More than a game: rugby and association football in Ireland, 1921-1990

This is the first integrated study of rugby and association football in Ireland on an all-island basis. It builds on important individual regional studies of those games over the past decade. In the first strand this study adds significantly to the study of the administrative identity and development of the relevant governing bodies, 1922-90, with a particular focus on their response to partition and how those bodies in Ulster/Northern Ireland identified themselves and their jurisdiction. It considers how the northern bodies interacted with their counterparts in the area that became the Republic of Ireland; in the case of the Irish Football Association, in particular, this was influenced by their continued attachment to the other football associations in the United Kingdom. In its second strand this study measures and maps the prevalence of rugby and football clubs in Ireland between 1922 and 1990, considering this to be the most viable measurement of the health of the games across space and time. Having mapped the temporal and spatial trends in club affiliations and sporting activity, the study considers the wider political, social, economic and cultural factors affecting those temporal and spatial trends and utilises ArcGIS mapping software in presenting those relationships between sport and society to the reader. In its third and final strand this study breaks new ground in the study of sport-related violence in Ireland, albeit it is an area in which only football has a significant, if until-now underexplored, history of that phenomenon at its games across Ireland, north and south. It sheds a light on the complex interactions between an often-neglected component of Irish sporting life, the spectator, with that game. Combined, the story of the administrative, club and spectator bases to rugby and football suggests that, in both parts of post-partition, they represent more than a game