Page 31 - Garda Journal Summer 2019

HISTORY | John McAlery
team of local rugby players billed as ‘Belfast FC’ played another visiting Scottish team, Lenzie, and lost 3–5. A few days later teams representing Ulster and Queen’s College, Belfast, drew 3–3.
The first Irish association club, Cliftonville, was formed in September, and Caledonian returned to Belfast in October to defeat the new club 9–1. Other clubs soon formed in Belfast, and that first season of association rules in Ireland saw eight clubs play the new code, including two from outside Belfast: Moyola Park, Co. Londonderry, and Banbridge Academy, Co. Down. Four new teams, all from Belfast, were active in the 1880–1 season, and significantly these included three workplace teams: Oldpark, Distillery and Avoniel, formed respectively by workers at the Oldpark Printworks, the Royal Irish Distilleries and builders constructing the Avoniel Distillery. These new clubs represented the future working-class character of Irish soccer.
A close relationship with Scottish football was evident. As well as Caledonian, there were visits from five other Scottish teams during the first two seasons, and in January 1880 Cliftonville became the first Irish club to play a match outside Ireland, journeying to Glasgow to play a return match against Caledonian. Scottish migrants were also involved in establishing each of the three workplace teams mentioned above.
On 18 November 1880, at the invitation of Cliftonville, seven clubs met and formed the Irish Football Association to organise, govern and promote the association game in Ireland. The Scottish FA rules were adopted, and soon the fledgling association would receive from the Scottish FA a £5 subscription towards the cost of procuring the Irish Football Association Challenge Cup. McAlery was elected as the first secretary.
The ‘Irish Cup’, organised on the same knockout basis as the FA Cup and Scottish Cup, began in February and Moyola Park were the surprise first winners in April 1881. An Irish international team was fielded for the first time in 1882, and later in the same year the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh associations founded the International Football Association Board.
ELSEWHERE IN IRELAND
The successful establishment of association football in Belfast and its subsequent growth from that centre has meant that until recently little attention has been paid to contemporary activity elsewhere in Ireland. New research, however, has revealed that association football was being played in other parts of Ireland, contemporaneously with, and independently of, developments in Ulster but without the same success.
In addition to the 1877 match in County Cork, an association football scene existed in Sligo from 1879 until at least 1882, and there is evidence of possible matches being played in Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, in 1878 and in Tullamore, King’s County, in 1879.
Two teams drawn from the Sligo Foot Ball Club (presumably a club originally established to play football under rugby or its own rules) played an
association match in Sligo on 17 March 1879, and association matches involving this and other clubs were played regularly until 1882.
In November 1878 an association match between a local team called Beverley Rovers and a team from the town’s military garrison was advertised in Mullingar; there is no record of the match’s taking place, but it is possible that it proceeded unreported. In October 1879 the Northern Whig reported that ‘at St Stanislaus College, Tullamore, there has been a good team organised to play Association Rules, and who are anxious for a few matches’.
This followed the ‘annual match’ between the College and Tullamore FC on 18 October, which the College won by ‘two goals to one’—perhaps an indication that it had been played according to association rules (although it is also possible that the goals referred to were converted tries under rugby rules). St Stanislaus was listed the following year in the Irish Football Annual as an association club. These developments were all independent of each other and unconnected to contemporary events in Belfast.
Moyola Park, Co. Derry, surprise first winners of the IFA Challenge Cup in1880–1, when they beat Cliftonville 1–0 in the final.
(British Library)
CONCLUSION
The origins of association football in Ireland are more complex than the traditional foundation story centred on the heroic endeavours of John McAlery.
It is now without doubt that football under association rules was played in Ireland before 1878 and that McAlery was not solely responsible for its introduction.
Martin Moore is an independent sports history researcher from Belfast.
FURTHER READING
P.I. Gunning, ‘Association football in the Shamrock Shire’s Hy Brasil: the “Socker” code in Connacht, 1879– 1906’, Soccer & Society 18 (2017).
M. Moore, ‘The origins of association football in Ireland, 1875–1880: a reappraisal’, Sport in History 37 (2017). D. Toms, Soccer in Munster: a social history, 1877–1937 (Cork, 2015).
GARDA JOURNAL 31