by correspondence and occasional visits to Garth when he was not in Ireland. The fact that he was now forty-one and she was only twenty-two was not considered a difficulty as in the eighteenth century it was quite common for women to marry men considerably older than themselves. There was however, one difficulty. As would have been the case with most parents the Gwynnes were reluctant to agree to their daughter marrying a man with no settled income, Charles did not even have a curacy.  John Wesley solved the problem by guaranteeing Charles an income of £100 a year from the sale of their hymns, most of which came from Charles’ pen. An income of £100 a year in 1749 had the purchasing power of about £14,000 or €20,000 300 years later. It was not wealth but neither was it want.The wedding took place at Llanlleonfel Church, a mile from Garth and six miles from Builth Wells on what is now the A483. It was conducted by John Wesley. To mark the occasion, the happy bridegroom wrote a hymn opening with the lines ‘Thou God of truth and love, we seek thy perfect way’. The third verse originally read:Didst thou not make us one,That both might one remain,Together travel on,And bear each other's pain;Till both thy utmost goodness prove,And rise renewed in perfect love?For the word ‘both’ in lines 2 and 5, John substituted the words ‘we’ and ‘all’ respectively and published it in his collection of hymns. As such it has been happily sung by generations of Methodists as a hymn of fellowship, blissfully unaware that it was originally a wedding hymn, first sung at the wedding of Charles himself.Charles and Sarah set up house at number 4 Charles Street in Bristol. Here over a period of nineteen years, eight children were born, of whom five died in infancy and were buried in the nearby graveyard of St James’ Church. The eight were John, Martha Maria, Charles, Sarah called Sally, Susannah, Selena, Samuel and John James. In 1753, Sarah Wesley caught smallpox which so marred her features that the disparity of her own and her husband ages was no longer apparent. It was from her that the infant John caught the infection and died before his first birthday.It was after his marriage that Charles began to withdraw from the itinerating ministry that Methodism had demanded of him.  To some degree he was beginning to be nervous of some of John’s activity, which he clearly saw would eventually lead to the separation of Methodism from the Church of England, and this Jackson sees as the most significant factor in his withdrawal. This was something John would not see. But there was also the fact that Charles was now a happily married man with a family. There was a kernel of truth in the caustic wit of the eccentric rector of Everton in Bedfordshire, John Berridge, who commented, ‘No trap so mischievous to the field preacher as wedlock. Matrimony has quite maimed poor Charles and might have spoiled John and George if the wise master had not sent them a pair of ferrets’. (laughter) John Wesley and George Whitefield were both married to shrewish wives.The picture is of Charles’ house no. 4 Charles Street, Bristol and the statue of him outside the New Room. Of the three surviving children of Charles and Sarah Wesley, the girl Sally had some literary talent, and Routley detected ability as a cartoonist in at least one of her sketches, but it was her brothers, Charles Junior and Samuel whose gifts had the greatest impact on the family. Their musical genius became evident at a very early age. Their uncle John and their father had both been competent singers but Uncle John had never had much appreciation of music for its own sake. He saw it more as a convenient vehicle for the words of a hymn. Charles, the father of the two boys had a greater musical appreciation and was able to play the organ but the talents of his son went far beyond that. He began to realise that Bristol was too small a place for their development and in 1771 the family moved to London. They took up residence at No. 1 Chesterfield Street, off the Marylebone Road, then on the fringes of the city. It had been the home of a Mrs Gumby, whose lease had still twenty years to run. She gave the house free of charge to Charles and Sarah richly furnished and completely ready for occupation. The cellars were well-stocked with wine and even with barrels of table beer.It was in the drawing room of this house that Charles organised subscription concerts at which his sons could display their talents. Among those who attended was distant cousin Gareth Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, son of the Richard Colley who had inherited the estate Charles had declined fifty years before. Lord Mornington brought his violin and joined the boys in playing. Another who came was General James Oglethorpe, differences in the colony of Georgia long forgiven and forgotten. Among the leading musicians who encouraged the lads were Thomas Arne and William Boyce. As is not unusual with child prodigies neither boy in later life quite fulfilled the promise of his early years, though Samuel was recognised as the leading organist of his day in England. His great contribution to English musical appreciation was his popularising of the work of Johan Sebastian Bach, indeed one of his sons was known as Samuel Sebastian Wesley.The last years of Charles’ life was spent in an unremitting struggle to keep the Methodist Societies within the Church of England. He was shocked and saddened when in 1784 his brother John ordained ministers for America. He could not accept the theological arguments by which John justified this action. It has been said that Charles showed his love for the church by supporting it, John by trying to reform it. To Charles John’s action was separation, though the Methodists in England did not organise themselves as a separate church for ten years, by which time both Charles and John were dead. But in spite of these deep disagreements, Charles did not abandon either his brother or the Methodist Societies, continuing to preach in Methodist chapels whenever he had opportunity. Whatever else may be said about the Wesley brothers and sisters, differences of opinion never destroyed their love for each other. Rutter’s comment is apposite, ‘Charles represented the law opposition on many organisational matters.’Charles died on March 20 1788 in his eighty-first year. His mother Susanna had been buried in Bunhill Fields, the great London dissenters’ burial ground and his brother John had prepared a burial ground behind the Methodist chapel in City Road. But these were not consecrated ground as the Church of England understood it and Charles was a churchman. He chose that his body should be buried in the churchyard of the parish of Marylebone, where he had lived for seventeen years. There thirty-four years later, his beloved wife Sarah joined him, having lived to the age of ninety-six. There too the mortal remains of their musical sons were laid, Charles Junior in 1834 and Samuel in 1837.In our survey of Charles Wesley’s life there have been indications of the ways in which he has been underestimated. We must look a little more closely at these. He was, as we have observed a strong churchman, but that did not make him any less a Methodist. Throughout his life he was loyal to the primary view that the Methodist societies were part of the life of the established church and that to be a Methodist was to be more devoted and more conscientious in membership of the church. He did far more for the early Methodists than teach them to sing theology.He travelled less than his brother John in the interests of the work, but that was primarily due to his less robust health and not to any lack of enthusiasm. The serious debility from which he served on his return from Georgia was largely psychosomatic prompted by his sense of failure to achieve the purpose of his going there. The evangelical experience of Pentecost 1738 removed the sense of failure and the debility went with it. He found the energy to throw himself into the work of the revival. However, the physical weakness remained to reduce the amount he could do, though not the effectiveness of it. We have looked in detail at the record of his time in Ireland which was quite evidentially spent very energetically. One of his supporters has claimed that he planted Methodism in Ireland with a tenacity that caused it to remain and flourish. That is to overstate the case. He did some pioneering in the small towns of County Cork, but in the Midlands and in Cork City others had been there before him. Had he not come to Ireland the Dublin Society would have taken longer to rally after the initial mob onslaught, but the patient work of John in the course of twenty further visits through the following forty-eight years and the devotion of the early preachers sent from England and more recruited in Ireland itself, would have been sufficient to develop the work. Nevertheless Charles must be given credit for the speedy recovery of the Dublin Methodists in 1747 and for responding immediately to the invitation from Samuel Handy which opened the way into the provinces.It is hard to assess Charles as a preacher, but so it is of John. But one thing is certain that the 151 sermons John published were not the sermons that so deeply affected the general public. They were drafted for highly educated congregations or as teaching material. The