1st Edition
New Perspectives on Association Football in Irish History Going beyond the 'Garrison Game'
This book assesses association football’s history and development in Ireland from the late 1870s until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on four key themes—soccer’s early development before and after partition, the post-Emergency years, coaching and developing the game, and supporters and governance. In particular, it examines key topics such as the Troubles, Anglo-Irish football relations, the failure of a professional structure in the Republic and Northern Ireland, national and regional identity, relationships with other sports, class, economics and gender. It features contributions from some of today’s leading academic writers on the history of Irish soccer while the views of a number of pre-eminent sociologists and economists specialising in the game’s development are also offered. It identifies some of the difficulties faced by soccer’s players and administrators in Ireland and challenges the notion that it was a ‘garrison game’ spread mainly by the military and generally only played by those who were not fully committed to the nationalist cause. This is the first edited collection to focus solely on the progress of soccer in Ireland since its introduction and adds to the growing academic historiography of Irish sport and its relationship with politics, culture and society.
The chapters in this book were originally published an a special issue in Soccer & Society.
1. Introduction to ‘going beyond the ‘‘garrison game’’: new perspectives on association football in Irish history’ Conor Curran and David Toms 2. Association Football in the Shamrock Shire’s Hy Brasil: The ‘Socker’ Code in Connacht, 1879–1906 Paul I. Gunning 3. ‘Who were the Shoneens?’: Irish militant nationalists and association football, 1913–1923 Aaron O´ Maonaigh 4. ‘‘Inciting the roughs of the crowd’: soccer hooliganism in the south of Ireland during the inter-war period, 1919–1939’ Mark Tynan 5. Football unity during the Northern Ireland Troubles? Cormac Moore 6. Linfield’s ‘Hawk of Peace’: pre-Ceasefires reconciliation in Irish League football Daniel Brown 7. Harry Cannon: a unique Irish sportsman and administrator Tom Hunt 8. How it all began: the story of women’s soccer in sixties Drogheda Helena Byrne 9. The development of schoolboy coaching structures for association football in Ireland, 1945–1995 Conor Curran 10. Pedagogy, game intelligence & critical thinking: the future of Irish soccer? Seamus Kelly 11. Supporter ownership as a method of football governance: the concept of a Supporters’ Trust and its operation within England and the Republic of Ireland Shane Tobin 12. Rule changes and incentives in the League of Ireland from 1970 to 2014 David Butler and Robbie Butler
Biography
Conor Curran is Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and has taught sports history at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He has published two books, The Development of Sport in Donegal, 1880–1935 (2015) and Irish Soccer Migrants: A Social and Cultural History (2017).
David Toms is an independent scholar based in Norway. Previously, he taught sports history at University College Cork, Ireland, and his monograph, Soccer in Munster: A Social History, 1877–1937, was published in 2015.
