The Celtic Times

Exiled Gaels and Irish sporting rebels: part 2

Irish heritage website of the week - Ireland's National Museum

The restoration of the ruined heart of the midlands, St Mel's, and the New Ireland of Auckland

This is a town and a county where man has found God, craic, tax havens and all the leisure the lordly Shannon can throw up. A place where the land has given up live fish to saints - let that be an image for the resourcefulness that’s required ahead. A place with soul.

Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games

Histories and folklore, stories and legend abound about the ancient Gaelic sports of Ireland. These native games have a rich modern history, peopled by famous names and fabled places, from Ring and Mackey, Purcell and Stockwell to Thurles, Croker and Clones on a mid summers day in the Red Hand Province. The four seasons speak of the feats and fame, infamy and lows in the vernacular world of Irish sport. These contests have earned its association a rightful place as a dynamic force in today’s Irish society.

Yet within the quilted patchwork of these indigenous games and memories, seldom is noticed a binding thread, which, when unraveled, takes you to the essence of our sporting traditions. Buried within the modern lore of our national games lay exotic histories which span across the world, from Batman’s Hill in Melbourne and the hallowed walls of Jerusalem to the Bocas Juniors of Diego Maradona in Buenos Aires; from the glittering floodlit nigh time glory of nineteenth century Madison Square Gardens experienced by once starving Irish peasants to the Parisian playing fields of the French Sun King.

One word leaps consistently from these obscured gems of Irish history amidst the tales of valour, struggle and joy – indomitable. Though defeat and victory may define the two sides of a sporting coin, these games, to borrow an iconic quote from an iconic Scouse sporting figure of another code, weren’t about life and death – they were much more than that.