My first memory of going to a “big match” in a proper stadium is St Patrick’s Day 1976. I went with thousands of locals from around Dun Laoghaire to see CBC Monkstown in the Schools’ Senior Cup at Lansdowne Road.
CBC, the local school, was not a posh school but it was a rugby school. Back then, the “known world” to my nine-year-old self was the coastal stretch from Blackrock baths as far as the ramparts in Dalkey. It was a rugby and football place. By football I mean soccer, not GAA. And nobody played hurling here.
Had you told us that a Dalkey team would be All Ireland hurling champions, we’d have laughed at you.
For us, hurling was a dangerous game played by fellas from the country. It was the foreign game. Football was our first love and rugby came second. While some of us may have played GAA in national school, GAA’s roots were not deep here. Sure it was always played here, but for us, the FA Cup was a much bigger day than the All Ireland football final. Whatever about football, hurling never figured. Even most national schools, run by GAA-mad teachers, didn’t attempt hurling with only a tiny minority daring to champion the game. These lads were usually the sons of hurling obsessives who brought hurling up to Dublin when they left home to find work in the capital.
In fact, you could say that back then sport was genetic. You played what your dad played. The only devotee of GAA on our road was one Des Cahill who tried repeatedly to convert us from soccer and rugby to GAA with no success. Des’ father was the principal of the local national school.
In the early 1950s, my dad co-founded Dalkey United, and so my sport was soccer. Both cultures lived in harmony side by side but soccer was king.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Dalkey United shared its ground with a small GAA club called Cuala. Dalkey United was the senior partner in the shared ground. In fact, Dalkey — the soccer club — actually “gave” Cuala the extra pitch beside it out of sympathy for the GAA club, which in the 1960s didn’t have a permanent pitch.
Fast-forward to today and Cuala, the small GAA club of my memory, is ubiquitous in this former rugby and soccer stronghold. There are Cuala red and white flags everywhere from Monkstown to Dalkey. Cuala is the first Dublin club to reach the All Ireland hurling club final and what’s more, Cuala are now champions! There is a real buzz around the club getting into the final. People who wouldn’t know one end of a sliothar from the other are talking hurling. It’s a brilliant success story. And guess who is a big wig at the Cuala GAA club? Well, the very same Des Cahill, RTE’s ballroom dancer, who failed to convert us to GAA in the ’80s.
But how did this happen? How did hurling get a toehold in deepest south Dublin? How did the national school I went to, Johnstown National School, which didn’t have a hurling team in the 1970s and 80s, end up providing seven of the first XV for the Cuala team that played in Croke park yesterday?
More interestingly, from a cultural perspective, how did the middle class in this neck of the woods end up having to make a choice between the RDS Stadium and Croke Park on St Patrick’s Day?
Yesterday’s choice was between the Rugby Schools’ Senior Cup, the traditional middle class St Patrick’s game in this part of the world — Blackrock versus Belvedere — and the new middle class sport here of hurling and the club final between Dalkey’s Cuala and Balyea of Clare.
I am interested in the economic and demographic forces that have played out in coastal south Dublin in the past few decades. These forces have changed the cultural composition of the population and have manifested in the emergence of hurling as a significant cultural force here.
To understand this, we have to understand that the last two or three decades have been a time of enormous social upheaval in middle class Dublin. The main force has been the emergence of a rural professional class that has come to dominate Dublin’s professions.
These upwardly socially mobile punters from the country are the major winners in the Irish professional meritocracies of medicine, the higher levels of the civil service, the law, accountancy and banking. The failed bankers of Ireland were dismissed as “not very bright rugby players” in the boom, but if you care to look forensically at the backgrounds of the major players in the banking collapse, you will see far more fingerprints of Christian Brothers’ boys on the make, with corporate boxes in Croke Park, then the more-easy-to-lampoon south-side rugby jocks.
So what’s going on?
Like all cultural phenomena, the rise in hurling in alien territory has a major economic dimension to it. The main economic factor behind rise in hurling in coastal south Dublin can be traced to the 1960s and free education.
The class that benefitted most from free education in the 1960s and 1970s was not, as you might imagine, the industrial working class, but the small farming class. It is their grandsons now playing hurling in south Dublin.
A few years ago, two economists — Damian Hannan and Patrick Commins — wrote a paper called the ‘The Significance of Small Scale Landholders in Ireland’s Socio-Economic Transformation’. If anyone wants to understand the economics and the social patchwork that is Ireland today and why south Dublin plays hurling, this paper is invaluable.
The writers chart the extraordinary success of the sons of Ireland’s small farmers in the social revolution of the past few decades.
