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The Dublin-based Lepracaun Cartoon Monthly was launched in May 1905 by Thomas Fitzpatrick, one of Ireland’s foremost cartoonists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eclipsing in its lifespan all previous Irish comic periodicals, the Lepracaun would run for almost a decade. This meant that the publication was in a position to offer a vivid cartoon chronology of the great 1913-14 Dublin strike and lockout, although there would be no contribution from the Lepracaun’s founder and most prolific cartoonist, with the Cork-born Thomas Fitzpatrick having passed away in July 1912 at the age of 52.

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.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Hilary McDonagh on the history of Maids of the Mountain Hockey Club's and on some of the Maids who made it on and off the pitch. 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, 'The Maids Who Made it' Hilary McDonagh looks at the history of the Maids of the Mountain Hockey Club 1918-1999 and at some of the Maids who made it on and off the pitch.  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.Ladies and Gentlemen - Good afternoon, Maids I should also say; it’s nice to see a few of you here.I would like to begin by thanking Dublin City Archives for inviting me here today to talk to you about the Maids of the Mountain Hockey Club. This club was founded in 1918 and after a very interesting and a very illustrious history; we merged with Three Rock Rovers HC in 1999. As Aideen said to mark the 81 year history of this very unique club, myself and another Maid, Órla McKeown, who is sitting in the audience down there along with a number of other Maids and a former Vice- President, we co-wrote the book entitled “The Lilac Years” (the name will become a little bit more obvious as my talk proceeds!). As I said Órla is also here today, so although I’m the one who drew the short straw and is standing up here talking, so any difficult questions you can put them that way!The structure of today’s talk will begin with a look at the start of the Club, the Maids who made it, the history, our achievements (on and off the pitch) as well as the other Maids who made it.... in other walks of life!When myself and Órla began researching the book, we were struck by the fondness that so many Maids looked back on their years with the Club. And we were also struck by the level of deep friendships that were made and continue, even to this day. There was definitely something very special about Maids Hockey Club.When we went to research the book we found that the Official records dated back to 1929 which we thought was actually very impressive. But since then; the book was published 10 years ago, since then we have actually unearthed the records going back right to 1918 so right to the start of the club. We are delighted that they are now being housed in the Dublin City Archives and we’ve been liaising with Ellen and they should be on show I think it’s next year they should be ready for all to see, which is great.So as I said Maid was established in 1918, and if we think of 1918 it was an era of real turmoil in Irish history. We had many young Irish men fighting in France, and indeed many of the early Maids had family members and friends who were actually caught up in this war. It was also only 2 years since the 1916 rising and the year that Sinn Féin won the big landslide General Election. So times were really changing...Now the founder of the Club seems to have been, certainly from the research, the prime mover was a woman called Hilda O’Reilly. She actually herself married a WWI veteran (Gerald Martin). Other names that are associated with the establishment of the club are Mary Martin (who was a sister-in-law of Hilda), a woman called Dorothy Avery (nee McCann), Evie O’Kelly, Mary Mahony, Vera McWeeney (nee Mahony), Dorothy O’Reilly (nee Martin), Nancy Barry (nee Pigot) and Marjorie Martin. The common theme was the link that these people had with Three Rock Rovers HC, as many were wives, sweethearts, sisters or children of Rover players. Hilda herself was born in 1898 and she was the youngest of eight children, and from what we can gather was a happy and optimistic sort of person who seems to have been well liked by most. Hockey was a very popular past time within her own family, and both her father and brothers playing the sport. And indeed, her brother went on to captain the Irish hockey team when it won the Triple Crown in the 1920’s. Hilda herself was a very talented hockey player and she went on to win many caps for her country as well as being given the Captaincy of the Irish Ladies Hockey team in the 1920’s. So I’d say that the O’Reilly parents would have been very proud of their children.Although the name of the Club has been varied in many ways – “Maids of the Mountain”, also known as “Hags of the Hill”, “Hoors of the Moores”, “the Bitches in the Ditches”, (I’m just quoting!) “the Tarts of the Town” and so on. The actual correct name originates from an operetta entitled “The Maid of the Mountains”, which was being performed at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in the August, of 1918. Now other shows that were running at that time were “Society’s Driftwood” and “Bought & Paid For”. But they were deemed not to be obviously appropriate! The operetta itself was written by the Englishman, Harold Fraser – Simson (1878-1944) and it’s a musical comedy in three acts. Very popular – because I’d say none of us have ever heard of it! The colours then chosen, as I said remember ‘The Lilac Years’, the colours chosen to represent this new club were a purple tunic with a mauve shirt, corresponding with the colours of the heather on the mountain.If you played hockey for Maids in the 1929/1930 season, subscriptions were £1-3s-0d, about approximately €1.40 in today’s terms. In 1965 the subscription was £2-15s-0d. After decimalisation the sub had only increased to £3.25 in the 1971/1972 season with a late fine payment of 25p. Things have changed a bit now.The Irish Ladies Hockey Union was founded in 1894, and it actually is the very first women’s hockey association established throughout the world. I know the hockey players here will remember but we hosted the 1994 Hockey World Cup and it was for the reason to celebrate the centenary of the Irish Ladies Hockey Union. By 1918, the sport of ladies hockey was