‘Decolonising Cricket’: The Politicisation of Sport in Ireland from 1882 to 1924
Michael O’Reilly [DU Dissertation]
The dissertation examines the politicisation of cricket in Ireland between 1882 and 1924, charting the sport’s transformation from a celebrated ‘national pastime’ into a marginalised ‘garrison game’. Existing scholarship has variously attributed cricket’s twentieth-century decline to organisational failures, inherent elitism, or the simple emergence of the Gaelic Athletic Association. This study challenges such interpretations, contending that the decisive factor was the politicisation of culture during Ireland’s revolutionary era. As nationalist rhetoric intensified, cultural pastimes were increasingly assessed according to their perceived ‘Irishness’, and cricket was symbolically delegitimised as foreign or ‘West-Briton’.
Drawing on John Lawrence’s Handbook of Cricket in Ireland, Derek Scott’s Cricket Leinster Archive, extensive local newspaper reportage, and Bureau of Military History witness statements, the argument proceeds across three chapters. The first uses regional case studies of Westmeath and Kilkenny to challenge the assumption that cricket collapsed in the 1870s, demonstrating instead that it flourished as a broad, cross-class and predominantly Catholic pastime well into the late nineteenth century. The second analyses the Gaelic Revival and the de-anglicisation movement, showing how the GAA’s rhetoric, exclusionary measures such as ‘The Ban’, and a hostile nationalist press recast cricket as culturally suspect. The third situates the sport within the revolutionary decade of 1912–1923, when vilification escalated into physical attack — from the torching of ‘Big Houses’ to the 1921 College Park shooting that killed the spectator Kathleen Wright.
Ultimately, the dissertation argues that cricket’s decline resulted from a convergence of nationalist propaganda, administrative weakness and political upheaval, rather than from any single cause. By tracing this trajectory, the study illuminates the broader entanglement of sport, identity and politics in the making of modern Ireland.
If anyone would like to read the dissertation in full contact Mikey O’Reilly at mikeyoreilly02@gmail.com
Note: Summary created by AI