few accounts which have survived of John’s field preaching indicate what would today be called a much more populist style. Of Charles’ sermons virtually nothing survives. The manuscript of six in his handwriting upon examination proved to include transcriptions of five by John. An examination of style has suggested that one of John’s 151 was originally by Charles. In all probability the brothers were unconcerned about who wrote which sermon as they were about who wrote which hymn; if it was good they published it. The only thing that we can be certain about is that Charles was an effective preacher and his pulpit and field preaching did much to build Methodism in England, Wales and Ireland. It is fitting that both brothers are commemorated in Westminster Abbey with their portraits on the one tablet. It is also fitting that Common Worship, Services and Prayers for the Church of England, published in 2000, includes in its calendar, a letter festival, May 24 John and Charles Wesley, evangelists, hymn writers.John R Tyson’s study led him to believe that Charles Wesley was an important theologian, often underrated. Tyson of course was studying Charles. In fact the same comment would be true of both John and Charles. The Calvinist discipline which predominated in Europe and American theology through much of the 20th century tended to dismiss both of the Wesleys as poor theologians whose position changed from time to time.  More recently theologians have began to re-evaluate the Wesleys, to recognise their apparent changes as the evolution of the experiential element in their thinking. And to perceive that this experiential approach offers the root into the 21st century thinking outside the church that is alienated by the rigidly deductive method. It is difficult to distinguish Charles’ theology from that of John and this is yet another evidence of how closely the brothers worked together. The main distinction lies in the media through which they communicated. John wrote sermons and tracts, Charles wrote poetry. It might be said that John wrote primarily for the head, Charles appealed to the heart. An example may be found in one of Charles’ hymns for the sacrament:Come, Holy Ghost, thine influence shed,And realize the sign;Thy life infuse into the bread,Thy power into the wine.Effectual let the tokens proveAnd made, by heavenly art,Fit channels to convey thy loveTo every faithful heart.Wesley does not intend to suggest in the third and fourth lines that different things happen to the bread and wine at the epithesis, the words life and power are used for poetic effect. The verses together make a powerful appeal to both the emotions and the understanding and are clear about the real presence without attempting to define it. Langford’s assessment of the theology of the two brothers is well balanced. It seems safe to attribute to John the primary role as theologian of the Methodist movement. Charles served as supportive, encouraging and propagandising role to and for John. The preface to the Methodist Hymn Book of 1933 opens with the words, ‘Methodism was born in song’.We must now turn to a consideration of Charles Wesley as a poet, but before we do one other point needs to be made: Charles the propagandist is Charles the poet and his flair as teacher of the faith lay in his ability to make theology singable. People remember songs long after they have forgotten verse or prose. Music is the finest aid to memory. It was in singing the hymns of the Wesleys that the Methodists learned their Christian doctrine. It has been said that Charles wrote between 6,000 and 7,000 hymns, but until comparatively recently it has been virtually impossible to say. Between 1988 and 1991 S.T. Kimborough Jr and Oliver A Beckerlegge completed the mammoth task of compiling and publishing in three volumes the unpublished poetry of Charles Wesley. That facilitates the task of counting and it has been computed that he wrote just a little under 9,000 poems. Given a productive period of fifty years, it averages 180 poems a year or more than three a week. When one takes account of the fact that he did not always maintain that average, his output was prodigious. But how many of these were hymns? What is a hymn? His poems fall into five broad classes; political, comment on current events, love poems, poems written for fun with children and religious poems. Even within the religious category, which is by far by the largest, the calculation will depend on how one defines a hymn. Is a hymn a poem capable of being sung by a congregation or does it only qualify if it has been actually sung in a worship service?Charles began writing verse before his evangelical experience. In the Epworth Rectory his father, his mother, his brother John and his sister Hettie all wrote verses and at least one critic has suggested that Hettie was the best poet of them all. The writing of verses including translations from the classic authors was part of the curriculum at Westminster School. In his years at Oxford and afterwards, Charles wrote a good deal of verse in the manner of Dryden and Pope. Poems that have survived from this period give evidence of his classical scholarship and his poetic talent. Beckerlegge asks the question why Charles has been so neglected by anthologists of English verse. He comments, ‘one can only assume the precious taste of so many very literary men prevented their ever knowing the work of one whom they probably thought of in their ignorance as being a mere evangelist or even a revivalist’.His classic scholarship did not desert him when he came to writing hymns and Baker has written of his, ‘Miltonic facility for incorporating polysyllabic Latinate words into his verses in a way that enhances the verbal music’. The lines he gives as examples are ‘incomprehensibly made man’, ‘inextinguishable blaze’, ‘concentred all through Jesu’s name’. John Lawson has done us considerable service by tracing the biblical references in about 150 of Wesley’s hymns demonstrating how many scriptural allusions there are in each verse. That does not suggest Charles sat down to write hymns with an open Bible, rather it is evidence that his youthful study of the bible was so thorough that its language came to him naturally and references fit seamlessly into the poetry.In the writing of hymns, Charles was profoundly influenced by the German carols to which the Moravians introduced him. But he was evidently alert to the significance of congregational singing and Shields believes that he actually wrote with tunes in mind. If that be so one must not forget that in the early hymn books music was not printed with the hymns and each congregation sang the hymns to any tunes they knew which fitted. It was possible to sing the same hymn with half a dozen congregations to as many different tunes. There is a story told of Charles preaching in West Cornwell and being interrupted by a group of drunken sailors singing the lewd ditty ‘Nancy Dawson’. Charles told them that he liked the tune but not the lurid lines and suggested that if they would return later in the day he would have a song for them all to sing together. The challenge drew a large crowd to the second meeting and Charles passed around the text of his defence of Christian hymnody “on the true use of music” which they all sang to the tune the sailors had bawled earlier in the day. Stories such as this have given rise to the idea that all of Charles’ hymns were written to tunes that were already popular. But that is only true in so far as many could be sung to ballad tunes likely to be known to the congregations. What is quite extraordinary is the variety of verse forms which Charles used. Hymns and Psalms, the hymn book currently in use in Methodist Churches in Britain and Ireland carries 150 hymns by him and they are written in twenty-eight different verse forms.It should not of course be forgotten that Wesley described his Collection of hymns, for the use of the people called Methodists as ‘a little body of experimental and practical divinity’. He was borrowing from the Dissenters who generally used their hymn books in Routley’s phrase as “word in Roman Catholicism’ they were intended as much to be read and prayed, as sung.If the verse anthologists have underestimated Charles Wesley, the hymnologists and musicologists have not. Dr John Julian in his Dictionary of Hymnology described him as perhaps, taking quantity and quality into consideration ‘the great hymn writer of all ages.’ W.J. Courthope in his History of English Poetry called him, ‘the most admirable devotional lyric poet in the English language.’ Bernard Manning gave high praise to A collection of hymns, for the use of the people called Methodists almost entirely Charles’ work.Today these hymns have to struggle against three disadvantages; the first is the limited repertoire of the average congregation; the second is the heresy spread by the advertising media that the latest is best and the dead have nothing to offer; the third is the demand for gender inclusive language and the modernising of the personal pronouns, that may not do much damage to the prose of the liturgy but it does seriously damage poetry. In the long run John Wesley has proved quite correct when he wrote, ‘Many gentlemen have done my brother and me, though without naming us, the honour to reprint many of our hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome to do so provided they print them just as they are but I desire they would not attempt to mend them, for really they are not able’. Thank-you[Applause] Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