fairly strong but there were a limited number of clubs in existence and they were mainly “closed”, for people who were either past pupils or employees. So with virtually no “open” clubs available we can only assume that Hilda, along with her friends, decided to establish their own clubs. In 1920, with the club having only completed two seasons, Maids won the treble of the Irish Senior Cup, the Leinster Senior Cup and the Leinster Senior League. That’s very impressive for a very new club. But it also shows how silly the other clubs, which were closed were for not having such wonderfully gifted players playing for them.This proved not to be once off and the club became a dominant player in Irish hockey over the next 15 years, winning Irish Senior Cups, Leinster Senior Cups and Leinster League. In 1923, the Club won the Irish Junior Cup, now known as the White Cup with their 2nd XI. So you can see that in a very short space of time the club had increased its playing membership.Now that [text] is quite small and I appreciate that you might not see all that but it was hard to include all the international Maids. Because members of the club achieved a lot of success at both international and interprovincial level with all the provinces represented. In old Irish Hockey we would have 6 provinces but I won’t go into that. A total of 32 Maids achieved international success with the honour of the top-capped player going to Ros Huet who won 22 caps between 1931-47, and then we have a Dorothy Lavery (1920-26) and Joan Shaw (1967-75) who both won 13, and a H. Wallis who won 10 caps between 1923-26.Now bearing in mind the links that Maids had with Three Rock Rovers, it is not surprising that the club’s first grounds were actually that of the grounds of Three Rock Rovers. They were located at Foxrock, near the Stillorgan station on the Harcourt Street Railway line. Those grounds had actually been given to Three Rock Rovers by Sir John Power of Power’s Distillers. In 1930, Three Rock Rovers moved to Londonbridge Road, the Headquarters of the Irish Hockey Union, down in Ringsend. Maids however remained in Foxrock until 1934, when the club submitted a written application to the Men’s Hockey Union for participation in the Templeogue grounds and pavilion scheme. It was a relative of a Maids member, a man called Mr. De Vere White, again a theatre connection, undertook to produce a play at the Peacock Theatre to raise the funds for the grounds guarantee. Maids was the first tenant club of the female part of the Templeogue grounds. Many happy years in Templeogue followed. A pavilion was made available for the use of the tenant clubs with a social area and a changing room. However it was only in the late 1950’s that showering facilities were provided for the women, and thanks for this development was due to the determination of one of the members Joan Matthews who later became Joan Blackmore. Upon joining, she was shocked to find that the showers were only available to the men. So she took her views to the next grounds meeting with very little success. So the following week, she marched, with soap and towel in hand, into the men’s dressing rooms to use their showers. Not surprisingly, the following week a shower had been installed in the women’s changing rooms. By the early 1980’s, Maids’ permanent home at the Templeogue grounds had been targeted by builders for development, some things never change and was finally sold during the 1985/86 season. Maids was homeless at that stage and they travelled around to hired pitches for both training and for matches. Part of the proceeds of the sale was divided between the three ladies tenant clubs. And a development of the Three Rock Rovers grounds at Grange Road gave Maids the opportunity to invest this money, together with the Leinster Ladies Hockey Union in the building of a second artificial pitch at Grange Road. The club moved to Grange Road under a licence agreement with Three Rock Rovers in 1988. Maids remained in Grange Road as licensees until a decision was taken in the spring of 1999 by Maids of the Mountain and Three Rock Rovers to merge their assets and become one club and the name of Maids was lost forever; not really though!When women started to play hockey in the last years of the nineteenth century, the activity was regarded as being somewhat outrageous. It was therefore important to avoid parental and society disapproval, so participating in hockey activities had to be carried out very discreetly. Hockey players wore a hat secured with a pin, a long sleeved blouse buttoned to the neck, a stiff linen collar, a loose flowing cravat type tie and a voluminous skirt long enough to conceal the ankles and high enough at the waist to tuck in the tie. No doubt they also played in stiff corsetry, elaborate petticoats and heavy woollen stockings. Their hair was worn in elaborate styles on the top of the head or back of the neck. When Maids HC was established in 1918, skirt lengths had started to rise to just above the ankle but otherwise the early players were attired much as described. We obviously don’t have a picture from the late 19th century unfortunately but that’s one of the players from the 1920 team so you can see the type of stuff they had to wear. God love them. By 1927 players were wearing loose fitting tunics, with pleats, which were cut just above the knee, no doubt encouraged by the upwardly creeping hemlines of the twenties.In 1936 the first pair of tights made their debut in Maids, courtesy of Doris Findlater, who has just turned 101, am I right? Still alive and kicking. While on tour with the Irish team to Philadelphia, Doris made the purchase of a pair of tights. She found they were a highly effective way to avoid what was termed the “smile” which was the gap between the top of the stockings and the bottom of the drawers - which was sometimes on view. For the rest of the Maids, they were forced to continue wearing the stockings until well into the 1950s.By 1959 the touring team to Llandudno had disposed of the ties, opened their collars casually and had shed their stockings or tights in favour of knee high socks. When socks became part of the official uniform, the colour chosen was that of lilac, to match the shirts. You can imagine lilac socks were not something that would be very easy to find. So white socks had to be purchased and then they were dyed the official colour. But the socks had to imported from Northern