An icy challenge to embrace and enjoy

The dawn of a new year and new resolutions made: A search for new frontiers, new experiences, new things to do. A time to be creative and to dream of exploring new possibilities.

What better way to put practical shape on broad statements of intent than trying a new sport?

If you’re going to go for something new, may as well go the whole hog.

And so it is that in the first week of a new year, you’re on the ice at Dublin’s only outdoor ice-skating rink at the RDS.

That phrase — ‘on the ice’. Predictably enough, it could not have been more appropriate.

It’s five minutes into a 55-minute session and you’re lying in an impossible shape in the middle of an ice rink, like some sort of a woolly-hatted gorilla who has fallen from a tree and whose body has achieved previously impossible angles of rest.

Except there’s no rest. There’s an Ice Marshall attempting to pull you back into an upright position and there’s children whizzing past and their skates are close to your nose.

The first four minutes had been spent edging around the boards along the sides of the rink, as if you were Spiderman heading home from the pub after putting in a solid evening on a high stool.

And then, the first venture out away from the safety of timber brings a fall that challenged the boundaries of anatomical capacity.

Apparently, it is not enough to have seen something on TV to make it possible for you to replicate it. Who knew?

The signs around the rink were good guidelines after all: ‘This is an ice rink. It’s quite likely you will fall! PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES SUSTAINED WHILE ICE SKATING’.

There’s also advice around using your ‘common sense’, not forming trains while skating, wearing helmets and pads, not playing tag, and being prudent around small children.

And there is also a glimmer of hope in those same signs. It emanates from the piece of the sign that reads: ‘Persons, who in the opinion of the Ice Marshals, represent a danger to themselves or others, will be asked to leave the rink and no refund will be offered.’ You wonder what more you’d have to do to be considered a danger to yourself and to others?

Anyway — in a sort of secular miracle — everything settles down after a while and, bit-by-bit you get used to it and it becomes possible to do a lap without ending up prostrate. Slowly, steadily staying upright and moving. All around people are getting used to the ice and learning to skate.

It begs the question as to why there is no permanent ice rink in the city — or in any city on the island. Surely there must be a market for it? And for the sports that are played on ice?

After all, across modern history every time there has been a big freeze in Ireland, people head for any piece of frozen water that they think will hold them. It is a lure to do something different and there is no denying that there is a thrill to flying along on ice.

This is a universal impulse: Everywhere that there is seasonal ice and snow, it is ‘winter sports’ that dominate. The desire of humans to fit their sports into the geography and climate of their lives — and to use both geography and climate to enhance sporting opportunities — is repeatedly demonstrated.

A great example of this is the great freeze of December 1916 in Ireland. The island was mired in a global war and its people attempting to understand the implications of the recent rebellion in Dublin when it was locked in a deep and brutal freeze, the “worst in a generation, or maybe in two”.

Down in Midleton, the Christmas hunt was cancelled. Over in Mayo, the proprietor of the Ballina Picture Palace had bought in the official film of the Battle of the Somme as the centrepiece of his Christmas programme. It was, he said, “marvellous drama” which “brought vividly before the mind all the terrible realities of war”, but the snow and ice and repeated, bitter frosts make travel from country areas treacherous. And the film earned the Ballina Picture Palace nearly no money.

And in the cities, too, there was chaos on the Saturday before Christmas. All of Dublin’s public clocks stopped. The ground was frozen so solidly in Glasnevin Cemetery that only one burial was possible, the gravediggers finally hacking the soil open with pickaxes, but other peopled coffins were put in a vault and stored.

Dublin’s blacksmiths opened early every morning but could not cope with the demand to fix frost knives to the hooves of horses.

The unshod horses slipped and slid and fell off roads and onto pathways. Hills were impossible to manage. Across the city, families were left without milk as daily deliveries were abandoned and fallen horses lay beside pools of milk.

Dublin Corporation was condemned for not sanding or salting as the traffic through the city dwindled and died.

There was invention, however. People with spare socks walked to mass on Sunday morning, wearing them on the outside of their shoes. Women were spotted walking with iron-pointed guide poles, as if they were great explorers heading off into the Arctic morning.

Everywhere there were accidents — more than 300 people were brought to hospital, having fallen on frozen streets. Some of those who were injured were those who were out skating on the canals of the city.

Indeed, all across the country people took to whatever river or canal or lake or pond they could half-trust and walked out onto them. People who had never had the chance before made impromptu skates and taught themselves the basics.

Mostly, it ended well and people remembered for the rest of their lives the joy of skating.

But there was also tragedy. Out at Peamount Sanitorium, near Lucan to the west of Dublin, more than 20 patients skated on a frozen pond in a field, adjoining Burns’ Quarry.

There was fun and laughter and childlike pleasure in the sharp air. Three of the skaters — John Flaherty, James Lynn and Michael Cannon — spun off across the ice. They raced around and ended in a happy embrace.

And then disaster: The skaters fell through the ice, into 12 feet of icy water. And disappeared.

Five others rushed to save them and they, too, ended up in difficulty. Those five were saved only when the remaining patients made a rope of their coats and pulled them to safety.

Later that evening, the pond was dragged and the bodies of the three skaters were recovered. The watch in John Flaherty’s pocket was stuck at 7pm — he was 24, the eldest of the three who drowned.

A similar tragedy was only narrowly averted in Cork when a young girl was pulled from breaking ice by a protestant clergyman.

Such stories emerge every time the waters of Ireland freeze over. People may accept, in a vague way, that these accidents are things that are possible but are things that happen to others.

And the joy of skating is compelling and that overrides the idea of risk. For its part, a modern ice rink is not without risk, but that risk is contained. It is a challenge to embrace and to enjoy.

Paul Rouse is Associate Professor of History at UCD and author of The Hurlers.