'Becoming John Gray', a talk by Jerusha McCormack as part of Dublin: One City, One Book 2010.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Dr William Murphy on the relationship between the GAA and revolutionary nationalism in Dublin in the years 1913-1923. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010. Listen to the lectureWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, Dr William Murphy charts the relationship between the GAA and revolutionary nationalism in Dublin in the years 1913-1923.  Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 11 September 2010, as part of the Sport and the City Seminar.Good Morning. First of all before I start I’d like to thank Ellen Murphy, and Mary Clark (Dublin City Archives) for inviting myself and also inviting Paul along to talk today, and wish them the best of luck in the enterprise, which is the Dublin City Sporting Archive. It is very important for myself and Paul who are involved professionally in the writing of sport that archives are developed because sports history is really at its early stages in Ireland as a professional activity and without archives we are not going to make much progress. So again I’d like to wish them all the best with their project.So today, I am going to talk about a subject that is comparatively widely written in terms of sports history in Ireland and that’s the relationship between the GAA and Nationalism and very specifically the relationship between the GAA and the Irish Revolution. When people wrote about the GAA in its early years they stressed constantly that members of the Gaelic Athletic Association had contributed in disproportionate numbers what they regarded as the struggle for Irish independence. So this is a quote from the Irish Independent of January 1923:In 1916 when Pearse and his companions unfurled the flag of liberty, the men of the hurling and football fields rolled in from far and near, and it is no exaggeration to say that they formed the backbone of that company... When the Anglo-Irish war developed, go where you would up and down the country, it was difficult to point to even one man, other than a hurler or footballer, who took any prominent part in the fight.In the intervening years much of this image has lingered. The link between radical separatism and the GAA was symbolically re-enforced during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the 1916 Rising in 1966 when, according to Mary Daly, ‘it is evident that the GAA tried to claim a special place, as the inspiration for the Rising and a major force in keeping the flame of republican idealism alive.’ This was manifest in the fact that Croke Park and also Casement Park in Belfast hosted enormous pageants during the ’66 celebrations and also on All-Ireland hurling final day in 1966 the Central Council welcome 1916 Veterans to Croke Park and in the Programme they said ‘in having as its guests today the Veterans of the 1916 Rising. Their presence symbolises the indivisibility which has always existed between this Association and the aspiration of a free and Gaelic Ireland.’So there is no doubt that many members of the GAA were active in Sinn Féin or the Irish Volunteers during the revolutionary period. These included a significant cohort of energetic men who took on leading roles in both the GAA and the revolutionary movement. In the case of Dublin, perhaps the most famous of them is Harry Boland, who was chairman of the Dublin County Board between 1911 and 1918. Here you can see Harry is here with the Dublin hurling team of 1917. But he wasn’t alone Dan McCarthy of Terenure Sarsfields Club who went on to be chairman of the Leinster Council of the GAA between 1919 and 1921 and President of the GAA between 1921 and ‘24) was another. McCarthy was a prominent member of Sinn Féin and he was elected in 1922. And also Thomas Ashe in north county Dublin originally a Kerry man but living in north county Dublin, was very prominent in both promoting revolutionary nationalism and the GAA in the north of the county. Obviously Ashe died in 1917 on hunger strike. In other parts of the country there were other figures, there was J. J. Walsh in Cork, there was Austin Stack in Kerry, and there was Eoin O’Duffy in Monaghan who combined this enthusiasm for the GAA with an enthusiasm for revolutionary nationalism. Eoin was always involved in organising rather than playing. Fearghal McGarry who has written a biography of Eoin O’Duffy, has commented that"there were certainly similarities between O’Duffy’s role in the GAA and IRA, both of which involved constant travelling, organizing, encouraging activity where little existed, promoting co-operation between rival parishes, and mediating local disputes. It was an immense advantage to O’Duffy in his latter role that he knew, and was known to, the young Gaels of Ulster. "It is thought that Harry Boland and his brother, Gerry, were recruited into the IRB in 1904 when they were approached after a hurling match by the referee, Maurice F. Crowe, who was a Limerick man who again combined IRB activity with involvement in the GAA. The Bolands would have been predisposed to join the IRB, their father had been a prominent IRB member. These men were committed to the success of the GAA, but they also utilised the association to promote revolutionary nationalism as I’ve said. Just as cricket matches had facilitated Fenians in their activities in the 1860s, so too the GAA provided cover for the meetings and movements of radical nationalists during the revolution: they often saved on train fares by travelling on match-day specials. It provided a network of contacts, a school in the rhetoric of Irish nationalism, a recruiting ground. Dan McCarthy remembered that IRB members within the GAA worked in Leinster counties to get IRB men elected to become the county delegates to the Leinster Council so that then when they came to Leinster council meetings in Dublin they could exchange IRB business as well as GAA business.But that’s not the whole story. In his analysis of nationalist politics in the counties of Sligo, Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Westmeath in the years before the 1916 Rising, Michael Wheatley has argued that ‘virtually no trace . . . can be seen locally’ of the control which the IRB appeared to exert at national and provincial levels of the GAA. Wheatley records that the RIC County Inspector for Roscommon reported in April 1913 that ‘The GAA clubs are chiefly concerned with their games and do not display disloyalty, but that is not saying that they are loyal.’ David Fitzpatrick was surely close to the mark when he suggested that what the [Gaelic] League and GAA had to offer the politicians they offered indiscriminately to Sinn Féiners and Redmondites alike: zest for Ireland, tangible rather than rhetorical reminders of Irish nationality, Irish reels, sets, jigs, a few words of Irish, aggressively un-English games.For these reasons Irish party figures remained very active in the association, as well as Sinn Féiners as they too sought to harness the association’s vitality. Irish party loyalists were active in the GAA in Dublin, but in this city and county there seems little doubt that the GAA at least at the higher administrative levels was dominated by an IRB or radical nationalist faction which included individuals such as Boland, McCarthy, Crowe, another man called Jack Shouldice who went on to be secretary of the Leinster Council, and a man called Maurice Collins, who was the Geraldine’s Club representative on the County Board.In late 1913 and 1914, GAA members and clubs in some areas were swept up in the initial wave of enthusiasm for volunteering in the country. Jack Shouldice estimated that about a third of those who attended the first meeting of the Irish Volunteers at the Rotunda here in Dublin on 25 November 1913 were GAA members. But he went on to note that he thought that maybe half were Gaelic League, so the Gaelic League was more important, he felt than the GAA in terms of nationalism. The association did not officially endorse the Irish Volunteers, but in January 1914 James Nowlan, who was President of the GAA, advised every member to join the Volunteers and ‘learn to shoot straight.’ The Volunteers branch formed in Fairview-Drumcondra area, drilled at the Clann na hÉireann hurling club grounds in Ballybough and Clann na hÉireann had close links with the IRB. All over the country GAA matches were facilitated Volunteer displays. In Con Short’s view this was mutually beneficial for both the GAA and the radical nationalist movement. So the Volunteers turned up and they paid in and they provided a crowd for the GAA and the GAA provided volunteers in return. On the other hand, other people have argued that they got in each other’s way. So for instance in Wicklow and Kildare some of the GAA people complained that their calendar was being constantly disrupted by their members going off on Volunteer activities. So it should not be taken for granted, therefore, that the cultural and political forms of nationalism always complemented each other. In some cases active membership of the GAA militated against participation in the Irish Volunteers, as the GAA and Irish Volunteers competed for the time and commitment of the activists. In Towards Ireland Free, by Liam Deasy, Deasy makes this comment that he did not join the Irish Volunteers for a considerable period because "my activities in the G.A.A. and the Gaelic League at the time were so absorbing as to prevent my feeling any immediate urgency about joining the new movement. Besides, I felt that by being actively engaged in the two organizations mentioned I was already serving my country in a useful manner.2Cornelius Murphy was from Cork and he was very involved in the Volunteers, and he remembered ‘Ninety per cent of the GAA was just GAA, the other 10% was good. I belonged to two GAA clubs when the Volunteers started, and I was the only member of either of the two clubs who joined the Volunteers.’ Several leading members of the Volunteers complained about their members going off to play matches, when they should have been as far as they were concerned, going off drilling etc.Prior to September 1914 involvement in the GAA and the Irish Volunteers was not synonymous with radical separatism. This is illustrated by the case of Laurence Roche of Bruree, Co. Limerick. Roche had been chairman of the Limerick County Board and he had been that county’s representative on Munster Council, before becoming chairman of the Volunteers in Limerick city. But when the Volunteers split with the arrival of World War I, they split over whether they should assist the war effort or not. Roche joined the Royal Munster Fusiliers and in May 1916 he was commended for his bravery in leading the capture of Guillemont, In various places around the country you get reports of club activities being disrupted because so many of their members have joined the British Army. In The Irish Independent they reported a Gaelic football match on St Patrick’s Day 1916 at the Phoenix Park between teams representing the RIC and the Dublin Fusiliers. The fact that a number of counties contemplated a proposal to lift the ban on GAA members joining the British Army at this point kind of gives an indication that this may have been a problem for the GAA. That they felt they were losing sufficient number of members that they had to lift the ban. Unfortunately a systematic study of GAA members’ involvement in the British Army during the 1st World War just does not exist, so we cannot be absolutely clear on what the picture is.The extent to which GAA members participated in the 1916 Rising, however, has received more detailed attention. Willie Nolan’s recent history of Dublin GAA, published in 2005, contains a list of GAA players in the county who were among the rebels. This comes to a total of 302 players from fifty-three identified clubs. In the past this list would have been accompanied by ritual repetition of the conclusion that the GAA was at the forefront of providing men for revolutionary movement. But this is not done in this book; there is a good reason why. We know that about 1500-1800 people participated in the Rising in Dublin. So this means that (allowing for the participation of some GAA players from outside of Dublin) the overwhelming majority of those who fought in 1916 were not members of the GAA. GAA players were more likely to have participated than many other sectors of Dublin society, yet the rebellion remained a minority sport, even for them. At the time, however the authorities were inclined to suspect that the GAA were deeply involved, many leading figures were interned, but the GAA while acknowledging that members had participated, denied any responsibility for the Rising.In general, the association – as an association – was wary of running ahead of the political attitudes of the majority of the nationalist public and managed to retain the loyalty of most nationalists, whether they were radical or constitutional. This does not mean that there were not local splits: Eoghan Corry suggests for instance, in County Kildare, that in Monasterevin there were local Sinn Féin and Irish Parliamentary Party clubs founded. And there was a real danger of a split nationally, at least between 1914 and 1918 when the Irish Parliamentary Party’s was destroyed. There was a secessionist organisation set up called the National Association of Gaelic and Athletic Clubs. It grew out of a dispute between the Kickham’s club in Dublin and the Dublin County Board. There were various reasons for it, but one of the sets of people who were attracted to this new association were those who were worried that the GAA was becoming too radical in its nationalism.Recent historians of Sinn Féin have recognised an important overlap between membership of the post-Rising party and the GAA. In Clare, for instance David Fitzpatrick acknowledged that the GAA had a role in facilitating Sinn Féin across the county. The Clare County Board began the process that saw de Valera nominated to contest the by-election of July 1917 and during its march to the All-Ireland football final of that year the Clare team entered the field, round after round, under the banner ‘Up de Valera’. More recently, Peter Hart has suggested that a significant correlation can be found between G.A.A. and Sinn Féin membership as of July 1917 but this got smaller and smaller as the revolution progressed. That the GAA maintained a recognizable distance between itself and Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers is probably suggested by the fact that the Government actually did not ban the association. Whereas it banned obviously Sinn Féin, it banned Cumann na mBan and it banned the Gaelic League, all these associations, but it never banned the GAA.The use of hurleys by drilling volunteers who did not possess rifles, was a common sight from the foundation of the Volunteers right through to 1917-1918. This gave the impression to the authorities or reinforced the impression that there was a close association between the GAA and the Volunteers. When a meeting demanding the release of the prisoners organised for Beresford Place, here in Dublin, on 10 June 1917, the Government banned it. The meeting went ahead, the DMP moved in to stop it and in the resulting fracas Inspector John Mills’ skull was fractured and he died within hours. The weapon used, it was reported, was a hurley. So this prompted the much talked about, but little enforced ban on carrying hurleys other than for sporting use which was instituted in the summer of 1917. Despite the fact that the first convention of the Irish Volunteers after the Rising was held at Croke Park , historians of the IRA have not been convinced of the importance of the GAA to the military wing of Irish nationalism. In major studies of Irish Volunteer activity in this period, Joost Augusteijn and Peter Hart have reached similar conclusions. Basically they argue that there was no direct relationship between the local strength of the Irish / Ireland movement and violent republicanism. And this is supported by some statements: this is from Sean Clifford, who was an IRA member in Limerick, who said:men who spoke only English and who never had much time for Gaelic Games, attacked and beat the enemy whereas those who claimed a monopoly on Irish patriotism, namely the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League were nowhere to be seen when it came to a fight.On the other hand this may hide regional patterns. Particular IRA leaders probably made extensive use of their GAA for recruitment; Eoin O’Duffy, for instance certainly did in Monaghan. In summer 1918 O’Duffy travelled to Wattlebridge to address the local GAA team and seek enrolments in the Irish Volunteers. Francis Tummon rememberedOn this particular Sunday there were about thirty boys of all ages [playing football] but only about twenty assembled to listen to O’Duffy ... His words left a lasting impression on me and, I’m sure, on all present. There were at least half a dozen who listened to O’Duffy that Sunday afternoon but never joined the Volunteers. The practice game of football from which we were summoned to listen to Gen. O’Duffy was resumed, but the foundation of a company was laid.So it’s quite interesting that there were thirty potential boys and maybe a dozen listened to him. So it’s important but then there are lots of members who have no interest. Such contrasting examples illustrate the importance of treating with scepticism the notion that the GAA was politically and nationally minded above all else. Phil O’Neill’s comment that ‘Our National Athletic Association nobly contributed its quota of heroic men, who left aside their camans for more deadly weapons’ should be balanced by an acknowledgement that there were countless ordinary members of the GAA, obscure men, who chose the hurley rather than the rifle.Inside prisons and camps Gaelic games occupied an important place. The boredom of prison-life and the dearth of other activities ensured that even sceptics adopted Gaelic games. Todd Andrews, for instance who was a soccer man found himself having to play football in the Curragh Camp. He didn’t particularly enjoy the experience; he thought it was far too rough. In more conventional prisons it was harder to play; there wasn’t so much space for games so there was a lot of handball and rounders played. But in Mountjoy in 1921, the women prisoners approached the Governor C. A. Munro, and they asked that they be allowed to