Ireland, and due to customs, could only be imported half dozen at a time. In the 1970’s short shirtsleeves became the norm. The tunic was finally abandoned in favour of the wrap skirt worn by hockey players today.So what about the Maids who made it... in other walks of life? They were many, but today time is limited so I’m only going to mention a small few.The first one is a woman named Vera Mahony later to become Vera McWeeney. She joined Maids in the 1920’s and rapidly made herself known in Irish hockey circles being selected to play for Leinster in 1927 for the first time. She went on to become an Irish International, gaining her first cap in 1932. Her playing days in Maids were accompanied by some of the greatest successes the Club has known in its history. She was twice Leinster President between 1948-49 and again in 1955-1956. She is the only person ever to hold that position twice.She made a unique contribution to Irish sport, firstly as a multi-discipline athlete – as well as representing Ireland in hockey, she also represented them in tennis, and in croquet and in squash; but also after her playing days she was particularly instrumental in bringing publicity to women’s involvement in sport through her reporting career. And I’m sure some people would remember her today. After her husband died, her husband Arthur died in 1958, he was a sports journalist, she started then to report on a free lance basis for the Irish Independent, later moving to the Irish Times and she reported on women’s hockey, she reported on women’s tennis, badminton and squash. Her name is actually commemorated in the Vera McWeeney Shield, which was presented by the Irish Times in 1981, just after her death to the Leinster Indoor Under 21 Interprovincial Tournament as a tribute to her contribution to hockey in Ireland. As a journalist she was always said very fair to up and coming players and if she ever had a criticism to make of their play, her comments were always finished in a very positive and constructive note.She was very professional in her approach she made sure to watch everything that she reported on. Former international tennis player colleagues described her coverage of Wimbledon during the 1970’s as brilliant. She also reported on all major tennis events in Fitzwilliam Lawn Tennis Club, then a bastion of male membership only. She is recalled fondly in Irish feminist circles for her no-nonsense approach to matters in the environs of Fitzwilliam. A report was reported after her death of an incident in Fitzwilliam when about to take a short cut through the men’s changing room to get to a match, she was stopped. She told the steward that she had to get through and if that bothered anybody the steward was to tell them that she had seen better elsewhere.When Vera died suddenly in January 1980, those who knew her would not have been surprised to hear that she died with the coming week’s sports fixtures marked in her diary.Uniquely among the Notable Maids, Edith Hudson never actually played hockey for Maids, her main interest lay in the umpiring area. She was Principal of Ling Physical Education College for many years; many of those graduates went on to join Maids. She was renowned for her professional approach and a very meticulous attention to detail and a scrupulous sense of fairness and integrity in all her dealings. After Ling closed in 1973 and all the Physical Education College moved to Limerick, she found herself without a Club and she was at that stage invited to join Maids. And when she did she immediately became involved in the Club’s umpiring. Although involved in Maids her main energy was in the wider field of Irish and Leinster hockey. She was a Grade A Umpire who examined aspiring umpires for their exams. She also travelled with both Irish and Leinster Touring Teams, represented Ireland at International Symposiums on Umpiring, she was a member of the FIH Rules Committee and was appointed a Judge at the FIH Intercontinental Tournament in 1983 in Kuala Lumpur, which I’m hoping that many remember it was a tournament that we actually won. She held the office of president, and I don’t think the Men’s hockey could actually say that - sorry. She held the office of President of ILHU from 1981 to 1982, having been Treasurer from 1945 to 1959. She also held the office of President of the Irish Umpires Association and was honoured with Honorary Life Membership of the Irish Ladies Hockey Union, the Leinster Ladies Hockey Union and the Irish Umpires Association; a very, very fine woman.But this is one of my favourites, it’s a woman called Muriel Gahan. And her inclusion in the selection of Maids, notable Maids, actually does not come from her hockey activities, we don’t really know how good she is, but she certainly played for Maids and you can find her in the records, but really it’s her non-hockey activities which you could fairly say that she had an enormous influence on the craft industry in Ireland. She herself was born in Donegal in 1897 and reared in Castlebar, Co. Mayo. Her father worked for the Congested District Board, and when he retired they moved to Dublin in the 1920’s and it was at that stage that she joined Maids.She joined the United Irishwomen in 1929 (which was later to become the Irish Countrywomen’s Association). One of her first major contributions to the movement was in the establishment of the Country Shop Restaurant and Country Workers in 1930. Again many of you probably remember The Country Shop, it was located at 23 St. Stephens Green, and was the meeting place for Maids Hockey Club until its closure in 1978. She was directly responsible for the establishment of the Country Markets Ltd, a co-operative formed jointly by the ICA and the Homespun Society, and she also was involved in the establishment of the Country Craftsmanship Scheme. She became the only female member of Ireland’s first Arts Council in 1952. In 1971 she set up the Crafts Council of Ireland.Throughout the years, Muriel was very involved with the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), and once again history was made when she became the first woman ever elected Vice President of the RDS. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College Dublin in 1978. In her long career with the United Irishwomen and the ICA, Muriel Gahan was elected chairwoman of the National Executive on many occasions. It was through her contact with the Kellogg’s Foundation that a grant was actually given to the ICA for the establishment of their residential centre, Grianán. The Irish American Cultural Institute endowed an annual development grant in her name – The Muriel Gahan Scholarship – and it is awarded at the annual RDS Craft Competition during the RDS Horse Show.It won’t be surprising to know that she was known as “M.G.” to all her friends because it paraphrased her dynamic character. She died in 1995 at the age of 97.But nothing would be complete for Maids without Rita. Rita was always very easy to spot coming to Maids matches, because she invariably travelled in a pony and trap. She was a daughter of one of the founders of Three Rock Rovers Hockey Club, and she joined Maids in September 1941. Although a successful hockey and lacrosse player, gaining international recognition in both, it was actually as Chairperson of the Irish Country Markets Association, a position that she held for 14 years, that she was better known. It was Muriel Gahan who got her actually, who asked her to take on that role. She also served as President of the Irish Horticultural Society. When Maids merged with Three Rock Rovers it was fitting that Rita, given her deep connections to both Clubs, became its first female President in 2001.A total of 20 Maids achieved provincial and international success in a wide variety of other sports such as lacrosse, cricket, windsurfing, golf, tennis, Olympics, badminton, fencing, swimming, netball, croquet and squash.As I said at the outset, the level of respect and fondness for the club of Maids, even given the name was quite striking, both from within the Club itself but also from other Clubs. This is probably best illustrated by the poem that was penned for the Club by Ann Cox in 1982, the then Leinster Hockey President, and it goes as follows:We are the Maids of the MountainWe hide in the gores and the fenAnd someday we hope if God spares usTo capture some wild mountain menWe’ll teach them the art of good hockeyWe’ll take off their trousers and shirtsWe’ll put on some wigs and some make-upAnd dress them in blouses and skirts.And when we have won all before usWe’ll treat them to some mountain dewAnd help them relax in the heatherAs Maids of the Mountain should doThe archival material that has been lodged by Maids Hockey Club as I said is very impressive. However these archives are much more valuable than just recording an 81-year history. They also provide a rare insight into women in sport, it really helps to chart the socio-economic life in Ireland, the changing role of women in Irish society, and also the contributions made by so women to so many aspects of Irish life – these all were the Maids who Made it! 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.

Transcript of a talk by Ciarán Priestley on the history of Bohemian Football Club, spanning the founding of the club in 1890, some of the club's influential players and matches and the how the history of one of Dublin's most influential clubs is connected with both the history of the city and the history of soccer in Ireland.

The following is a transcript of a talk by Dr Paul Rouse on the history of hurling and the vital role Dublin played in developing hurling as we know it. The talk was part of the Sport and the City Seminar held in Dublin City Library and Archive on 11th September, 2010.There have been few propagandists for hurling as committed as the Limerick GAA official, journalist and historian, Séamus Ó Ceallaigh. Year after year, he waxed lyrical in honour of a game with which he was besotted. In 1937, for example, he wrote:‘Hurling is indeed a game for the Gods. Hurling, which can claim to be the parent of every game played with a stick and ball, stands still unapproached as the greatest game ever devised for the diversion of men. Like the race that begot it, it is old, yet young, virile and fascinating, and though its origin dates away back in prehistoric eras, could Oisín come back again today from Tír na nÓg, he would find in an all-too-changed world, by Lee and Suir and Nore and Shannon, at least one familiar sight to gladden his heart.’Today, I would like to focus on a river which he doesn’t mention. Because more than what happened on the banks of the Lee or the Suir, the Nore or the Shannon, it was what happened on the banks of the River Liffey which most influenced the invention of the modern game of hurling. The heartlands of hurling are always portrayed as rural, not urban, but it is arguable that without Dublin there would be no modern game of hurling at all. To make that argument, I would like to look at three distinct moments in hurling history. The first relates to what happened in Trinity College Dublin in the 1870s and early 1880s; the second relates to Michael Cusack and his promotion of hurling before the GAA was founded; and the third relates to hurling in Dublin immediately after the founding of the GAA.From Hurley to HurlingHurling, famously, is not a modern game, or, at least not entirely a modern game. Its antiquity in Ireland stretches back centuries, into history and on still further into myth and legend. By the second half of the nineteenth century the game was under immense pressure. It never disappeared, but the frequency with which it was played was greatly diminished. This was the consequence of famine, emigration and cultural change. Amidst that cultural change was the emergence in Ireland of a new approach to playing sport. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the social and cultural life of towns across Britain and Ireland was transformed by the establishment of clubs to cater for men and women who wished to play sport. It proved an enduring social phenomenon which redefined how people passed the hours between work and sleep. This phenomenon gathered extraordinary momentum in the 1880s and 1890s, when many thousands of sports clubs were established. Some clubs catered for long-established sports such as cricket and golf; others catered for newly-codified versions of old games, such as rugby and soccer; and still more catered for newly-invented sports such as badminton and lawn tennis. These clubs were usually associated with a centralised governing body which regulated the manner in which a particular sport should be played.As with so much else in modern Irish sport, Trinity College was involved in changing the way in which hurling was organised in Ireland. It was at Trinity that the first rugby