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Thanks very much for the invitation to speak. As Aideen said I work on the Irish Sporting
Heritage Project so I’m always interested in information on particularly grounds. It’s
the built heritage that I’m interested in but those grounds contain stories and histories
so it’s always great for me to be able to speak to different groups of people who will
have experience. It’s right across the country but actually I haven’t done enough work
on Dublin yet so any information that comes in I’d be very grateful for.
The most striking new building on the Dublin skyline is of course the Aviva stadium. I’ve
been told by people who have done - is it called the Dublin Eye or the wheel? – that
when you look down it’s just magnificent this new stadium. As Lansdowne Road, it was
the oldest rugby ground in Europe, and first hosted athletics in 1872. The original stadium
was a multi-sports venue, which included a cinder track for athletics, cricket pitch,
croquet green, three football pitches and facilities for archery and lawn tennis. I’ve
no photos of that or sketches of that; I’d love to see what it looked like as a multi-sports
venue at that time. But now that site on Lansdowne Road has been transformed into a remarkable
piece of twenty-first century architecture. The Sunday Tribune last week noted that for
the cost of saving Anglo-Irish Bank the country could have built twenty-five state-of-the-art
hospitals, or twenty Aviva Stadiums. It’s more expensive than a hospital; €410 million
the Aviva Stadium cost. So it’s an obvious part of the built sporting
heritage of the city and it can be seen clearly from several vantage points. But some other
significant venues are almost hidden from public view, while others have almost vanished
altogether. Actually this is part of the evolution from Lansdowne Road to the Aviva Stadium that
concrete grandstand very much of its time built in 1925 and then just before demolition
and the process of this magnificent glass structure. I remember whenever Castlecourt
or maybe it was the Waterfront Hall in Belfast was built and it was just between ceasefires
I think and no body could believe that anybody would build a glass structure in Belfast made
of glass. It’s a sign of a peaceful society that you could have a signature building in
your city built of glass.
But that grandstand actually echoes, the one at Lansdowne road echoes in some ways this
is the grandstand in Baldoyle Racecourse. Racing in Baldoyle began in 1829 on the Deer
Park, on a course laid out by racing enthusiast and landowner, Thomas, Third Earl of Howth.
There was a slight hiatus then in the 1840s but racing returned to Baldoyle in 1853. The
site was perfect as it was served by Drogheda and Howth Railway Company, which regularly
sponsored races. The races at Baldoyle became hugely popular. They were cheap to attend,
and the racecourse was not enclosed, so there were also popular with hawkers, tricksters
and pickpockets who could work the crowds. And one of the reasons for enclosing sports
grounds through the course of the 19th century was to keep the tricksters and hucksters out
or at the very least make money out of the money they were going to make. So that regulation
of the populace, of those who assembled at racetracks was very much part of the development
of sporting sites throughout the 19th century. In the twentieth century, Baldoyle continued
to have an important place in Ireland’s sporting history and its reinforced concrete
stand (by Donnelly, Moore and Keatinge in 1919) heralded the beginning of the influence
of modernism on sporting architecture. This is the first of its kind in Ireland and it
was built for Baldoyle in 1918, that bold, plain concrete appearance was radical. But
in 1973 the insurers could no longer insure the grandstand and so in part because of that
racing ceased at Baldoyle in the 1970s. And now the area, there is an old, we have one
hoof of it stands here, you can see on the left and on right - amazingly I think Carlow
Rugby Club bought the jockey changing rooms in 1972 and moved them themselves from Baldoyle
to Carlow, and they are still there. It’s a lovely little corrugated iron building and
we still have that left from the very famous, one of the most famous racecourses in the
world and now these are all that remain. There are two thousand houses on the site where
Baldoyle racecourse used to be.
There was racing as well in the Phoenix Park. Racing began there in 1901, and the Phoenix
Plate for two-year-olds was held over five furlongs until 1913 and was the richest race
in the country, surpassing even the Irish Derby at the time. But the popularity of racing
in Phoenix Park dropped after its heyday in the 1950s, and ceased altogether in 1990.
The land is also now apartment blocks.
