Partisan • Patriotic • Internationalist
A slow burning but significant class conflict is unfolding within Cumann Luthchleas Gael [the Gaelic Athletic Association or GAA]. It pits the Association’s corporate-aligned leadership against its grassroots membership, with the flashpoint being a sponsorship deal with the German insurance giant Allianz. This is not merely a disagreement over branding; it […]
Bread and circuses is an often used term to critique modern sports, alluding to the Roman bread dole and the Colosseum games. The idea being that the state funds and pushes these sports onto the workers to distract us from the class issues of the day. This idea is most […]
In the past few months, two important contributions to Irish sports history hit the shelves of bookshops around the country. Labelling these books as Irish sports history is potentially reductive, as both authors make it very clear that the history they write is a shadow of what we would call […]
Formal recognition by Ireland of the Palestinian state is expected to happen before the end of the month. To all intents and purposes, it occurred at Dalymount Park in Dublin on Wednesday, May 15. The first game of a Palestinian national team on European soil was always going to be […]
Born out of genocide and oppression and after centuries of Irish culture, language, indigenous sports, and pastimes had been deliberately eroded by English, later British colonialism, it was no coincidence that many of the GAA’s founding members had links to political organisations, namely the Land League and Republican movements such […]