club in Ireland was established in 1854; at Trinity too that the first modern athletics meeting was staged in 1857. In general, there was a culture of organised sporting clubs for cricket, rowing, swimming, gymnastics and much more besides.Part of this sporting world was a game called ‘hurley’. It had been played by a club at the college at least since the late 1860s. Officially called the Dublin University Hurley Club, it published its first rules in the Handbook of Cricket in Ireland in 1870. The influence of those boys who had passed through English public schools on their way to Trinity College is evident. Initially, as the only club in Ireland, the Trinity boys resorted to such internal matches as ‘Smokers v Non-smokers’, and ‘The First Team v The Philosophical Society’.Amongst the players to have played the game was Edward Carson, the father of modern unionism. Carson’s involvement in the hurley club has led to several generations of myth. At their apparent peak these myths imagined that Carson had played Fitzgibbon Cup hurling for Trinity. Not to be outdone, Gerry Adams recently claimed that his hurling in Trinity meant that Edward Carson ‘was a Gael’.Hurley, through, was not hurling. The rules of the game, which include provisions for off-side, hitting off one side of the stick only, might be considered a forerunner to modern hockey, rather than to modern hurling. Through the 1870s the game was spread out of the university and into the city by Trinity graduates. Hurley never exploded onto the Dublin sporting scene rather its story is one of steady progress. It became an important part in the life of various schools in Dublin, including those of High School, Rathmines School, and King’s Hospital, where students and teachers played regular matches. Rugby clubs such as Lansdowne took on the game and clubs were also formed from workplaces such as the Royal Bank. The growth in the number of clubs led to the establishment of the Irish Hurley Union at Trinity College on 24 January 1879.In the early 1880s, the Hurley Union sought to draw its own rules closer to the game of hockey as played in England. The impact of these changes was to make the game of hurley progressively less physical and this seems to have led to a disaffection amongst certain players. Several of these players were instrumental in founding a new club: the Dublin Hurling Club. The plan was to develop a game that was more robust than hurley was considered to be.The first meeting of the club took place in the College of Surgeons on York Street on 30 December 1882 in the lecture room of Dr. Hugh Alexander Auchinleck. The meeting, it was recorded in the minutes, was ‘for the purpose of taking steps to re-establish the national game of hurling.’ A provisional committee of eight – included Auchinleck and, crucially, a certain Michael Cusack – was established to draw up the rules for the proposed club. At a meeting in Auchinleck’s room, five days later on 4 January 1883, the Dublin Hurling Club was formally established and a set of rules adopted. Auchinleck was elected president, and Cusack was chosen as his vice-president.With a few exceptions, the rules were largely the same as those which governed hurley. The great difference was to be in the equipment used. The Dublin Hurling Club resolved to replace the long, narrow sticks of hurley, with broader, shorter sticks. It was here that the first problems for the club arose. It proved impossible to get sticks suitable for hurling in Dublin, because, as Cusack wrote, ‘no hurling has been played in Dublin … within the memory of the oldest inhabitant.’ Eventually, it was necessary to order sticks from Fitzsimons’ Factory in the city but they had not arrived in time for the first planned practices which had to be postponed.The first practice finally took place on Thursday, 25 January 1883 and then, on three Saturdays during February 1883, the Dublin Hurling Club played matches amongst themselves in the Phoenix Park. Around twenty players turned up, most of whom were part of the established hurley clubs of the city. For the internal matches, Michael Cusack and Lloyd Christian picked two teams which played against each other. The games were well-contested and considered to be very enjoyable. Despite the apparent promise of the club, it disintegrated as suddenly as it had formed. Following the third internal match on Saturday 24 February 1883, the Dublin Hurling Club never played again. The club committee met once more, in mid-April, but the club was then wound-up, never to re-appear.The reason for the sudden demise of the Dublin Hurling Club was clear-cut. Following its establishment, hurley clubs had immediately sensed the threat of a rival organisation which would poach its players. They immediately launched a counter-attack through the press. The Irish Sportsman noted how those who played hurley had changed ‘the swiping game of the savage to a scientific recreation which may be indulged in by anyone without being in constant dread of having one’s brains dashed out by an adversary’s hurl.’ Michael Cusack responded by accusing hurley clubs of trying to smother hurling before it had arrived beyond a chrysalis state. The ensuing bitterness destroyed the prospects of the Dublin Hurling Club developing. In founding the Dublin Hurling Club, several members had spoken of the necessity to cultivate good relations with hurley clubs and had been at pains to stress they wished to avoid any hostility. Indeed, initially, several players had taken part in both hurling and hurley matches on the same weekend, hoping to combine the two games. Facing with confrontation between rival bodies, those players drifted away and the Dublin Hurling Club collapsed.Michael Cusack and the MetropolitansThe failure of the Dublin Hurling Club brought liberation for Michael Cusack. Cusack was an extraordinary character. From an impoverished background in Clare, he had constructed a career for himself as a schoolteacher in prestigious secondary schools such as Clongowes Wood, Blackrock College, and Kilkenny College. Within these schools he had developed a passion for sport which had seen him emerge as a champion athlete and which had also seen him develop a passion for cricket and rugby. By the time he had reached his mid-30s, Cusack was able to recall his involvement in ‘many a hard-fought match’. His passion for the game was obvious. He wrote once that it would help cricketers to