So, the history of sporting sites in Dublin shifts and changes – and this was particularly
true of the years of the boom, and it seemed to us that no body was paying any attention
as apartment blocks gobbled all before them. That development across the city, nobody - well
people did I suppose - I often quote John Healy “but no shouted stop!” So it was
clear that a great deal of the Irish sporting landscape was changing and, not only were
we not recording this change, we had no clear record of what had been there in the first
place. So you can have - it was possible to have vast tracts, the amount of land a racecourse
takes up, and that could go and houses could be put up over it and nobody had any real
record, it would just disappear from view.
So, in setting up the Irish Sporting heritage Project, which was the brainchild of Mike
Cronin of Boston College-Ireland, our first aim was to compile a record of the sporting
sites of Ireland. The Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport was already attempting to
audit its facilities through county councils but we were attempting to do something slightly
different: we wanted to map the sporting landscape of Ireland over the last 150 years. Almost
impossible a task.
We have approached the project as historians and that makes a difference, it gives a different
dimension to the audit of facilities that the county councils have undertaken. We see
sporting sites as social spaces so we want to reach an understanding of their significance
in Ireland historically, politically, economically and culturally. We want to retrieve the stories
that these locations hold, the memories, the tensions, the social networks and hierarchies,
which they have reinforced or challenged. And actually the two papers which have preceded
this one are perfect examples of the way in which sporting clubs and sporting sites operate
within communities and form ties and form associations, but create outlets and networks,
and as Hilary said at the end of her paper they also reflect, and then also Ciarán very
clearly laid out with Bohemian the way in which they reflect the broader history of
the city. This is not simply a history of one small group of people they all have to
contacts into the broader society and we wanted to use the sites in which sport had been played
to tell these stories and to link into the broader social, political and economic history
of Ireland.
So I’ve got a website, I’ll just do a little plug for it. The Irish Sporting Heritage
website www.irishsportingheritage.com. And you can see we have the database up and this
is what it looks like. It’s done by county and by sport, so you can put in search ‘hockey
in Dublin’ or ‘tennis in Dublin’ or anywhere around the country. Or you can put
in your keyword. So please look it up and if your club is not properly represented or
not represented at all or if there is something you know about I’d be really delighted to
have the information. And it is important that these, that these
sites are recorded I think. I was looking recently through a history of architecture
in Dublin and I looked up the Phoenix Park and they have listed every gate lodges and
monument in the Phoenix Park and they don’t mention sport. It seemed extraordinary to
me. So there’s a real blindness. And I’m also putting together a dictionary entry for
the Dictionary of Irish Architecture on sporting sites and it’s really, really hard to get
the information. But the information, people in Ireland hold that information; it’s held
informally in their heads, in their attics, in their memories and histories. It’s not
held in official places so that’s why this archive is hugely important because it will
be a common place where people can come to retrieve that information.
So I am just going to show you two maps. I won’t spend too much time on them, but I
really like these two maps that’s why I’m going to show you them, to give you a sense
of how it works on a national scale and then I’ll talk specifically about Dublin. This
map I found; 1916 there’s somebody sitting there with their ballpoint pen, it’s like
a little manuscript because there’s nothing else to do in 1916 but put all the golf clubs
in Ireland onto a map and you can see really clearly on this map how important the railway
networks were to the development of sport in Ireland. So that when we think of the sporting
map of Ireland we can see multiple maps. It’s all about associations and transport links
and networks. And there you have it very clearly I think there are only three that aren’t
located very close to a railway line. And this one here as well in terms of the sporting
map and landscape. I went through all the sporting calendars through the 19th century
and what you see with the racing calendars, what you see is a much more informal process
at the end of the 19th century and eventually becomes much more formalized, so that the
number of racecourses becomes reduced, reduced and reduced until I think there are 25 or
30 today. But look this is a an all Ireland map, look at the North East and the North
West and what you see now is there were point-to-points throughout Ulster. But the racing calendar
when I was going through it I was thinking I’m from County Antrim, I was thinking “I’ve
not seen anything from County Antrim in this”. You know obscure places but I thought I’d
surely know them. So a sporting map of Ireland is also a religious map of Ireland. It will
also tell you a story about the relationship between Presbyterianism and gambling in Ireland.
So sport can tell us almost anything we ask of it, you know it can tell us about the position
of women in society, it can tell us about class politics, about urban development, about
the difference between the shipyard culture in Belfast and the less industrialized aspect
of Dublin culture. It tells us all of these stories. So if we map and record it we have
a whole new way to approach history.