Mr Hannan and Mr Commins found, astonishingly, that the single most important determinant, on a county-by-county basis, of a county’s educational achievement in the 1960s and 1970s was the number of small farmers in each county. This is quite extraordinary and unique to this country.
The more small farmers in a county, the better educated the children were and the better they did in their Leaving Cert. They even found that the single most successful subsection of the Irish population was the children of small farmers in East Galway, the home of hurling in Connacht.
Compared to their urban, working-class counterparts, 30pc more children of small farmers did the Leaving Cert and 50pc more went on to third-level education.
They turned into the teacher aristocracy, bringing with them to Dublin a love of the GAA, squeezeboxes and Farah slacks. Their success in education also catapulted them into the public service in great numbers. Now they are retiring as the best-paid public servants in Europe. Their kids have gone up a notch on the social hierarchy to become doctors and lawyers. Some of them have adopted rugby, the sport of the old hierarchy, but they have also kept their allegiance to the GAA.
So as they bought houses in the coastal parts of south Dublin, they joined GAA clubs, not rugby or soccer clubs, leading to an explosion of GAA in this part of the world. As is so often the case in economics, the law of unintended consequences plays out. The unintended consequence of free education and related upward mobility is that Dalkey are All-Ireland champions. There won’t be a cow milked in Dalkey tonight…
Subscribe
Rugby
In an older time I went to the same school as Paul O’Connor did many many years before . In those times some classmates of mine who’s family were steeped in rugby tradition in Limerick would often bring up the subject to play rugby in the school only to face ‘the leather’ and a lot of admonition and ridicule.
Since then this same school are now rugby champions.
Napoleon Wars were also unintended consequences as to why Dalkey even existed .
The name Dalkey has primal West African origins meaning ‘ safe place for boats to land’.
It is no wonder why the British were worried and built Martello Tower only to be followed by the soldering elite endorsed by Hugh Gough and Admiral to Queen Victoria and a county Limerick man.
Nice article. “The more small farmers in a county, the better educated the children were and the better they did in their Leaving Cert” You didn’t go far enough here. If you knew how hard it was for to make a living off a small farm you would understand the do or die intensity to give the kids a good education. The other thing not elaborated on was that for many of the small farmers in the 50’s it was only 70 or so years since the land leaguers were on the go. As difficult a life as it was… Read more »
The question I ask is why did not the native Dublinese fill the void with their free education and why was it that the cultchies were shown to do that only ? And why are the most in elevated civil service all hail from Kerry .
Not many gay men with dogs wearing waistcoats to be seen in Dalkey lately. Not a GAA thing. Shame.
Not too sure what to say – given that I have completely given up spectator sports. [ And it dovetails nicely with my decision to stop watching television ]. Therefore I comment on the sports result. Eamon Gilmore and his Missus are from East Galway, and are part of that demographic. President Higgins grew up on a small farm in County Limerick, launched a career in academia, and later politics. Bertie Ahern’s parents came from County Cork, and he studied in the London School of Economics. Actually, hold on….he didn’t – that was just one of those claims. Mary Harney… Read more »
Could it be rural brains and brawn overcoming urban inertia? Purely from personal observation over the years. I notice that country folk are generally fitter and stronger than their urban relatives as their occupation involves a lot of physical activity. Rural kids are and have to be problem solvers. Working a farm is a complex occupation full of analysis and decision making during the days. Because of this, far from being country bumkins, country folk develop a superior more well rounded IQ. Put these folks into the urban environment and their physical robustness, general good health, and developed problem solving… Read more »
The kids from the Atlantic Counties with excellent college marks, deserve credit for making Ireland more meritocratic.
Unfortunately, since the mid 1990s, there has been a relentless puch to make Ireland less meritocratic. And this will get even worse in the coming years.
The harder you work, the more you do – the more you get scammed by an institutional morass, that is out of control.
A hurling team from Dalkey in an all Ireland Final is a strange phenomenon. I was out in Dalkey on Friday afternoon where the place was decked out with flags and there was a palpable sense of excitement on the streets. I asked a passer-by what was going on, to be told that Cula (Cuala),a local hurling team, were playing in Croke Park, What! Dalkey, playing hurling – I being from Kilkenny,was really taken aback. All credit to them and to the town for the level of support on display. What most people don’t realize about kilkenny hurling is that… Read more »
Of course, the real power, is with those with the big money, and access to political party machines.
Perhaps the greatest disappointment in the last 40 years, has been the non-arrival of another option in retail banking to circumvent the Duopoly or AIB/BoI.
I think that the opportunity has passed. We will be stuck with two useless, rotten monoliths, run predominantly by rugger boys operating as a club.
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2017/0319/860849-bells/
So if we can’t persuade you that you’re wrong we’re going to shout you down.
