Rugby in Munster: A Social and Cultural History

APPENDIX: A note on sources

APPENDIX A note on sources 241 It is only in recent years that Irish historians have slowly come to recognise the value of sport as a subject of enquiry. This has been visible in the inclusion of sport-related material in general works of synthesis. R.V. Comerford included an entire chapter on sport in his Inventing the Nation,1 while Richard English’s treatment of the GAA in his history of Irish nationalism (2006) is a good deal more satisfactory and nuanced than the efforts of Robert Kee in a work of similar scope published thirty-four years earlier.2 Most impressive of all, perhaps, was the coverage given to a relatively wide range of sport in Diarmaid Ferriter’s The Transformation of Ireland, where sporting themes are skilfully woven into the author’s extensive exploration of Irish society in the twentieth century.3 Two developments have influenced the shift in emphasis in more recent works. Firstly, a tendency among historians in Ireland to recognise the significance of sport has no doubt emerged. From a position, perhaps, of being viewed as an object of frivolity, the Irish historical mind is beginning to grasp the social, political and cultural importance of sport. Critical to this progress has been the growth, from the 1990s, of a small body of professional historical work on the subject. The most pervasive theme within this literature has been the intersection between sport and identity politics in Ireland. In addition, a dramatic reconsideration of the history of Gaelic games has taken place. Works by Cronin,4 Rouse5 and Garnham6 have strived (if not to decouple Gaelic games and nationalism) to present a critical view of the GAA’s relationship with politics and also to encourage more analyses of the Association as a social and sporting body. The culmination of these efforts was the publication in 2009 of a landmark collection of essays that opened up several new avenues of enquiry into the history of Gaelic games.7 Quality works on the social history of Irish sport, however, remain few and far between. Exceptions to this include Neal Garnham’s Association Football and Society8 and Tom Hunt’s remarkable local study of Westmeath.9 Heavily influenced by the work of British 242 Rugby in Munster historians, these books successfully analyse significant themes in Irish social history through the prism of sport. Within this expansion of Irish sporting historiography, rugby remains largely ignored. The general surveys written by the journalists Edmund Van Esbeck,10 Seán Diffley11 and Charlie Mulqueen,12 though containing useful detail, are limited in analytical ambition. Though some works have explored the relationship between rugby and national identity, particularly in the context of the game’s thirtytwo county structure,13 little has been written on the social history of the game. Moreover, existing research has done little to challenge the pervasive perception that rugby has historically been a middle-class anglophile game. Indeed, the work of Michael Mullan, for instance, takes the assumption of a neat social and cultural binary division between Gaelic games and sports of British origin as the starting point for his work on the ‘bifurcation of Irish sport’.14 This paradigm also informs Patrick McDevitt’s work on ‘muscular Catholicism’ in which the author states, for example, that: By creating the GAA, Irishmen were performing a deliberate act of heresy in the face of the cultural imperialism and political dominance of Great Britain . . . By repudiating the central rituals of the British imperial religion, they rejected the tenet that team games were symbolic of the superiority of British manhood.15 Rugby, by implication, is lumped together with a variety of sports of British origin standing at variance with the broad social appeal (Mullan) and cultural message (McDevitt) of Gaelic games. The validity of this assumption has not been corroborated by detailed academic research. Given the extent to which recent work has demolished historical pre-conceptions about Irish cricket,16 this over-simplified view of Irish rugby is in need of detailed re-consideration. Approaches in this book have also been heavily influenced by readings on the history of rugby football in other countries. My focus on the fluidity and localisation of the game has been informed by the work of Tony Collins on English rugby,17 Gareth Williams on Wales and the home nations,18 and Phillip Dine on France.19 These works, along with volumes on the game in other parts of the world,20 have proven that despite the...