‘A Youth Tainted with the Deadly Poison of Anglicism’? Sport and Childhood in the Irish Independence Period

Abstract

Research into the history of sport and childhood in Ireland remains embryonic. In this study, McElligott explores how developments in the relationship between sport and children in contemporary Britain both heavily influenced and stimulated strong reaction in Ireland. Various organisations would now look to formal sport to project the values they wished to incubate among Irish society’s youth. McElligott investigates how schools, religious and lay youth movements, nationalist bodies and Irish sporting associations used sport as a means of appropriating the Irish child in the decades surrounding the creation of the Free State and the political partition of Ireland.