play some game at exercise while at exercise such as Camog – which I understand is a kind of hurley for women – or football. As a matter of fact a football has been sent in for one of these prisoners, neither game seems suitable but as regards the football I gathered that all they wanted to do was to kick it about in their exercise ring.And eventually he agreed that they be allowed to play football but not camogie. It was a pretty consistent approach within the prisons because hurleys could be used as a weapon, there was a fear, whereas the footballs were fairly harmless as far as they were concerned. These same women actually, several of them escaped within a couple of months, they used the football match as a sort of diversion, they made lots of noise playing the football match while some of the others basically scarpered out of the wing, over the wall and out of the prison. In fact the governors often encouraged the playing of these games because they dissipated the prisoners’ energies which might otherwise be used basically to attack them or the warders or to organise hunger strikes or whatever. In writing about his prison experiences in Mountjoy during the Civil War, Peadar O’Donnell noted that a rising tide of unrest would suddenly dissipate when ‘a football match seemed to catch on, the crowd cheered, and our ridiculously small exercise ground sated the fever out of our minds.’So you have lots of activists who are members of the GAA who are overlapping in their activity but again to stress that they very rarely used the organisation as a whole as a weapon in their struggle against the British state. But they did do it occasionally. The most significant example of this occurred when Harry Boland persuaded the annual congress of 1919 to confirm a proposed ban on all civil servants who took the oath of allegiance; he famously told the delegates that the GAA ‘owed its position to the fact that it had always drawn the line between the garrison and the gael’. Now historians have begun to draw more subtle conclusions. Recent scholars of the ban, for instance, have pointed out that a sizeable minority of delegates supported an amendment proposed by Jack Shouldice, which would have considerably circumscribed the impact of the ban. Nonetheless the congress banned all civil servants who took the oath by a clear majority of fifty votes to thirty-one. Reactions around the country seem to have been very mixed; some counties seem to have been very disappointed by this decision and there was an interesting debate at the County Convention in Wexford GAA in mid-March 1919 when the delegates unanimously supported an appeal circulated by Dublin Civil Servants that this ban not be introduced. So one of the things that is striking is that there is a very mixed pattern around the country when you look at different places. For instance North Wexford the GAA there seems to have been quite intimately associated with radical nationalists, whereas South Wexford less so. Or even if you take a town like Enniscorthy, which Paul has written about, there are several clubs in the town, and you have some clubs who are very associated with the GAA and others, you know, very little.As an organization, perhaps the GAA’s most explicit act of resistance during the revolutionary period came in August 1918. In one of the most successful examples of mass defiance witnessed during the period the GAA defied an attempt to halt football and hurling matches which was instituted by the government in the summer of 1918 as part of a general ban on public meetings, that summer. On 28 June when the DMP tried to stop several games at the Phoenix Park players responded with stones and several were arrested. Then the GAA decided to organise on Sunday, 4 August, what they called Gaelic Sunday, and they would organise matches in every town and parish across the country simultaneously in this mass defiance of the ban. The Irish Independent reported that about thirty matches were organised in Dublin, including two important championship games at Croke Park. It is estimated that over 50,000 people participated in games all over Ireland on that day. The police realised they just did not have the resources to compete with that sort of mass defiance so they backed down.Even if the GAA members are not actively involved, there is an interesting indication of their sympathies in the naming of clubs during this period. So these are clubs in Dublin that were founded in the years 1917 – 1921 and these are just some of them: O’Raghallaigh’s 1916, Brothers Pearse 1917, Con Colbert’s 1917, McDermott, Macken’s, Connolly, Mallin, Ceannt, Malone – all 1916 martyrs either executed subsequently or died during the fighting. Kevin Barry, obviously everyone familiar with, the club was founded almost immediately after his execution in 1920. Michael Fitzgerald died on hunger strike in Cork in 1920, the club was formed in Dublin immediately afterwards. Patrick Moran was executed in 1921. Tormey and Sloan were shot in Ballykinlar internment camp by a guard, very late 1920 / 1921 and almost immediately again you get a club founded using their name. On the other hand you get clubs like Balbriggan Commercials, Clan Eadair in Howth who are just using local names. Or generic sports kind of club names Harps, Shamrocks, Rovers, or you get local saints - St Agatha’s, St Brendan’s, and you get clubs still associated with workplaces, so the Foundry Gaels is in Inchicore and it’s related to those who worked in the railway.Throughout the period the GAA organised matches in aid of prisoners and this was one way in which people who were sympathetic but didn’t want to become actively involved, they could represent supporting the prisoners as an act of philanthropy rather than necessarily a political act. So the GAA organised tournaments across the country, in support of prisoners, and they consistently organised matches throughout the period. Obviously the most famous of such matches organised in support of Prisoner’s Aid was the match held in Croke Park on 21st November 1920, which is the match on Bloody Sunday, when crown forces surrounded Croke Park and opened fire and the figure is still disputed as to how many people were killed but eleven on the day and two subsequently is usually the figure given. I hear of people on the day subsequent praying on the pitch at the spot where Michael Hogan died. Despite the mayhem and the confusion on that day £160 was still, after they went around and collected up all the bags that people had dropped as they were scurrying away, there was still £160 there to hand over to the prisoners’ aid.The successful completion of GAA competitions – both at local and national levels – became very difficult in the years 1918 to 1923. Jack Shouldice who was secretary of the Leinster Council, in this long quote, I’m probably running over time so you can read the quote [on the slide] "stressed the difficulty they had but they still managed to keep going:This was not an easy matter. Contact had to be kept up with the different Counties, meetings of the Council held, fixtures made and carried out at different points. Difficulties had to be overcome in the way of transport, suitable venues arranged, accommodation for teams etc. We managed to keep going, however, and had games played in Athy, Kilkenny, New Ross, Portlaoighise, Drogheda and other centres. Some obstruction was experienced at a few venues where we had visits from Crown Forces when searchings occurred and threats of arrests and other action were made. The attendances at the games suffered considerably but we kept on . . ."For instance in the same year 1921 there was no Munster senior football championship and only Limerick and Cork contested the hurling, and only twenty-seven delegates attended the annual congress of the GAA in Dublin.The playing calendar wasn’t disrupted as badly Dublin as it was in other places – the senior football championship of 1920 was completed in the summer of 1921, which wouldn’t have been that unusual in that period. But the Fingal Leagues which were important leagues played in the north of the county in this period, they were an important part of the GAA calendar in the north of the county were not played at all in the years 1919 and 1924 . There was much more problems in completing the GAA calendar in counties such as Kilkenny and Tipperary, where for several years in this period there were no championships completed at all. With the truce then of 1921 such disruption ended, at least for a brief time. There are many famous photographs from this period of the troops, and lots of them come from GAA matches actually, here you can see Harry Boland down the end and Michael Collins beside him at a match in Croke Park in September 1921. So there is a general lifting of the mood in the country, matches can be freely organised, those who were on the run can now freely attend games again etc. Obviously with the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1922 this disruption begins again.So a quick conclusion then: now the stories of the GAA have been told from many different perspectives – for different places, by different people, from different ideological standpoints, and with different themes in mind – has the grand narrative emerged? Well, increasing I think one of the points that has to be made is that the picture is very fractured. The GAA in some counties offered more active support to the revolution than in others. Dublin may have been one of these counties. Perhaps even more importantly, however, some clubs tended to be centres of support for the revolution while many others were not. This is certainly true of Dublin. Historians of the GAA will continue to emphasize the strength the association drew from, and the contribution it made to, Irish nationalism, but, on balance, it seems that revolutionary activists and their opponents had more impact upon the GAA than the association or its members had upon the revolution: the GAA appears to have been a playground of the revolution more often than it was a player in the revolution. Thank-you very much. Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Dr Roisín Higgins on the rich history of Dublin's sporting grounds, pitches and clubs and the stories they tell about the social, economic and political life of city and its people. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010. Listen to the lectureWelcome to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. In this episode, 'Where Dubliners have played', Dr Roisín Higgins relates the rich history of Dublin's sporting grounds, pitches and clubs and what they tell us about the social, economic and political life of city and its people.  Recorded in front of a live audience at Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street on 11 September 2010, as part of the Sport and the City Seminar.Thanks very much for the invitation to speak. As Aideen said I work on the Irish Sporting Heritage Project so I’m always interested in information on particularly grounds. It’s the built heritage that I’m interested in but those grounds contain stories and histories so it’s always great for me to be able to speak to different groups of people who will have experience. It’s right across the country but actually I haven’t done enough work on Dublin yet so any information that comes in I’d be very grateful for.The most striking new building on the Dublin skyline is of course the Aviva stadium. I’ve been told by people who have done - is it called the Dublin Eye or the wheel? – that when you look down it’s just magnificent this new stadium. As Lansdowne Road, it was the oldest rugby ground in Europe, and first hosted athletics in 1872. The original stadium was a multi-sports venue, which included a cinder track for athletics, cricket pitch, croquet green, three football pitches and facilities for archery and lawn tennis. I’ve no photos of that or sketches of that; I’d love to see what it looked like as a multi-sports venue at that time. But now that site on Lansdowne Road has been transformed into a remarkable piece of twenty-first century architecture. The Sunday Tribune last week noted that for the cost of saving Anglo-Irish Bank the country could have built twenty-five state-of-the-art hospitals, or twenty Aviva Stadiums. It’s more expensive than a hospital; €410 million the Aviva Stadium cost.So it’s an obvious part of the built sporting heritage of the city and it can be seen clearly from several vantage points. But some other significant venues are almost hidden from public view, while others have almost vanished altogether. Actually this is part of the evolution from Lansdowne Road to the Aviva Stadium that concrete grandstand very much of its time built in 1925 and then just before demolition and the process of this magnificent glass structure. I remember whenever Castlecourt or maybe it was the Waterfront Hall in Belfast was built and it was just between ceasefires I think and no body could believe that anybody would build a glass structure in Belfast made of glass. It’s a sign of a peaceful society that you could have a signature building in your city built of glass.But that grandstand actually echoes, the one at Lansdowne road echoes in some ways this is the grandstand in Baldoyle Racecourse. Racing in Baldoyle began in 1829 on the Deer Park, on a course laid out by racing enthusiast and landowner, Thomas, Third Earl of Howth. There was a slight hiatus then in the 1840s but racing returned to Baldoyle in 1853. The site was perfect as it was served by Drogheda and Howth Railway Company, which regularly sponsored races. The races at Baldoyle became hugely popular. They were cheap to attend, and the racecourse was not enclosed, so there were also popular with hawkers, tricksters and pickpockets who could work the crowds. And one of the reasons for enclosing sports grounds through the course of the 19th century was to keep the tricksters and hucksters out or at the very least make money out of the money they were going to make. So that regulation of the populace, of those who assembled at racetracks was very much part of the development of sporting sites throughout the 19th century. In the twentieth century, Baldoyle continued to have an important place in Ireland’s sporting history and its reinforced concrete stand (by Donnelly, Moore and Keatinge in 1919) heralded the beginning of the influence of modernism on sporting architecture. This is the first of its kind in Ireland and it was built for Baldoyle in 1918, that bold, plain concrete appearance was radical. But in 1973 the insurers could no longer insure the grandstand and so in part because of that racing ceased at Baldoyle in the 1970s. And now the area, there is an old, we have one hoof of it stands here, you can see on the left and on right - amazingly I think Carlow Rugby Club bought the jockey changing rooms in 1972 and moved them themselves from Baldoyle to Carlow, and they are still there. It’s a lovely little corrugated iron building and we still have that left from the very famous, one of the most famous racecourses in the world and now these are all that remain. There are two thousand houses on the site where Baldoyle racecourse used to be.There was racing as well in the Phoenix Park. Racing began there in 1901, and the Phoenix Plate for two-year-olds was held over five furlongs until 1913 and was the richest race in the country, surpassing even the Irish Derby at the time. But the popularity of racing in Phoenix Park dropped after its heyday in the 1950s, and ceased altogether in 1990. The land is also now apartment blocks.So, the history of sporting sites in Dublin shifts and changes – and this was particularly true of the years of the boom, and it seemed to us that no body was paying any attention as apartment blocks gobbled all before them. That development across the city, nobody - well people did I suppose - I often quote John Healy “but no shouted stop!” So it was clear that a great deal of the Irish sporting landscape was changing and, not only were we not recording this change, we had no clear record of what had been there in the first place. So you can have - it was possible to have vast tracts, the amount of land a racecourse takes up, and that could go and houses could be put up over it and nobody had any real record, it would just disappear from view.So, in setting up the Irish Sporting heritage Project, which was the brainchild of Mike Cronin of Boston College-Ireland, our first aim was to compile a record of the sporting sites of Ireland. The Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport was already attempting to audit its facilities through county councils but we were attempting to do something slightly different: we wanted to map the sporting landscape of Ireland over the last 150 years. Almost impossible a task.We have approached the project as historians and that makes a difference, it gives a different dimension to the audit of facilities that the county councils have undertaken. We see sporting sites as social spaces so we want to reach an understanding of their significance in Ireland historically, politically, economically and culturally. We want to retrieve the stories that these locations hold, the memories, the tensions, the social networks and hierarchies, which they have reinforced or challenged. And actually the two papers which have preceded this one are perfect examples of the way in which sporting clubs and sporting sites operate within communities and form ties and form associations, but create outlets and networks, and as Hilary said at the end of her paper they also reflect, and then also Ciarán very clearly laid out with Bohemian the way in which they reflect the broader history of the city. This is not simply a history of one small group of people they all have to contacts into the broader society and we wanted to use the sites in which sport had been played to tell these stories and to link into the broader social, political and economic history of Ireland.So I’ve got a website, I’ll just do a little plug for it. The Irish Sporting Heritage website irishsportingheritage.com. And you can see we have the database up and this is what it looks like. It’s done by county and by sport, so you can put in search ‘hockey in Dublin’ or ‘tennis in Dublin’ or anywhere around the country. Or you can put in your keyword. So please look it up and if your club is not properly represented or not represented at all or if there is something you know about I’d be really delighted to have the information.And it is important that these, that these sites are recorded I think. I was looking recently through a history of architecture in Dublin and I looked up the Phoenix Park and they have listed every gate