There’s been a lot of stuff about bullying in the media over the last few years.
A new concept PC bullying perhaps.
This is useful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-y2aqYwOQ0 It is a critique of UK public policy planning, in 2012. However, it is apparent many of the same flaws are relevant TODAY in public policy planning here. In his critique of US policy planning, he omits the issue of labour force participation rates, which make official unemployment statistics look ridiculous. Of particular relvance to Ireland, is the scale of TOTAL debt. We are NUMBER 1 on debt. Even worse than Japan !!!! [ How many of the Quangocrats on absurd salaries to produce NOTHING of value, are willing to discuss this, on the national propaganda… Read more »
Concerning Sturgeon, and her demonstrated enthusiasm for More EU rope….. it all seems to be unravelling. http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/britain/sturgeon-abandons-plan-for-scotland-to-stay-in-eu-35536090.html This could change if a leftist regime takes power in Spain, but even then, there will be concerns in Belgium, which will view Scotland getting back in as a nightmare scenario, in reference to it’s own tax harvest of Flemish speakers. By the way Myers is correct in his assessment of NI. NI is still deeply sectarian. That sectarianism is mirrored in Scotland, but not in England or Wales. That is something that the quangocrats might wish to think about, in their eagerness… Read more »
I came across Cuala ten years ago when my son was playing in a tournament there and I couldn’t believe it, the size of the place and the number of children. And I couldn’t belive it was in this part of Ireland that must be the closest thing on the island to England. It was a shame that these upwardly mobile country people who came to Dublin dropped their traditional values and adopted the mad ideas that now pass for conventional wisdom. Of course D4 has long been a mental or spiritual concept rather than a geographical area so they… Read more »
The old generation used to wear their Sunday best and try and fit in with the rugger buggers. The newer generation doesn’t care and Irish sports are more fashionable as a result.
Rugby is for toffs, GAA is for everyone. Whether it’s true or not that is the perception and not many want to be seen as a toff.
Glad hurling moved to Dublin.
Hasn’t everything?
Time for the rest of Ireland to turn out the lights?
Dublin is a city state and in the league of city states it ranks 15th in the world!
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/datablog/2014/may/12/world-most-powerful-cities-data
We desperately need radical interventions to restore/revitalise/reinvigorate the Ireland that is not Dublin…
Imagine:
Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford having comparable demographics to Dublin?
And rudimentary regional planning?
And logical urban planning?
And connected public transport?
Oh the places we’d go?
What kind of Government closes rural post offices/ Garda stations/ and annihilates rural Ireland ? Dublin is not Ireland. The Western seaboard has everything and is given nothing, compared to Dublin. Why can’t our young people stay on the land, if they want. There must be massive investment in Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Kerry etc. no lights out. The cost of living for our young teachers/ nurses/ Gardai in Dublin is way too high. None of us had to save 60k or it’s equivalent to buy a house somewhere in Dublin. I’m sick of all the Dublin “progress” and the (true)… Read more »
Cuala have been around a long time.
As a kid “U12” I played against their football team and they were pretty useful even then – that’s more than 50 years ago – early 60s.
Mind you a lot dubs my age (I’m not a dub btw) has at least one parent or grandparent who was from the country.
Tallaght was a country village back then, Clondalkin too.
Sorry for the ramble.
Talking of success and what sports can teach.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” … Michael Jordan
While we are all talking about the latest sports results and sipping on a bowl of soup the economy is headed down the toilet. The great recession is morphed into the false recovery, (remember the green shoots years back) the greatest depression is uncoiling.
Take care, be prepared.
http://usawatchdog.com/great-recession-headed-for-greater-depression-michael-pento/
What is the reason why Brian O’ Driscoll says that we cannot be as good as the All Blacks unless we give up the GAA ?
Ta Martin mcGuinness os Cuige “Setanta –> Cuchulain” [ an iománaí don sliotar is mó ach amháin Christy Ring ] tar éis bháis inniu ;
Le sin, feach ar seo os Aanirfan.blogspot.com innue foilsithe direach tar eis chluaiseant bas Martin McGuinness.
Bionn Aanirfan maith go leor mar gheall an tUaisceart.
Da bhri sin, is ceart go léireoidh againn ar an airteagal seo.
