A late Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin wrote of quarrels between those who attacked their boiled eggs on their little ends and those who attacked them on their big ends. He was prophetic. Though kicking balls, some covered by non-human skins was a very old pastime for chaps with nothing better to do, the 19th century idea of curtailing free-style play led to quarrelsas silly as any lampooned by Swift.
Soldiers, when not killing, have plenty of time to kill. Apparently squaddies in Kilkenny, took to tying cats’ tails together and betting on which cat would win the resulting fight. That was long before the barracks there changed hands and was renamed after the Fenian leader James Stephens. And some time before the August night I was made Corporal commanding the Guard there. The night when, 6,000 miles away, Marilyn Monroe died.
Commissioned officers had even more spare time than common soldiers, and when tired of pig-sticking, or too impecunious to keep polo ponies or even a half-decent hunter, one or other drew up rules for pocket billiards. Association Football was codified by British officers, but proved so popular with the working classes that few gentlemen, and fewer still would-be gentlemen, would have anything to do with it. Its popularity with the masses probably arose because traditional free-style football, a robust, less epicene sport, had been suppressed, as Robert Graves observed in “Goodbye To All That.”
Gentlemen of England (when not abed) and schools for would-be gentlemen, there and in Scotland and Ireland, adopted rugby, a far rougher game than Associated Football. In Wales and in Limerick rugby took on with less toffee-nosed folk. In the North of England, a variant, Rugby League,( played by Bounders and Cads for Money!) acquired and retained popular appeal.
In Ireland, depopulated by the Great Hunger which involved particularly speakers of Irish and custodians of time-honoured pursuits, the survivors with aspirations, such as the aspirations of eating and earning their bread, were in danger of identifying “completely with British ideas, sentiments and assumptions” – in fact becoming prototype Terry Wogans. And the very forces which had guarded foodstuffs on their way to the ports for export from the mouths of the starving Irish masses were promoting the newly codified ball-games.
The GAA was founded in 1884 to preserve and develop Irish games. It codified hurling and football, following British precedent. The association has always been autonomous and democratic. Its ban on its members playing “garrison games” was democratically arrived at and when it was abolished in 1971 it was democratically abolished. I’d suggest the ban was not dissimilar to a a tariff on imported goods, by which countries protect nascent industries until they are strong enough to compete in a free market. Anyhow it was nobody’s business but the GAA’s ,and there was no ban on others who wanted to play GAA games from setting up their own clubs.
What was ridiculous though was hurlers sneering at cricket players, rugger buggers sneering at Gaelic and soccer players, or anyone living in a country where hurling had been played since the time of Tain Bo Cuailnge, playing hockey.
I remember in the late 1950s, a classmate in Rockwell, Paddy McGrath of Cork, who was later capped to play rugby for Ireland. He would persuade the teacher, Thady O’Connor, to recall the College’s glory days when the Ryan brothers who’d been at Rockwell were on a winning Triple Crown match against England, and one of them had crossed the English line, as THE TIMES put it – “festooned with Saxons.” The heroes returned in glory to their alma mater, and were met a mile from the school on “Misery Hill” the first vantage point on the Dublin Road from which the College could be seen. The horse was released from their carriage and the boys drew it the mile to the College.
Thady also told us how Father Shanahan and Rockwell’s Senior XV missed a train for Cork for the Munster Schools Final against Christian Brothers’ College. So he hired another train, took the team to Cork, where they “bet” “Christians”. We used sing a song, probably first sung by Lions – “Christians think they’re goin’ to win, Parlais Vous.”
Father Shanahan, the son of a Tipperary farm labourer, became Bishop Shanahan, and Thady O’Connor, (Father Thady O’Connor C.S.Sp.) accompanied him as a missionary to Nigeria. Recently I met a Nigerian priest of that Order. When I told him I’d been taught by a priest that had been on the mission with Bishop Shanahan, he told me that Shanahan was to Nigeria what St Patrick was to Ireland. I checked on Wikipedia and found that Bishop Shanahan had died in Kenya in 1943 but had been reburied in Nigeria in the 1950s in a plot reserved for local royalty.
Some of you will have seen a photograph of Thady O’Connor, taken in 1904 at Rockwell. He is holding a Rugby ball, as captain of a team which included the student-teacher Edward de Valera. They remained friends and de Valera’s devotion to rugby football never dimmed.
It’s 57 years since I left Rockwell,and it was a mere 55 years before that that Thady captained that 1904 team, and that was just 57 years after Black ’47, the most lethal year of the Great Starvation.
Thady died in August 1959 the month that the Leaving Cert. results were published. We’d marvelled at his hawk-eyed attention to rugby for a man of his advanced age – the same age as I am now. He taught Chemistry, which together with Physics I was exposed to, because my father, an engineer, thought I should be equipped for a scientific age. Eamon de Valera thought likewise about his sons, and, in the case his youngest son, Terry, was similarly mistaken. I failed Chemistry in my Leaving but do not think it contributed to Thady’s death. Had I passed I would have been convinced the surprise had killed him.
Thady’s was a life well-lived and I was honoured to have known him.
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