So what kinds of stories are being told by the city? I suppose that’s one of the things
I’m going to look at today.
I will first say something about the way in which history is impacted into the way in
which it’s located in the places where sport has been played, even when the name changes
or even when stands are changed one by one, and even when the location itself changes,
there still is a traceable memory of sport in that area. I suppose I would be interested
to hear what you think of that; I’m not saying anything definitive, I’m just throwing
out a few thoughts on it. Then I will look at the relationship between
sporting sites and social structures in Dublin. Then I will say something briefly about the
way in which economic matters influenced the development of sport, and Ciarán has already
alluded to some of those things. So it’s just a brief overview and really the interest
for me would much more what you have to say and the information that’s held out there,
rather than the information I have already. So some places are no longer in existence
like Baldoyle racecourse and the Phoenix Park, they are half remembered, and still just about
traceable. For others, like the former home of Shamrock Rovers, which was also victim
to developers, there is a determination to remember. So the fans erected this little
[monument] to Shamrock Rovers, and in my other incarnation, my other interest is the 50th
anniversary of the Easter Rising. So I’ve looked at commemorations to the Rising around
the country, and I have to say that challenges many of them in its commitment and grandeur,
you won’t see a better commemorative monument anywhere in the country really. And it shows
these places matter to people, sporting sites matter to the communities in which they take
place.
So fans do have a strong sense of loyalty to the location and history of the place,
if at times, not the name. The Aviva stadium has been described by its architects Populous
as ‘the first truly site responsive stadium of its kind in the world. Its form, mass,
materials and aspect are defined by the site and its surrounds’. So they see it very
clearly located in that part of Dublin. Dublin rugby fans said very little about the renaming
of their national stadium on Lansdowne Road but they might have been more exercised if
it had been decided to relocate it to Thomond Park in Limerick. There was some talk of the
headquarters of rugby - you know there is a perfectly good stadium in Limerick why don’t
we relocate it there. They made enough noise about having to travel to the North side of
the city for a few years, I don’t know what they, what rugby fans would have said about
having to go to Limerick. So you can see these links to places, sometimes it’s the name,
sometimes it’s the place, but it’s no accident where these sporting grounds build
up. These grounds are embedded in the social, cultural and economic environment in which
they are located. They remain as markers of how the city itself evolved.
Speaking of the North side a familiar ground, the headquarters of the GAA. Working on Irish
sporting heritage, a lot of people think Irish sporting heritage is just the GAA because
it’s the Irish Sport, but it’s not of course, everything that takes place in Ireland
is part of the Irish heritage. But this is a photo of Croke Park in 1948. Look Croke
Park has seen several phases of development and alteration. It is an extraordinary venue.
It’s Europe’s oldest modern stadium, it predates the Stade de France by several years.
As well as being the first of its type, the building is probably the largest ever built
in Dublin in terms of mass. But of course when Frank Dineen bought the
ground in 1908 for £3,250 the site in Jones’s Road was very different. He made improvements
to the pitch and added terracing, and the ground had already evolved by the time the
GAA bought it off him in 1913 and called it Croke Memorial Park.
But Croke Park is a very good example of the way in which a site can modernize without
losing its sense of history. It has been renovated many times, most dramatically through the
four phase development begun in the 1980s, which culminated in 2005 with the opening
of the ‘new Hill 16’, that’s what it was called. Even those words give some idea
of how successfully Croke Park has negotiated this transition. How much of the original
rubble from Sackville Street remains on Hill 16? There can’t be very much. But it’s
important to people that some of it’s there and it’s still on the official tour “This
is made up of the rubble from Sackville Street”. No matter how unpopular the Catholic clergy
becomes in Ireland and I was watching Sky News about how they couldn’t sell their
2,000 tickets to see the Pope. No matter how unpopular the Catholic Clergy is I can’t
imagine how GAA fans would respond to the changing of the name Croke Park; say we don’t
want a ground called for an archbishop. That sense of history is very, very important.
Or how would people respond if Croke Park was to be moved somewhere else? The GAA knows
very well that its place in Irish society is also connected to its place in Irish history.
