Second Innings – Frank McNally on a post-independence cricket revival in Co Meath

One of the lesser-known effects of Irish independence, it seems, was to encourage a revival of cricket in Co Meath.

The revival was as short-lived as it was enthusiastic, lasting from the end of the Civil War until about 1948 and therefore almost paralleling the life of the Free State.

It was not the first inter-party coalition, however, or the declaration of a Republic that did for the Meath cricketing renaissance. If any single calamity can be blamed, the usual culprits are the county’s Gaelic footballers, for beating Cavan in the 1949 All-Ireland final.

The bat-and-ball game never recovered from that. But as Adam Burke explains in a handsome new book – Wielding the Willow – Cricket in South Meath: 1860-1950 – the truth was a bit more complicated.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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As the subtitle suggests, his study focuses on those parts of the royal county bordering Kildare and North Dublin. The latter remains a bastion of the game today: perhaps the last one left in the Republic, at least outside the cities.

In the late 19th century, by contrast, cricket was played all over rural Ireland, with strongholds including Tipperary and Kilkenny. The rise of the GAA and the break-up of the big estates (whose labourers were a mainstay) eventually sank it in those parts.

And there was a similar if later decline in Meath from 1909 onwards, as Gaelic games, land reform, and revolution combined to cricket’s detriment. But once the Troubles were over and Ireland got on with the business of running itself, the necessity for abstinence from “English games” was no longer as urgent.

On the contrary, Burke writes, quoting J.P. Farrell: “people felt that it was time to go back to things they really liked, such as cricket, badger hunting, open coursing with greyhounds, and other traditional country pursuits”.

So rather than disappearing in the Free State, cricket in South Meath now entered its “golden age”. Within months of the Civil War ending, there were active clubs in Agher, Dalystown, Gilbertstown, Isaacstown, Longwood, Newcastle, Rathcore, Rathrone, and Trammon.

An incidental accompaniment to this revival, as a court case of 1930 illustrated, was the related Irish sport of “shebeening”. As always, that game involved serving or consuming alcohol cheaply and without a licence, so long as it was not sold or paid for.

When gardaí visited the house of one Thomas Doran of Cloneycurry, one night in 1930, they found the kitchen full of men drinking porter from cups and mugs. They were celebrating a season in which Cloncurry had won the Meath Cricket League’s “Division B” (itself a symptom of the renaissance).

A solicitor later argued that the quarter-barrel of porter had been bought with club funds, then served free to members as a fringe benefit of their 2s 6d subscription. No sale had occurred.

Unfortunately, on the night, the members themselves had been unable to defend this legal wicket against the spin bowling of Garda questioning. One defendant said there was a 2s 6d admission fee to the house, although being “sick with the drink”, he could not remember paying.

The court also heard that such events were “very common” among local cricket clubs. There were even dark suggestions that certain clubs were less likely to be raided by gardaí than others. Even so, the upshot was a judgment of Solomon in which the drinkers were fined 2s 6d each.

The rise in Meath’s GAA fortunes certainly sapped the popularity of cricket as the 1930s and 40s progressed. Aside from the county’s growing success at football, there was also the effect of the “ban” on foreign games, with vigilance committees always on the watch for stray GAA sheep in garrison game pastures.

One Longwood hurler was suspended for six months in 1934 after a club colleague reported he had been “standing on the side of the road at Ballyclare watching a cricket match [...] across a ditch”. Sheep who strayed but repented, meanwhile, were granted “reinstatements”, accepting them back into the GAA church on condition they did not sin again.

On the other hand, the efficacy of the ban in South Meath was undermined by proximity to the Kildare border. You could play football or hurling with Longwood, for example, then skip across county lines to Moyvalley for cricket. Kildare GAA vigilantes were unlikely to testify at a Meath GAA hearing, or vice versa.

But ban or no ban, the rise of Gaelic football was not cricket’s only challenge. Increased farm mechanisation reduced the rural playing base. So did the work of the Land Commission, in breaking up and redistributing unviable estates.

The famous All-Ireland win may have been the coup de grâce. But the game was collapsing locally even before that. With its oldest clubs dating from the 1860s, cricket in South Meath had been bowled out, still well short of its century, by 1948.