lodges and monument in the Phoenix Park and they don’t mention sport. It seemed extraordinary to me. So there’s a real blindness. And I’m also putting together a dictionary entry for the Dictionary of Irish Architecture on sporting sites and it’s really, really hard to get the information. But the information, people in Ireland hold that information; it’s held informally in their heads, in their attics, in their memories and histories. It’s not held in official places so that’s why this archive is hugely important because it will be a common place where people can come to retrieve that information.So I am just going to show you two maps. I won’t spend too much time on them, but I really like these two maps that’s why I’m going to show you them, to give you a sense of how it works on a national scale and then I’ll talk specifically about Dublin. This map I found; 1916 there’s somebody sitting there with their ballpoint pen, it’s like a little manuscript because there’s nothing else to do in 1916 but put all the golf clubs in Ireland onto a map and you can see really clearly on this map how important the railway networks were to the development of sport in Ireland. So that when we think of the sporting map of Ireland we can see multiple maps. It’s all about associations and transport links and networks. And there you have it very clearly I think there are only three that aren’t located very close to a railway line. And this one here as well in terms of the sporting map and landscape. I went through all the sporting calendars through the 19th century and what you see with the racing calendars, what you see is a much more informal process at the end of the 19th century and eventually becomes much more formalized, so that the number of racecourses becomes reduced, reduced and reduced until I think there are 25 or 30 today. But look this is a an all Ireland map, look at the North East and the North West and what you see now is there were point-to-points throughout Ulster. But the racing calendar when I was going through it I was thinking I’m from County Antrim, I was thinking “I’ve not seen anything from County Antrim in this”. You know obscure places but I thought I’d surely know them. So a sporting map of Ireland is also a religious map of Ireland. It will also tell you a story about the relationship between Presbyterianism and gambling in Ireland. So sport can tell us almost anything we ask of it, you know it can tell us about the position of women in society, it can tell us about class politics, about urban development, about the difference between the shipyard culture in Belfast and the less industrialized aspect of Dublin culture. It tells us all of these stories. So if we map and record it we have a whole new way to approach history.So what kinds of stories are being told by the city? I suppose that’s one of the things I’m going to look at today.I will first say something about the way in which history is impacted into the way in which it’s located in the places where sport has been played, even when the name changes or even when stands are changed one by one, and even when the location itself changes, there still is a traceable memory of sport in that area. I suppose I would be interested to hear what you think of that; I’m not saying anything definitive, I’m just throwing out a few thoughts on it.Then I will look at the relationship between sporting sites and social structures in Dublin.Then I will say something briefly about the way in which economic matters influenced the development of sport, and Ciarán has already alluded to some of those things. So it’s just a brief overview and really the interest for me would much more what you have to say and the information that’s held out there, rather than the information I have already.So some places are no longer in existence like Baldoyle racecourse and the Phoenix Park, they are half remembered, and still just about traceable. For others, like the former home of Shamrock Rovers, which was also victim to developers, there is a determination to remember. So the fans erected this little [monument] to Shamrock Rovers, and in my other incarnation, my other interest is the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. So I’ve looked at commemorations to the Rising around the country, and I have to say that challenges many of them in its commitment and grandeur, you won’t see a better commemorative monument anywhere in the country really. And it shows these places matter to people, sporting sites matter to the communities in which they take place.So fans do have a strong sense of loyalty to the location and history of the place, if at times, not the name. The Aviva stadium has been described by its architects Populous as ‘the first truly site responsive stadium of its kind in the world. Its form, mass, materials and aspect are defined by the site and its surrounds’. So they see it very clearly located in that part of Dublin. Dublin rugby fans said very little about the renaming of their national stadium on Lansdowne Road but they might have been more exercised if it had been decided to relocate it to Thomond Park in Limerick. There was some talk of the headquarters of rugby - you know there is a perfectly good stadium in Limerick why don’t we relocate it there. They made enough noise about having to travel to the North side of the city for a few years, I don’t know what they, what rugby fans would have said about having to go to Limerick. So you can see these links to places, sometimes it’s the name, sometimes it’s the place, but it’s no accident where these sporting grounds build up. These grounds are embedded in the social, cultural and economic environment in which they are located. They remain as markers of how the city itself evolved.Speaking of the North side a familiar ground, the headquarters of the GAA. Working on Irish sporting heritage, a lot of people think Irish sporting heritage is just the GAA because it’s the Irish Sport, but it’s not of course, everything that takes place in Ireland is part of the Irish heritage. But this is a photo of Croke Park in 1948. Look Croke Park has seen several phases of development and alteration. It is an extraordinary venue. It’s Europe’s oldest modern stadium, it predates the Stade de France by several years. As well as being the first of its type, the building is probably the largest ever built in Dublin in terms of mass.But of course when Frank Dineen bought the ground in 1908 for £3,250 the site in Jones’s Road was very different. He made improvements to the pitch and added terracing, and the ground had already evolved by the time the GAA bought it off him in 1913 and called it Croke Memorial Park.But Croke Park is a very good example of the way in which a site can modernize without losing its sense of history. It has been renovated many times, most dramatically through the four phase development begun in the 1980s, which culminated in 2005 with the opening of the ‘new Hill 16’, that’s what it was called. Even those words give some idea of how successfully Croke Park has negotiated this transition. How much of the original rubble from Sackville Street remains on Hill 16? There can’t be very much. But it’s important to people that some of it’s there and it’s still on the official tour “This is made up of the rubble from Sackville Street”. No matter how unpopular the Catholic clergy becomes in Ireland and I was watching Sky News about how they couldn’t sell their 2,000 tickets to see the Pope. No matter how unpopular the Catholic Clergy is I can’t imagine how GAA fans would respond to the changing of the name Croke Park; say we don’t want a ground called for an archbishop. That sense of history is very, very important. Or how would people respond if Croke Park was to be moved somewhere else? The GAA knows very well that its place in Irish society is also connected to its place in Irish history. It is a core part of the GAA brand, which is not to diminish it, it’s also a core part of its culture. As with the national stadium, GAA clubs across the country use the naming of grounds and clubs as a way of remembering both historical and religious figures and William Murphy had that brilliant list of the names of clubs in the 1920s in the wake of the Rising and during the War of Independence and currently there’s Parnell Par and the Wild Geese, Thomas Davis and Round Tower, being some of the names that are used to connect GAA grounds and clubs very clearly to the broader history of the country.And that’s Croke Park today. I mean that’s quite, that’s quite a journey really. But there’s the new Nally stand so you keep the name.Think again of an aerial view of Dublin and some of the expansive areas in which sport has been played, they tell us about which groups had access to land in some ways in nineteenth century Ireland. We can see the ways in which formalized sport with its built facilities were first part of an elite leisure culture. And if we think in particular I suppose a good example of that is the Phoenix Park. The first recorded cricket match in Ireland took place in the Phoenix Park in 1792 for a wager of 500 guineas between the Garrison and “All Ireland”. The future Duke of Wellington, who was then the aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant, is reputed to have participated on the Irish side. And with that kind of elite background nevertheless