pass away the dark days of winter, by dreaming of the wonderful six that they had hit in mid-summer, and of feeling pride at having walked to the crease, the forlorn hope of their parish, before saving the day with a memorable performance. He wrote of the advisability of setting up cricket clubs in every parish in Ireland. For Cusack this was not simply a matter of boys getting exercise to enhance their health – it was also a matter of ideology. He wrote in July 1882: ‘You may be certain that the boy who can play cricket well, will not, in after years, lose his head and get flurried in the face of danger.’If Cusack loved cricket in the summer, he also loved rugby in the winter. By the time Cusack began playing rugby in the 1870s, the game had finally begun to establish itself on a solid footing in Ireland. In October 1877, in imitation of the section of the school in which he had worked in Blackrock, he set up his own academy in Dublin to prepare students taking civil service and other public examinations. Sport was an essential part of the activities at his school. For the 1879-80 season, he founded the Cusack’s Academy Football Club and affiliated it to the Irish Rugby Football Union. The team played out of the Phoenix Park. Cusack was club secretary, trainer, as well as playing in the forwards, where he built a reputation as a powerful operator. Indeed, Cusack seems to have acquired something of a reputation for the black arts in his play, leading one journalist later to observe darkly: ‘Everybody knows what Cusack is in a scrummage.’ He also referred to himself as ‘a sterling lover of the game’.Following his involvement with the Dublin Hurling Club, however, he left all other sporting engagement behind him and became consumed with the idea of reviving hurling and was now determined to do it his own way. In early September 1883 he arranged for a handful of enthusiasts to join him on a Saturday afternoon in the Phoenix Park on ground beside the Wellington monument. He brought with him the spare hurleys left over from the Dublin Hurling Club. In the beginning there were just four of them – Cusack, L.C. Slevin from Armagh, and Paddy and Tom Molohan from Clare – hitting the ball around. The hurlers came back every Saturday afternoon for the rest of the autumn of 1883. Slowly, their numbers grew. Interested spectators – generally country people living in Dublin – gathered to watch what was happening. ‘They were told to fall in and slash away,’ Cusack later recalled. He used the newspaper column in he was then writing in the Shamrock newspaper to advertise the fact that hurling was now being played for two hours every Saturday afternoon. Men who worked in the commercial and composing sections of that newspaper were cajoled to come to the park and take part in the hurling.Cusack also persuaded (or worse) the students from his academy to join in the hurling. These students came from all across Ireland and were sufficient in number for Cusack to consider them as ‘the nucleus of a fairly good club’. By October 1883 he was sufficiently sure of them to establish the Cusack’s Academy Hurling Club. The hurlers continued to come to the Phoenix Park every Saturday, now with Cusack’s Academy lining up against whatever combination of others appeared for the 3pm start. Those others were an assorted bunch of countrymen and hurley players, men who came together, according to Cusack, ‘regardless of rank, or creed, or calling’. The logical step was for all the other hurlers to unite as a club. This they did at a meeting in Cusack’s Academy at 4 Gardiner Place on 5 December 1883 when the Metropolitan Hurling Club was formed. It was a momentous event. Michael Cusack was later in no doubt that this was the club ‘out of which the GAA sprang.’Some reports survive of the initial matches between the Cusack’s Academy hurlers and those of the Metropolitan Hurling Club. One report, written by Cusack, records a ‘gloriously enjoyable game’ played on 1 December 1883: ‘During the third and fourth quarters the hurling became so fast and furious, the goals were so threatened on the one hand and defended on the other, that spectators expected to be called on after each charge to help the disabled to Steeven’s Hospital.’ The Metropolitans continued to play with the students every Saturday without heed to the ‘blinding snow, or bruising hail, or the famishing sleet.’ By the spring of 1884 there were sometimes 50 hurlers on the field, the scene of which was captured by a cartoonist in the London-based, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in March 1884. Less than six months after he had begun hurling in the Phoenix Park, Cusack could now look to the fact that there were two clubs in existent and a genuine interest in hurling. It was enough to suggest to him that it was time to expand his horizons.The opportunity for expansion came from Co. Galway. In the stretch of East Galway that bordered the River Shannon, hurling had never died. From Ballinasloe across to Loughrea and down to Portumna and Gort, hurling matches remained a regular feature of the social life of the people. Press reports of the revival of hurling in Dublin were noted in Galway and a leading hurler in the village of Killimor, Patrick Larkin, invited The Metropolitans down to play against his own team, which was considered to be the best in East Galway. Cusack accepted the challenge and the match was arranged for the Fair Green in the middle of Ballinasloe on Easter Monday, 13 April 1884. Two Ballinasloe businessmen commissioned a special silver trophy for presentation to the winners.The list of Metropolitans players to travel to Galway was chosen and published in the Dublin press on the week before the game. The players were instructed to be at Broadstone Station for the 9am train. They arrived in Ballinasloe shortly after 1pm and were met by cheers from the many locals who had turned out at the station in anticipation of their arrival. The Metropolitans were brought to the local Agricultural Hall where they were given refreshments and a place to change into their hurling clothes. The Killimor team had arrived by jaunting cars and long horse-drawn coaches. The local press had noted that a mere look at them would ‘give an assurance that their opponents from the ‘Big Smoke’ would have a hard nut to crack to win the cup.’ Their captain, F.W. Lynch, met Michael Cusack and the pair agreed a set of rules for the game. No wrestling was to be allowed; the match was to played across four half-hours and the winner would be the team which scored the greater number of goals in that time. A number of men were also appointed to act as linesmen and goal-umpires.A huge crowd had turned out for the match not least because advertisements in the Galway papers had heralded the arrival of ‘the Dublin champion club’. At 2.15pm the ball was thrown in to huge excitement and the 22 players on each team were soon bunched together attempting to drive the ball forwards. The play opened out after a while and the Killimor men quickly gained the upper-hand. They scored a goal as ‘cheer after cheer rent the air.’ Before they could score a second goal, Michael Cusack intervened. The play of the Galway men, he said, was ‘too rough’. His biggest complaint was that they ‘slashed in a reckless and savage manner.’As if to emphasise his point, Cusack then asked that the field be cleared so that The Metropolitans could play an exhibition match in order to demonstrate the rules of the game to the Killimor men. When this exhibition was complete, the Killimor men came back onto the field and played an exhibition of their own. An admittedly biased Western News journalist claimed that ‘to the keenest judge no material difference could be detected in the style of either team.’ Despite the wishes of several of his players to play out the match, Cusack refused. The decision was scorned by those who believed that Cusack had withdrawn so as to avoid seeing his team badly beaten. The Killimor team were then declared victorious. It was, wrote the Western News, a thoroughly deserved success, ‘as the physique and bearing of our own men was vastly superior.’As the day’s sport on the Fair Green continued with pony races and tug-of-war contests, the Killimor team set off for home. All along the way they were met by bonfires lit in celebration of their victory. By the time they had reached Killimor, the townspeople were out on the streets and bonfires blazed at every corner. A fife-and-drum band paraded the team through the town and speeches were made lauding the hurlers for the honour which they had brought to their home town. The Metropolitans returned to Dublin under something of a cloud, but the day was not without success for Michael Cusack. A letter to the Western News made a public plea for the nationwide revival of hurling, ‘a sport which we all love ... as a relic of a time that was the golden age of Ireland.’ Even before the trip to Ballinasloe at Easter 1884, it seems certain that Michael Cusack was planning the revival of hurling on a national scale. He continued to develop hurling in Dublin in the following months, helping to develop a third club in the city, the Dublin Workingmen’s hurling Club, based in Christchurch Place.The Early Years of the GAA in DublinAfter the GAA was founded in November 1884, it published its first rules for hurling in January 1885. Through February and early March 1885 clubs across the country experimented with the new hurling rules by playing matches amongst themselves. Clubs in areas where hurling had retained or regained a presence – Tipperary, Galway, Cork and Dublin – were the first into the field. Although it is impossible to be certain, it appears that the first hurling matches played under GAA rules between separate clubs took place on Sunday 22 March 1885. In Galway a team from the Meelick area (known as The Shannon District) played against a team from Lusmagh which was directly across the River Shannon in King’s County. On that same day, a match was played between Nenagh and Silvermines in Tipperary.There was difficulty in spreading a game which had been lost to so many areas of Ireland, however. Cusack hit upon the idea staging a major match in Dublin to capture the imagination of the national press. In October 1885 Cusack wrote in United Ireland of his plan to bring two teams of seasoned hurlers to Dublin – one from Tipperary, the other from Galway. The Nenagh club, led by Frank Moloney, began preparations to bring a representative team from the clubs across north Tipperary by holding a tournament from which the best players from the area would be chosen. Reacting to this, Cusack called on the men of Galway to send up a team of first-class hurlers to Dublin to play a challenge against them. By the end of December, he had his answer. Twelve hurling clubs from south Galway came together to play a series of matches in the town of Gort and, afterwards, they sent word to Cusack that they were ready to meet the North Tipperary challenge in late January or early February 1886.Cusack arranged for the game to be played in the Phoenix Park on Tuesday, 16 February 1886. It is not clear why the match was played on a Tuesday, but it was played in the Phoenix Park only because Cusack was unable to secure the use of Lansdowne Road or any other enclosed ground in the city. In advertising the game, he said its object was to show the citizens of Dublin what hurling was really like. It was a chance, he said, to see the most sublime game ever played, short of warfare. On the week of the match, the newspapers billed the game as the ‘Championship of Ireland’ and Michael Cusack afterwards declared it ‘the first great hurling match organised by the Gaelic Athletic Association.’The North Tipperary team had arrived by train to Broadstone train station at 5pm on the evening before the game. They went first to their lodgings on Marlborough Street, and then went to Dan Lowery’s Star of Erin theatre [check name] on Dame Street. At 9.30pm Cusack called for them at the theatre and brought them back to Broadstone station to meet the Galway men who were arriving on the 10pm train. The two teams exchanged cordial greetings and mutual admiration, before something of a disagreement arose over the ball. The Galway men viewed the ball used by the Tipperary men as being too big and too soft. They retired to the Clarence Hotel where they were staying. On the morning of the match, they made a ball which was smaller and harder, and headed to the Phoenix Park.The press reported that despite the damp, cold day, a very big crowd turned out, with ‘every class being represented’, and that ‘quite a large number of vehicles fringed the ground.’ The North Tipperary men wore green and orange striped jerseys, stockings and caps; the South Galway men wore white jerseys, corduroy knicks, grey stockings and green caps. The jerseys for the Galway team had been knitted for them by nuns in Gort at their knitting factory, while their knicks had been sewn by a local tailor, Packie Shaughnessy. It was decided that the Tipperary ball would be used for the first half and the Galway one for the second. When the two teams lined up in the middle of the field, they made an arch in the air with their hurleys and the hurlers let out a huge cheer. The ball was then thrown in by the referee. The clash of styles immediately became apparent. The Tipperary men sought to move the ball first-time by hitting it on the ground or in the air. The Galway preferred to dribble the ball forward on the ground in front of them. It was also clear that the Tipperary team was stronger and, for almost all the first half, they pinned the Galway men close to their own goal without managing to score. The highpoint of the match when one of the Tipperary hurlers doubled on a high ball which came his way through the air and drove it towards the Galway goal. No score resulted, but the spectators were lost in admiration. As it was, the only score of the game came when Martin Gleeson drove the ball into the Galway goal midway through the second half. It was considered by all that North Tipperary were the better team. In fact, it passed into folklore in North Tipperary that they were considerably superior to their rivals. Their goalkeeper on the day was Pat Gleeson from Gow and he was reported to have roared at his teammates: ‘For God’s sake, will ye let the ball come this way. I’m dying with the cowld.’Cusack was clearly relieved that the match had passed without a fight or a serious injury. He wrote that the rules of the GAA had been ‘observed with a scrupulousness which was almost religious’ and that the GAA had ‘passed triumphantly through the most critical ordeal of its existence.’ The journalist for the Dublin weekly sports newspaper called Sport, which up until that day had largely ignored the GAA, was not nearly as effusive. He praised the fine physique of both teams and overall deemed the match to be a ‘great success’. Nonetheless, he viewed the general standard of play as ‘crude and primitive’, and that there was ‘a regrettable absence of science’ in the match.Cusack was not interested in such barbs from those whom he described in his match report as ‘the haters and traducers of our race.’ He was buoyant at the success of the match and wrote that the championship of Ireland now rested with the North Tipperary team and that any club which wished to wrest it from them should send a challenge to Frank Moloney, Castle Hotel, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. For the team from South Galway there was nothing but recriminations. There had been local dissatisfaction at the team selected to travel to Dublin and in the days before the match several key players had withdrawn. Local tradition in Gort has it that those hurlers who had travelled now preferred not to take the train home and face their public. Others offer a more mundane explanation. Many of the players had missed the train home because they had been taken by horse-and-car to the wrong station in Dublin.On top of staging a match in Dublin, Cusack and the Metropolitan hurlers worked to foster the game outside the city. The Metropolitans (in tandem with the hurlers of other newly-formed Dublin clubs) also began to travel outside of Dublin to play exhibition matches. Along with hurlers from the Faughs and Dunleary clubs, they travelled by train to Dundalk and played matches there. The first time they travelled, the game was abandoned after ten minutes, with the crowd rushing onto the field in ignorance of the rules. Time and persistence brought better fortune. In early 1887 a hurling club was established in Dundalk and another team of hurlers from various Dublin clubs went up and played a match. They lauded the patriotism of the Dundalk men in their efforts for hurling and offered advice on how to progress. P.P. Sutton, from the Dublin Metropolitans, noted that their faults were the same as those of inexperienced hurlers everywhere: stopping the ball with their feet and then scraping it forward along the crowd, instead of hitting it a hard, quick blow. He offered a coaching lesson: ‘Get a few balls and puck them about indiscriminately. Strike both left and right as hard and as fast as possible, and let no-one stop the ball with his feet.’In 1887, too, the Dublin county board was the first in the country to successfully stage a county championships for its clubs. Fittingly, it was won by the Metropolitans and first championship did much to promote the growth of hurling in Dublin through 1887. New clubs were formed in various parts of the city. These included Raparees hurling club from the Lower Bridge Street area, the Celtic hurling club from around Cork Street, Erin’s Hope from the Marlborough Street teacher training college and Brian Boru’s from Clontarf. Despite hurling invariably being overshadowed by Gaelic football, it gained a foothold in the city which it never again lost.And all told, such was the importance of Dublin in taking the ancient game of hurling and squeezing it onto a modern playing field that it might be considered that Dublin was the crucible of the modern game of hurling. While Thurles was the formal birthplace of the GAA, the idea of the association was forged on the grass of the Phoenix Park in Dublin. It was there, after all, that Michael Cusack had fixed the revival of hurling even before he founded the GAA

The following is a transcript of Dublin City Public Libraries 1884-2009: 125 years of service to the community, a talk to commemorate 125 years of Public Library Service in Dublin City by Deirdre Ellis-King, Dublin City Librarian as part of Local History Day 26th September, 2009.

The following is a transcript of a talk to coincide with the launch of the publication, Early Modern Dubliners, by Dr Maighread Ní Mhurchadha on 28th August, 2008.

The following is a transcript of Rediscovering Emmet's Dublin through the Collections of Dublin City Libraries, the 8th Annual Emmet and Devlin Spring Lecture by Dr Máire Kennedy, at Dublin City Library and Archive on Monday 15th March 2010.

The following is a transcript of Commodious temples: Catholic church building in nineteenth-century Dublin, the thirteenth Sir John T. Gilbert Commemorative Lecture by Brendan Grimes, at Dublin City Library and Archive on 21st January 2010.