It is a core part of the GAA brand, which is not to diminish it, it’s also a core
part of its culture. As with the national stadium, GAA clubs across the country use
the naming of grounds and clubs as a way of remembering both historical and religious
figures and William Murphy had that brilliant list of the names of clubs in the 1920s in
the wake of the Rising and during the War of Independence and currently there’s Parnell
Par and the Wild Geese, Thomas Davis and Round Tower, being some of the names that are used
to connect GAA grounds and clubs very clearly to the broader history of the country.
And that’s Croke Park today. I mean that’s quite, that’s quite a journey really. But
there’s the new Nally stand so you keep the name.
Think again of an aerial view of Dublin and some of the expansive areas in which sport
has been played, they tell us about which groups had access to land in some ways in
nineteenth century Ireland. We can see the ways in which formalized sport with its built
facilities were first part of an elite leisure culture. And if we think in particular I suppose
a good example of that is the Phoenix Park. The first recorded cricket match in Ireland
took place in the Phoenix Park in 1792 for a wager of 500 guineas between the Garrison
and “All Ireland”. The future Duke of Wellington, who was then the aide-de-camp
to the Lord Lieutenant, is reputed to have participated on the Irish side. And with that
kind of elite background nevertheless the Phoenix Park is now the most important multi-sports
venue of Dublin. Despite the fact that when people tell the history of it and when you
do the tours they’ll take you to the Zoo but they won’t take you to the sporting
sites. Even though that’s how most people experience the Phoenix Park. So we have this
great variety of things happening: motor racing, speed trials – in terms of the modern world
coming to Ireland sport was one of the things that really did that. The Gordon Bennett motor
race that was held in 1903 in Carlow, Kildare and Laois. They reckon there were about 300
cars in Ireland in 1903 and 350 cars came over on one boat to see the Gordon Bennett
Motor Race. I mean imagine what that does to a society. And they had speed trials a
lot in the Phoenix Park in the early 20th century and the motor racing in 1929 was the
precursor of the Grand Prix and 100,000 people turned up in the Phoenix Park to see that.
So the spectacle of sport and the memory, because we all remember the big sporting moments,
I’d say people from Tipperary will be talking about last Sunday for a long time; but we
remember those moments.
Look at this, another space within Dublin that tells you about I suppose where an elite
played at one point but now there’s more general access. Games had been prohibited
in the college by Trinity’s seventeenth century statues, but to prevent students taking
their exercise outside college walls, the authorities acceded to the demands for sporting
facilities over the next 300 years and now it’s one of the key things that visitors
notice about Dublin when they look over the wall on the 46a and see people playing cricket
and they see the Pavilion. So it’s very much part of Dublin’s heritage and it’s
history. The cricket ground was laid out there in 1842 and, just over ten years later, the
football ground was also laid out in Trinity.
Sports such as cricket and rugby, associated at the outset with English public schools
and the middle classes, spread across Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and we
can see through this, not just the social networks of the landed gentry, the British
army and railway lines, but also the way in which Irish society was becoming increasingly
regulated, and the way it began to adopt sports that were more formalized. What we can see,
at the end of the nineteenth century, is the increasing realization that regulating leisure
practices benefits and facilitates regulation of society itself. And the GAA was part of
that, it was in the game at a particularly important level.
So, it is part philanthropy and part common sense that has some employers sponsor teams
and, in the case of Guinness, this eventually led to the opening of Iveagh Grounds on the
Crumlin Road in 1928. The Brewery had supported the establishment of the St James Gate Athletic
and Cycling Union in 1905 but its activities had been limited by the lack of grounds. The
Union petitioned the Brewery in the years following the First World War a Trust was
formed and eventually the ground was opened by Rupert Guinness in 1928. And at the point
at which it was opened it contained a football field, bowling green, grass courts and a pavilion
with a grandstand. So you can see in many ways they are international sports, they have
a local history, they are as local as Guinness and all the people who worked in the brewery
and were part of that. And sports grounds develop out of lots of different reasons communities
coming together, employers coming together, the patronage of the landed gentry, all of
these different things and each one has a different story to tell.