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2017/01/kincora-cia-mossad-mi5-mi6-bigger.html#comment-form
Just mentioning in passing.
https://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2017/03/21/fasco-communist-globalist-criminal-david-rockefeller-finally-exits-the-world-after-101-years.html
https://wearechange.org/top-5-reasons-david-rockefeller-wont-missed/ 1. Founder Of Several Secret Societies David Rockefeller was a huge part of virtually every secret society of ultra rich on the planet. He was not just a member of the Council Of Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group – he was reportedly the founder. Through these secret societies and others like the occult Bohemian Grove club, Rockefeller conspired to control the media and governments around the world to establish his goal towards a one world government, even once thanking the media for it’s complicity. 2. Population control Stabilizing the population’ – as Rockefeller called it… Read more »
https://needtoknow.news/2017/03/the-dreadful-history-of-the-rockefellers-and-their-curse-on-humanity/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySnk-f2ThpE
http://www.michaelsavage.wnd.com/2017/03/michael-savage-newsletter-a-bearded-man-ran-over-people-in-london/
G.A.A. in reality = GARDA ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION Garda ==> Garda-Landlords / Landlord-Gardai Ultimately, the purpose of the Garda force is to protect / guard the Elite in Irish State ; The chief cultural sport that the Elite play is Rugby. Of course, in recent decades the Garda force have manipulated themselves into being members of the Elite. The sport / combat that the Garda-Landlords / Landlord-Gardai in the main play / assail is Gaelic FOOTBALL.[ or “Gaah” Football ]. This fact explains much of the thuggery common to Gaelic Football / Gaah Football. It is best to boycott Gaelic Football… Read more »
Ref. Henry Makow’s website March 16, 2017 Canada-EU “Trade Deal” Contains a Gift for the Rothschilds Ostensibly a trade deal, Bill C-30 will forever prevents the Bank of Canada from creating debt free currency. Dear Senators, I suspect by now you have received emails and letters about the many problems that are an inherent part of Bill C-30 for the implementation of the CETA agreement between Canada and Europe. To say there are problems with the agreement are an understatement but I would like to focus on just one aspect of the agreement and it relates to the Bank of… Read more »
I trust that “Cast Iron Guarantees from France” Me-hole Martin is all for this declaration.
Highlight all of Url > Right-Click > Select “Go to … [ Url ]
uk.reuters.com/article/uk-eu-summit-declaration-analysis-idUKKBN16R0TZ
But, Reuters is always a very suspect source.
The being of The Dreadful Few, of course.
bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-03-23/poland-talks-tough-against-multi-speed-eu-ahead-of-rome-summit
intellinews.com/poland-isolated-again-as-it-threatens-to-block-eu-declaration-118217/
telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/24/brexit-failure-divided-european-union-admits-jean-claude-juncker/
Meanwhile, as all minds are occupied by the rugby/GAA circuses. European finances and politics march to great changes. http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1101357242253&ca=8972a3c9-e48c-4c21-8559-ea956bbb3cb9 “Well, just this morning, a whopping €233 billion of such “TLTRO” loans were handed out, to 474 supposedly “solvent” European banks. This time, with a four-year term and said 0% interest rate; in a blockbuster “auction” nearly double the Street’s expectations. In other words, the European banking sector is as vulnerable now as at the height of the 2008 Crisis; as epitomized by the world’s most systematically dangerous institution,” Deutsche Bank – which this week, was forced to sell €8 billion… Read more »
A weekly news wrap up you will certainly not hear from the MSM.
It is worth 31 mins. of your time to remain informed.
http://usawatchdog.com/weekly-news-wrap-up-3-24-17-greg-hunter/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/robson-pellerin/the-environment-a-true-story?ref=thanks_share
Here is something you can do something about. Doing something is empowering. Help to tell the truth about climate change and throw a spanner in the works of the one world globalist dictators.
new digital trend in china reported.
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/03/23/a-new-trend-emerges-digital-gold-gifting-gains-popularity-in-china/
Further to the theory that “the G.A.A. [ Garda Athletic Association ] replaced Rugby for Middle-Class of Irish State”, it is acknowledged by the leading authoritative scholars that Holocaustianity has replaced Christianity as reverence in the Western world since the 1970’s. And, already for quite a while, blasphemy [ including “mocking” ] of Christ is all the fashion ; e.g.’s Pussy Riot doing so in Russia Sarah Silverman doing so on main-stream TV Google.com results for search terms ; Sarah Silverman AND Christ google.com/?gws_rd=cr&ei=mXDWWLi0F4zZvATO6rGICw&fg=1#q=Sarah+Silverman+AND+Christ&* Google.com results for search terms ; Sarah Silverman AND Christ AND youtube Sarah Silverman AND Christ… Read more »
TBH I’m not too worried about about the EU and Brexit. JC Junker has said that Brexit is already a failure. Anyone that out of touch with reality is in for a major surprise but will it come soon to save us. The EU and/or Juncker would like to stitch the brits up and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process. He’s saying, publicly, the exact opposite. His sort of attitude will walk Ireland into the manure – the it’ll be alright on the night, we’ll look after you nonsense (sign here please) is not to be trusted.… Read more »