Sports History Conference: Daire Whelan previews a first attempt to take a professional look at the history of sport here
Have you ever wondered about bread and circuses, and what is the function of sport? Or cried aloud about the failure to suppress bloodsports in Victorian Ulster? Or pondered, perhaps, about communists, Catholics and hat-tricks? Or preached the gospel of virility? Or, more worryingly, been concerned about internal tamponage, hockey and parturition?
If you're just a sports fan confining your reading to the pages of this newspaper, then open your eyes: there's a whole new world out there and it's called sports history. And Ireland's first sports history conference is being held at UCD today and tomorrow.
Organised by sports historians Paul Rouse (PhD in History from UCD, whose thesis was on the history of the ban on foreign games) and Will Murphy (UCD PhD student), this inaugural conference hopes to stir discussion and debate in the field of Irish sports history.
"We had both gone to conferences abroad on sports history," explains Rouse "and we thought there was a big opening for people to study sports history in Ireland. Apart from a couple of honourable exceptions, Irish historians have never displayed any interest or aptitude for sports history. If you look at it, the traditions of Irish historiography have been based on political history rather than social and economic history. Take Joe Lee's book Ireland 1912-1985 or Roy Foster's Modern Ireland, they barely mention sport, and when they do it is only very briefly and only in connection with politics."
It seems we in this country have been taking sport very lightly; while on the pitch we are as sports mad as the rest, it is in looking at its effects and consequences on our society where we have been conspicuously lacking. The study of sports history is just one way of finding out more about the lives of ordinary Irish men and women, or, as the social philosopher, Eric Hoffer, once wrote: "The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle".
"If you want to look at history in purely political terms," continues Rouse, "then sport is on the sidelines; however, if you want to look at the more interesting aspects of history, which is social and cultural history, sport is right at the centre of Irish life and has been for centuries. What is it that people talk about in the pubs mostly? They talk about soccer and Gaelic, and I don't think people have changed so fundamentally over the decades."
And conventional historical thinking is getting turned on its head, as studies into sports history are revealing. Tom Hunt, a schoolteacher from Westmeath, has studied the playing of games in Westmeath from the 1880s-1900s and has challenged preconceived notions of how rural life was organised in terms of who played what. For example, did you know that cricket was the biggest game in Westmeath in the 1880s and 1890s? That polo was a huge sport in this country, with an All-Ireland polo championship in the 1900s and Westmeath fielded two teams in it?
This weekend's conference is as good as booked out. However, the study into sports history in Ireland won't end after Saturday, as Rouse and Murphy are setting up a sports history society to provide a platform for people who are interested in sports history, whether it's at local, student or professional level. For more information contact shiconference@hotmail.com.
And for those of you who are still wondering, parturition is the act or process of giving birth. Not the kind of thing one learns from the sports pages every day. See, sometimes sport can turn conventional thinking on its head.
