A positive image at a time of negativity
THE Tailteann Games go back a few years.
Originally held from the sixth century BC until 1168, the year before the Normans came, they were a cultural and sporting festival at the Hill of Tara. The events were supposedly initiated by Lugh Lamhfhada in honour of his mother, Queen Tailte, as burial games.
Dr Paul Rouse of UCD takes up the story. “Obviously that’s mythology, but Irish revivalists of the 1880s took the games on as a symbol of a free Ireland. When the Free State was founded, one of its first decisions was to stage a games to symbolise Ireland had survived colonisation, that this was the Irish race coming together from all over the world.”
Rouse and Mike Cronin, Professor of Irish Studies at Boston College, have now produced a documentary on the Games. “I knew nothing about the Games,” says Cronin. “While researching various events of the twenties I found it was getting pages and pages of newspaper coverage — it drew coverage from the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Times of London, for instance. It had a global reach.
“What piqued my interest was that everything you read about 1923-4 is that Ireland was in a mess after a bloody civil war, and holding the games always struck me as incredible when you consider nowadays how so much angst and aggravation goes into securing the Olympics — London is still six years away and there’s all this will they-won’t they about getting everything ready.
“Yet the Tailteann Games, which catered for 5,000 competitors and hundreds of thousands of spectators, was held in very adverse circumstances.”
The first games were to be held in 1922, but the outbreak of the Civil War meant the American athletes pulled out and the idea was abandoned. When revived two years later, however, the games were a runaway success: there were over 5,000 competitors in disciplines as diverse as hurling and Gaelic football, a full athletics programme, swimming, motor-cycle and airplane racing, art and music competitions.
JJ Walsh TD was the prime mover, as Cronin points out.
“Walsh was the real zealot about the Tailteann Games,” says Cronin. “In a way you need a crazy obsessive to get something like that off the ground, like Baron de Coubertin with the Olympics.
“What happened was that the Government of the time liked the idea — Walsh’s colleagues — but the first games lost around £10,000, and Ernest Blythe said that while that was all well and good, there were better things to spend money on. Walsh pointed out that the French Government had given £1 million to the Paris Olympics the same year, which put £10,000 in perspective.”
In terms of entertainment the public weren’t short-changed. There was an air race between the pilots of the Free State Air Corps, which, as Rouse says, provide rousing entertainment: “They raced around the Phoenix Park, a 12-mile circuit, and it was an amazing spectacle at the time. That ended with a crash (nobody was hurt) but they also staged a mock battle in the Phoenix Park, building a timber castle there which they attacked with plaster-of-Paris bombs.”
The athletes on show were also top notch, even if the facilities were sometimes not quite state of the art.
“For swimming they used one of the ponds in the Phoenix Park,” says Cronin. “They cleaned it out and put proper sides on it so it was like a swimming pool. But it was somewhere animals had been living until that point — I think it’s the one where the hippos live nowadays in Dublin Zoo.”
The infrastructural problems extended beyond the swimming facilities. The only sports ground that was really rebuilt for the Games was Croke Park, which got a grant of £10,000 in 1924. Most of the facilities were ad hoc. The art exhibition was in the RDS, but the billiard competition was held in a Catholic club on O’Connell Street.
However, the makeshift swimming pool offered the swimming champion an odd prefiguring of his future career. America’s Johnny Weissmuller, fresh from a swimming gold medal at the recent Paris Olympics and later to gain fame as Tarzan in the movies, won gold in his chosen discipline. He wasn’t the only Olympian in the competition.
“The Paris Olympics were on just two weeks before, so American athletes like Weissmuller and Harold Osborne, the top Olympian of his time, attended the Tailteann Games,” says Rouse.
“That was a clever move — they were making sure they had the spectacle, they had people out there who were internationally known.”
Osborne had a tough outing against a local star. The documentary shows footage of the high jump competition between him and the great Kildare footballer Larry Stanley.
“Osborne won by using the new jumping method,” says Rouse. “It was a kind of prototype Fosbury flop, while Stanley was just using a normal standing jump. He still managed to jump over six feet two inches, but Osborne beat him by an inch.”
While teams came from the US, Argentina, South Africa and Australia, local athletic festivals were held all over Ireland for the right to compete in the Games. And those local heroes were followed by their own people.
“The railways ran specials and were carrying around 5,000 people into Dublin every day specifically to attend events,” says Cronin.
“The air race alone attracted 100,00 people, and there were 50,000-60,000 for the motorcycle races, while Croke Park was filled for the opening ceremony and the hurling and football games. Mind you, the biggest attendance for the two weeks of the billiard competition was six people.”
No matter: Cronin outlines exactly how the Games served the Government’s purposes.
“The thinking was ‘we want to announce to the world we’re here’, so they fed into the diaspora by having teams of Irish heritage and they were able to say they were reinventing an ancient event. Events like motor cycle and air racing were also able to suggest that the state was a modern one.
“The positive coverage was hugely important for changing the negative story of Ireland — the ten years before that had concentrated on rebellion and war, and now you had something good happening.”
It didn’t last. When the Games’ strongest advocate left Government the decline was swift.
“In 1927 Walsh left politics,” says Cronin. “While he was on the organising committee the Games had lost that direct link to Government. Also, by 1932 the Olympics had gone to Los Angeles — the Games had benefited from the Paris and Amsterdam Olympics, which meant top athletes were nearby, but Irish athletes couldn’t even compete at that year’s Tailteann Games because they’d gone to Los Angeles.
“It was also the year of the Eucharistic Congress, and the Games were crammed into a week at the end of the Congress. Fianna Fáil had come ito power as well, and the Tailteann Games weren’t their gig. There was a Dáil committee appointed to see whether there should be a long-term commitment to the Games, but there’s a sense that the committee’s report was buried. “Walsh was barracking from the sidelines about how good an idea it was, but there was no-one on the inside to carry it on.”
Without political patronage, the Games ended in real terms in 1932. Walsh eventually drifted into supporting Hitler in the Second World War, and the games faded from the public mind in Ireland.
But maybe not everywhere. After all, somewhere in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, a renowned movie star had a bright medal to remind him of the day he took a dip in the hippos’ pool in the Phoenix Park.
The Tailteann Games will be broadcast on TG4 tonight at 9.30pm.
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