Just very quickly then to signal some of the cricket, tennis clubs, these aren’t as visible
as the stadiums but they are part of the community and they show an incredible commitment on
the part of people who participate in them. So you have Clontarf and Leinster and these
change and evolve. I suppose that is the difficulty for me really, they change but we haven’t
necessarily recorded it. You know they’ll say in club histories, it’ll say the Victorian
Pavilion was knocked down due to dry rot in whatever year, and then we’ve got this brilliant…and
there’s no photo of the Victorian Pavilion and I could weep really. Or somewhere like
Herbert Park there’s some great examples of this horseshoe throwing area and the croquet
and bowls and tennis, you know all in this part of South Dublin.
Another building and Jimmy Magee apparently mentioned it earlier today, I don’t think
I have a slide of it, no I don’t, sorry, The National Boxing Stadium. It tells it’s
own story. Now boxing is an international sport and fist fighting, pugilism, was one
of the most popular sports I suppose in Ireland in the eighteenth century. It was one of the
first sports to have a written code. But by the nineteenth century it was seen as very
much an unruly, it was difficult to control so the official view of it was that people
who attended fistfights were participating in riotous assemblies. So it became quite
difficult for it until the introduction of the Queensbury Rules in 1867. So it’s actually
an interesting sport in terms of one that was seen as a working class sport, and the
class issue is always there in sport but you know, that working class male aggression,
it was a danger and then actually it was something that if it was controlled and put into productive
use, could actually serve the society. So and we can see that very much then in Ireland,
that shift and we see lots of Catholic Young Men’s Societies build boxing clubs and boxing
halls. And then with the formation of the Free State boxing actually became quite a
central feature as it was seen as a way of training the new police and army. And I suppose
it still has…and Jimmy Magee, I saw him launch the Fighting Irish exhibition in Croke
Park, you know Ireland has had more success in boxing than in any other sport and yet
it isn’t seen as a mainstream sport, and probably isn’t given the recognition it
deserves. Anyway with the formation of the Free State and this recognition that in order
to be healthy and in order to maintain the strength of the State it was necessary to
maintain the physicality of the police and the army, boxing had a particular focus.
In 1936 it was decided to build this National Stadium and Frank Aiken who was the Minister
of Defense as was the Police Commissioner so it has support at a very high level. Ground
from Griffith Barracks was given over to it and it was opened in 1939. And what Jimmy
Magee has said what is the most remarkable thing about it is that this building is the
fact, that the Irish Amateur Boxing Association is the only amateur boxing association in
the world to control, run and own its own National Arena and Stadium.
So you can see you know, from the croquet club in Herbert Park, to the National Boxing
Stadium on South Circular Road, the number of stories that that tells us about the city.
And when they were building the National Stadium it explicitly said in The Irish Times give
money because this is a poor person’s sport, so we need to have money. So there was always
a recognition of those divisions of class within the sporting environment.
Just then as a last example I’ll say something about a very commercial sport, I’m just
throwing out some different kinds of sports that you might not necessarily think about
whenever you think about Dublin’s heritage. Greyhound racing is a twentieth century invention.
It grew in the 1920s and just spread like wildfire from North America, to Britain through
Ireland. Flann O’Brien, writing of it in 1940, said that it ‘seemed to fill perfectly
a void which (in the absence of horse-racing at night) had existed in the spiritual and
intellectual consciousness of the people’. So that desperate need to be able to gamble
in the evenings. But what Greyhound Racing had it was, it was very cheap to develop that’s
why it became so popular because it didn’t need its own grounds. So you could put the
gambling machines, or the gambling areas and the track around existing football grounds
and that’s what they did. And at Shelbourne you’ll see that, you know, it’s seen as
the headquarters of Greyhound Racing in Ireland. And it’s always been very commercially driven
and now I suppose we can see that very much in the way Greyhound Stadiums have developed.
Although there are still some that share tracks, the Galway Greyhound Track shares its grounds.
So there are lots of different ways, so you can see also the Speedway that was quite a
short lived but quite an important part of Shelbourne’s experience in Dublin.
So we can see if we think of the Dalymount Parks, the Croke Parks, Shelbourne, the private
clubs, the Phoenix Park, Trinity College, the Boxing Stadium there are hundreds of stories
of Dublin’s heritage that really we are trying to collect and get as much information
about as we can. And in turn these sites tell us something about the changes in social lives,
economics, attitudes to health, and to leisure. So that the history of sport in Dublin is
also the story of how the city and its people have grown and developed over time.