Book extract from Blood & Thunder: 'Limerick rugby is different'

LIAM O'Callaghan shares a recent extract from his new book Blood & Thunder. O'Callaghan talks about how Limerick rugby is different to Dublin and Cork. 

It HAS long been said that Limerick rugby is different. Compared to Dublin and Cork, for example, where the game is associated with fee-paying schools and the better-off middle classes, rugby in Limerick has traditionally been the game of the ordinary man and woman. This is no myth.

Rugby in Limerick took a divergent path from the rest of Ireland as far back as the mid-1880s. In 1884, Garryowen FC was founded. In contrast to most other clubs in Ireland – then dominated by wealthy Protestants – Garryowen had Catholics and nationalists among its most influential members from the beginning.

The club took it upon itself to nurture junior rugby in the city by organizing tournaments among the small clubs that began to crop up in the streets and laneways of the inner city (‘junior’ in this context being the adult rank below ‘senior’).

Swarming with Clubs

THIS led to a remarkable expansion of the game. ‘Limerick is literally swarming with clubs’, the newspaper Sport joyfully reported in 1886 before announcing the founding of a new club, Kincora FC.

The club secretary claimed the club had a membership of seventy-nine and ‘some of the best halves and quarters in Munster’.
Quite how the fledgling club achieved such rude health so early in its history is unclear, though it seems plausible that the secretary, Walter Brazier, got carried away at the prospect of coverage in the national press and overstated the club’s progress.
It was certainly the case, however, that Kincora soon became one of the finest junior clubs in Limerick. Brazier, a Catholic clerk who later worked for the city council, and William Lamb Stokes, a Protestant merchant and Garryowen official, organized a junior rugby tournament in Limerick in 1887.

The tournament had one strikingly unusual feature: the fixtures took place on Sundays – the only guaranteed day off for the working classes. Jack O’Sullivan and Jack Macaulay – two Garryowen men who would later play for Ireland – were also heavily involved in organizing the tournament.

Kincora FC had taken the precaution in 1886 of writing to the IRFU asking if Sunday rugby was allowed.
The Union, in turn, passed a motion ‘That there is nothing in the rules of the Irish Football Union which prevents clubs from playing one day more than another.’

Most IRFU officials were Protestants who, irrespective of denomination, would have been encouraged to observe the Sabbath; and Sunday sports, as we will see, were bitterly opposed by many Protestants.

The Catholic Church was much more relaxed about these matters. Jacques McCarthy, a Catholic, was responsible for the motion that permitted Sunday rugby – though its seconder, J. R. Blood, was Protestant.

With the GAA in disarray in Limerick from 1887, Sunday rugby continued to prosper. ‘To deal with the Sunday clubs in Limerick would be to write a history’, Sport claimed in 1887; ‘– they are simply innumerable.

Every youth from five summers upwards has his club and his colours’. It is difficult to specify exactly the number of clubs that emerged, though a claim that there were ‘more than two dozen’ seems excessive. Around half that number seems more plausible.

None of them was affiliated to the IRFU, meaning that a precise record of their comings and goings does not exist.

Precarious Existence

Many of these clubs had a precarious existence, their vitality often dependent on the efforts of one or two eager officials.
The loss of key men to emigration or other commitments could lead to a club’s demise, or force mergers. Kincora, having attained senior status in 1888, suffered a chastening defeat to Queen’s College Cork in their first competitive outing at that level.

Rather than return to the junior ranks, Kincora amalgamated with Limerick Football Club in 1889, taking the name of the latter.
Though some clubs clearly struggled to survive, others prospered. Each junior club tended to be associated with a particular locality in the city, and intense rivalries soon emerged.

One fixture in the 1887 Sunday tournament attracted over a thousand spectators to the field at the rear of the Tait’s clothing factory. The tournament was held again in 1888.

Transfield Cup

From 1895, a new competition, the Transfield Cup, became the focal point of junior rugby. Two of Limerick’s greatest clubs, Shannon and Young Munster, started life on the rough-and-tumble of the Sunday junior rugby circuit.

Junior rugby took the game in Limerick down its unique path, and reflected the demographics of the game in the city.
The fact that they played on Sundays means it is likely that most of the players involved were Catholic.

It also suggests that these players worked on Saturdays, the day when rugby matches typically took place in Ireland.

Sunday Rugby

Though this does not necessarily imply that they were from working-class backgrounds, it probably means that they occupied a lower rung of the socioeconomic ladder than the footballers of Dublin and Cork.

The city’s Sunday rugby tradition had its greatest moment, perhaps, in 1928, when Young Munster won the Bateman Cup (an All-Ireland tournament played among each of the provincial champions).

The club had not long graduated from the junior to the senior ranks, and caused a sensation by defeating a star-studded Lansdowne team in the final.

With a team that included semi-skilled and unskilled workers – all of whom first encountered rugby at junior level on Sundays, Young Munster’s victory, according to one newspaper ‘was all the more creditable when one considers that the majority of their players are drawn from a class which has neither the time nor the opportunities for extensive practice’.

Only two members of the winning team – Danaher Sheahan and Ter Casey – were rewarded with international honours.
In 1929 the IRFU began to make strenuous, but unsuccessful attempts to ban Sunday rugby (the Union was worried that Sunday rugby lowered the game’s tone). Limerick clubs simply ignored the ban.

They were not going to be dictated to by the rugby establishment in Dublin.”

Blood & Thunder: Rugby and Irish Life: A History by Limerick man Liam O’Callaghan is published by Sandycove and is in bookshops now. Author Liam O'Callaghan is a social historian at Liverpool Hope University, specializing in the social history of modern Ireland, with a focus on sport