I vividly recall one moment from my primary school days.
At break some boys were harmlessly kicking a football when an elderly, now deceased, teacher – otherwise gentle with his pupils – stormed into the yard, overcome by rage and physically lashing out at bewildered boys. Their crime wasn’t playing football where windows might get broken. It was that their kickaround involved soccer and not Gaelic football.
Children don’t always absorb the context of things they witness, but I instinctively understood that his fury was nothing to do with sport, but politics. We were casually kicking a ball, but to him we seemed engaged in a treasonous rejection of a spirit of nationalism he felt fervently duty-bound to instil in us.
That day I grasped the truth that you can’t separate sport and politics. Salazar understood this when he established his dictatorship in Portugal, determined to squash dissent by weaponising his three Fs: “faith, fado and football”.
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David Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation: The Story of Brazil through Soccer explores how Brazil’s rulers used soccer as a unifying tool to graft a sense of nationhood on a vast, culturally diverse country.
But, until recently, few histories of Dublin paid much attention to the role that sport played in the social fabric of Dublin life. This is despite the Irish Rugby Football Union being founded in 1879 and governing bodies for Gaelic games, cycling and athletics being established soon after.
The governing body established for Irish soccer in 1880 was Belfast-based and orientated, with the game slower to take off in Dublin, with the Leinster Football Association only established 12 years later.
This rich and comprehensive book by Conor Curran is a welcome addition to a growing body of research into the role of sport in Irish society by historians like Paul Rouse, Cormac Moore and Siobhán Doyle. It quotes David Goldblatt in describing how soccer’s fate “was to arrive in Ireland at the very moment that a broad-based opposition to British rule… (meant that)… sport and politics would become inseparable”.
This was the cultural struggle still fought by that engaged teacher in 1971 – the year the GAA lifted their ban on “foreign games”. But to Curran’s credit, he never gets bogged down in this cultural war but focuses on how soccer first evolved, in Dublin, like in industrialised English cities, as a working-class game.
The spur for towns like Sheffield to become early soccer powerhouses was a Factory Act that afforded factory workers a half day on Saturday, creating a paying audience for soccer.
But, as Curran explains, only a quarter of male workers in Victorian Dublin were employed in manufacturing and could benefit from this legislation. This allowed industrialised Belfast to retain such a grip on soccer that, when an international was finally played against England in Dublin in 1900, eight Belfast players were picked with one token Dubliner. The seeds of a bitter split in Irish soccer existed long before partition.
With its strong emphasis on the parish, the GAA was destined to thrive in rural areas, buoyed by parochial rivalries. Often a similar sense of identity didn’t exist in Dublin. Instead many early teams emerged from workplaces – St James Gate formed by Guinness workers and Jacob’s by workers in that biscuit sweatshop.
Pembroke soccer club was founded by Ringsend bottle blowers who started work half an hour early each day, to be allowed Saturday afternoons off to play soccer.
Founded in Ringsend in 1895, Shelbourne became associated with Dublin Corporation, partly because its linchpin as player and treasurer, James Rowan, was a Corporation worker. Shamrock Rovers also originated in Ringsend. Dublin’s first Northside/Southside soccer rivalry didn’t involve the Liffey, but Shels and Rovers playing on opposite sides of the Dodder.
Not the least of Curran’s achievements is that he takes us from the origins of these early clubs to the foundation in 2009, by a Nigerian ex-professional player, of a multiracial club like Insaka FC in Blanchardstown. In between, he details the development of woman’s soccer here, the fate of Dublin teams in Europe and the careers of Dublin players not only in the UK but in professional leagues further afield.
He vividly captures the 1950s heyday of domestic soccer, when “Soccer Special” buses from Burgh Quay brought huge crowds to Milltown to watch a young Rovers team known as “Coad’s colts” dazzle opponents. But they barely scrapped to FAI Cup victory in 1955 against a veteran Drumcondra side reining them in with the offside trap.
Just occasionally Curran’s narrative seems reined in by the offside trap of having originated as a work of commissioned academic research. In trying to so comprehensively cover every aspect of Dublin soccer, one sometimes wishes he had gone on longer solo runs with certain stories.
He finds room to mention to John Paul II (a noted goalkeeper when young) but not the legendary Ollie Byrne, who revived Shelbourne from their “death throes” to enjoy European success, then nearly bankrupted them trying to repeat it.
Curran provides excellent analysis of John Charles McQuaid’s unsuccessful attempts to stop the FAI playing Yugoslavia in 1955, after which he retaliated by trying to infiltrate every schoolboy club.
But I would have liked to read more about the terrible pressures faced by FAI officials, condemned from pulpits while knowing that, having fought for Uefa recognition, they risked expulsion if they refused to play a fellow member nation.
But this exhaustive study explores how soccer wove its way into every stand of Dublin life. Oscar Traynor – one of the last volunteers out of a blazing GPO – declared in 1945 that revolutionaries like him, Cathal Brugha, Kevin Barry and Emmet Dalton all played this “foreign game” without it diluting their nationalism.
It’s a point I could have made to an enraged teacher in 1971. Wisely, I didn’t.