the Phoenix Park is now the most important multi-sports venue of Dublin. Despite the fact that when people tell the history of it and when you do the tours they’ll take you to the Zoo but they won’t take you to the sporting sites. Even though that’s how most people experience the Phoenix Park. So we have this great variety of things happening: motor racing, speed trials – in terms of the modern world coming to Ireland sport was one of the things that really did that. The Gordon Bennett motor race that was held in 1903 in Carlow, Kildare and Laois. They reckon there were about 300 cars in Ireland in 1903 and 350 cars came over on one boat to see the Gordon Bennett Motor Race. I mean imagine what that does to a society. And they had speed trials a lot in the Phoenix Park in the early 20th century and the motor racing in 1929 was the precursor of the Grand Prix and 100,000 people turned up in the Phoenix Park to see that. So the spectacle of sport and the memory, because we all remember the big sporting moments, I’d say people from Tipperary will be talking about last Sunday for a long time; but we remember those moments.Look at this, another space within Dublin that tells you about I suppose where an elite played at one point but now there’s more general access. Games had been prohibited in the college by Trinity’s seventeenth century statues, but to prevent students taking their exercise outside college walls, the authorities acceded to the demands for sporting facilities over the next 300 years and now it’s one of the key things that visitors notice about Dublin when they look over the wall on the 46a and see people playing cricket and they see the Pavilion. So it’s very much part of Dublin’s heritage and it’s history. The cricket ground was laid out there in 1842 and, just over ten years later, the football ground was also laid out in Trinity.Sports such as cricket and rugby, associated at the outset with English public schools and the middle classes, spread across Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and we can see through this, not just the social networks of the landed gentry, the British army and railway lines, but also the way in which Irish society was becoming increasingly regulated, and the way it began to adopt sports that were more formalized. What we can see, at the end of the nineteenth century, is the increasing realization that regulating leisure practices benefits and facilitates regulation of society itself. And the GAA was part of that, it was in the game at a particularly important level.So, it is part philanthropy and part common sense that has some employers sponsor teams and, in the case of Guinness, this eventually led to the opening of Iveagh Grounds on the Crumlin Road in 1928. The Brewery had supported the establishment of the St James Gate Athletic and Cycling Union in 1905 but its activities had been limited by the lack of grounds. The Union petitioned the Brewery in the years following the First World War a Trust was formed and eventually the ground was opened by Rupert Guinness in 1928. And at the point at which it was opened it contained a football field, bowling green, grass courts and a pavilion with a grandstand. So you can see in many ways they are international sports, they have a local history, they are as local as Guinness and all the people who worked in the brewery and were part of that. And sports grounds develop out of lots of different reasons communities coming together, employers coming together, the patronage of the landed gentry, all of these different things and each one has a different story to tell.Just very quickly then to signal some of the cricket, tennis clubs, these aren’t as visible as the stadiums but they are part of the community and they show an incredible commitment on the part of people who participate in them. So you have Clontarf and Leinster and these change and evolve. I suppose that is the difficulty for me really, they change but we haven’t necessarily recorded it. You know they’ll say in club histories, it’ll say the Victorian Pavilion was knocked down due to dry rot in whatever year, and then we’ve got this brilliant…and there’s no photo of the Victorian Pavilion and I could weep really. Or somewhere like Herbert Park there’s some great examples of this horseshoe throwing area and the croquet and bowls and tennis, you know all in this part of South Dublin.Another building and Jimmy Magee apparently mentioned it earlier today, I don’t think I have a slide of it, no I don’t, sorry, The National Boxing Stadium. It tells it’s own story. Now boxing is an international sport and fist fighting, pugilism, was one of the most popular sports I suppose in Ireland in the eighteenth century. It was one of the first sports to have a written code. But by the nineteenth century it was seen as very much an unruly, it was difficult to control so the official view of it was that people who attended fistfights were participating in riotous assemblies. So it became quite difficult for it until the introduction of the Queensbury Rules in 1867. So it’s actually an interesting sport in terms of one that was seen as a working class sport, and the class issue is always there in sport but you know, that working class male aggression, it was a danger and then actually it was something that if it was controlled and put into productive use, could actually serve the society. So and we can see that very much then in Ireland, that shift and we see lots of Catholic Young Men’s Societies build boxing clubs and boxing halls. And then with the formation of the Free State boxing actually became quite a central feature as it was seen as a way of training the new police and army. And I suppose it still has…and Jimmy Magee, I saw him launch the Fighting Irish exhibition in Croke Park, you know Ireland has had more success in boxing than in any other sport and yet it isn’t seen as a mainstream sport, and probably isn’t given the recognition it deserves. Anyway with the formation of the Free State and this recognition that in order to be healthy and in order to maintain the strength of the State it was necessary to maintain the physicality of the police and the army, boxing had a particular focus.In 1936 it was decided to build this National Stadium and Frank Aiken who was the Minister of Defence as was the Police Commissioner so it has support at a very high level. Ground from Griffith Barracks was given over to it and it was opened in 1939. And what Jimmy Magee has said what is the most remarkable thing about it is that this building is the fact, that the Irish Amateur Boxing Association is the only amateur boxing association in the world to control, run and own its own National Arena and Stadium.So you can see you know, from the croquet club in Herbert Park, to the National Boxing Stadium on South Circular Road, the number of stories that that tells us about the city. And when they were building the National Stadium it explicitly said in The Irish Times give money because this is a poor person’s sport, so we need to have money. So there was always a recognition of those divisions of class within the sporting environment.Just then as a last example I’ll say something about a very commercial sport, I’m just throwing out some different kinds of sports that you might not necessarily think about whenever you think about Dublin’s heritage. Greyhound racing is a twentieth century invention. It grew in the 1920s and just spread like wildfire from North America, to Britain through Ireland. Flann O’Brien, writing of it in 1940, said that it ‘seemed to fill perfectly a void which (in the absence of horse-racing at night) had existed in the spiritual and intellectual consciousness of the people’. So that desperate need to be able to gamble in the evenings. But what Greyhound Racing had it was, it was very cheap to develop that’s why it became so popular because it didn’t need its own grounds. So you could put the gambling machines, or the gambling areas and the track around existing football grounds and that’s what they did. And at Shelbourne you’ll see that, you know, it’s seen as the headquarters of Greyhound Racing in Ireland. And it’s always been very commercially driven and now I suppose we can see that very much in the way Greyhound Stadiums have developed. Although there are still some that share tracks, the Galway Greyhound Track shares its grounds. So there are lots of different ways, so you can see also the Speedway that was quite a short lived but quite an important part of Shelbourne’s experience in Dublin.So we can see if we think of the Dalymount Parks, the Croke Parks, Shelbourne, the private clubs, the Phoenix Park, Trinity College, the Boxing Stadium there are hundreds of stories of Dublin’s heritage that really we are trying to collect and get as much information about as we can. And in turn these sites tell us something about the changes in social lives, economics, attitudes to health, and to leisure. So that the history of sport in Dublin is also the story of how the city and its people have grown and developed over time. Thank-you for listening to the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive Podcast. To hear more, please subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud. You can also visit our website - dublincitypubliclibraries.ie and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.