“Studying Irish Sport” by Alan Bairner PhD from Nicky Getgood on Vimeo.
This speech on Studying Irish Sport was given by Alan Bairner PhD on Wednesday as this month’s Birmingham Irish Heritage event.
It’s a very interesting talk about how sport reflected and exacerbated the divisions in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, made all the more pertinent by recent events. The divisions were patently obvious there because of what was going on, but I’m sure it happens on a much subtler level everywhere. It’s a fascinating insight into why sport is so much more than just a game.
One of the beauties of sport is the extent to which it divides us…we like the tension, we like the rivalry…the trouble is if you set that kind of rivalry within a place that already has political and cultural divisions, sometimes leading to violence, then you have problems.
It is hard to eradicate that kind of passion and tension from sport and so often it is how we identify ourselves and how people identify us. So it’s part of who we are.
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