In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

‘Is not the artisan who plays football as good a sportsman as the gentleman? One stands to lose much, the other little.’1 Such was the question posed by T. Desmond, the honorary secretary of Cork Constitution RFC, in the aftermath of controversial comments made by H.C. Sheppard, the then treasurer of the Irish Rugby Football Union, in 1903. In summing up the Union’s financial position in February, Sheppard had embarked on something of a verbal solo run in which he claimed that the Welsh team were cheaper to host than their Scottish counterparts as artisans were happy to drink beer with their post-match dinner while gentlemen demanded champagne. The resultant stream of scorn from the Welsh press was matched at home by several repudiations from individuals and clubs. Dublin clubs Old Wesley and Bective Rangers publicly criticised Sheppard, while the meeting chaired by Desmond in Cork concluded that the ‘inference suggested by the comparison made between champagne and beer should never have been made and the references to the quality of dinners offered to international teams was sorely out of place’.2 A correspondent to the Sporting Record opined that ‘few footballers know how to appreciate champagne and the money spent on it might be more judiciously used in fostering the game all over the country’, while a contributor to Athletic News asserted that ‘Mr Sheppard’s views are not in sympathy with the best Irish Sportsmen’.3 The casual snobbery inherent in Sheppard’s indiscretion was possibly reflective of the fact that in his capacity as an official of the IRFU, he did not have much cause to deal with artisans. Indeed, the generalisation current in academic literature on the subject, which sees rugby in Ireland as an homogenously middle-class pursuit save for a degree of proletarian infiltration in Limerick, is broadly true.4 In that sense it seems quite fitting that the sole Limerick representative on the Irish team that season was its only member likely to be directly offended by Sheppard’s comment. Paddy Healy, a Garryowen front-row forward, was a prosperous butcher and who as a champion rower 65 CHAPTER 3 Class and Community was denied entry to the Henley Regatta on the grounds of his occupation . A hugely popular character in Limerick, Healy most likely opted for beer or whiskey in Cowhey’s, apparently his hostelry of choice in St Mary’s parish.5 A corollary of middle-class domination was that Sheppard’s comments were also notable for being a rare example of class being referred to in any kind of explicitly confrontational manner in Irish rugby discourse . Unlike England, where the bitter clash of working-class and elite sporting cultures leading to the split between the RFU and the Northern Union was heavily infused with class-based rhetoric and comment, Irish rugby has historically had a deceptively coherent social perception. As late as 2008, generalisations such as ‘in the amateur era when rugby was a game for the gentlemen and the professional classes’,6 are buttressed by humorous caricatures such as those seen in the Ross O’Carroll Kelly series of books where rugby is part and parcel of an exaggerated middle-class decadence in suburban Dublin. That artisans would not have entered Sheppard’s domestic thinking was borne out of the fact that rugby at national level was dominated by middle-class players and administrators from Dublin and Ulster. As pointed out earlier, of 250 men who played on the Irish international rugby team before 1900, 220 played for either Leinster or Ulster clubs, with a mere twenty-nine hailing from Munster. Furthermore, sixty-nine of the 145 Leinster-based players were from the socially and culturally prescriptive Dublin University club.7 Given this preponderance of Leinster and Ulster men, a sample of forty-four Dublin- and Belfast-based players, taken from the 1911 census, who were capped by Ireland before 1920 is indicative of the social tenor of the game at national level.8 Of the twenty-seven Dublin men, twentyone were Protestants (nineteen Church of Ireland, one Methodist, and one Weslyan), five were Roman Catholic, with the only non-Christian being the Jewish Bethel Solomons. Occupationally, the sample was clearly middle-class leaning. The health professions were represented by five doctors, two dentists and a medical student. Five subjects of the sample were at various stages of legal careers while a further three were in technical professions. Of the remaining eleven, there were three...

Share