Physical Education in Irish Schools, 1900-2000: A History

On the eve of the twenty-first century, physical education was a subject which still remained on the periphery of the curriculum in both primary and second level schools in the Republic of Ireland. In November 1988, Fine Gael politician Jimmy Deenihan, a man who had achieved sporting success as part of the Kerry senior men’s Gaelic football team in a career that spanned from 1973 until 1983, winning five All-Ireland medals amongst numerous other honours, described the subject’s treatment by the Irish government as ‘a national scandal’.¹ Deputy Deenihan was a man with sport close to his heart and was a qualified physical education teacher. He had come through a new system which had been established in the early 1970s for those seeking qualifications in the subject.² The foundation of the National College of Physical Education in Limerick in 1973, the first co-educational centre for training physical education teachers in the Republic of Ireland, had offered much promise.³ In addition, in a frenzy of enthusiasm which had largely dissipated within Irish political circles by the late 1980s, the Irish government had introduced a revised curriculum for primary schools which included a new system of physical education in 1971.⁴ While there were some curricular improvements in the early part of that decade, physical education continued to be neglected and this was laid bare in a number of European surveys carried out in the latter decade of the twentieth ←1 | 2→century as Ireland was regularly shown to be at the bottom of tables related to time allocated to the subject.⁵ Many Irish second level schools did place an emphasis on sporting success, with strong traditions of codes such as rugby, soccer, hurling and Gaelic football developing in numerous schools, but the place of PE in the curriculum was often neglected at the expense of sporting glory.⁶ It also developed an unfortunate reputation as one which was frowned upon by non-specialist teachers and was open to abuse in terms of pupil participation, particularly by students taking final examinations in subjects considered more worthy of academic prowess and more valuable for a future career path. It was not until 2017 that the Department of Education announced that physical education would be piloted as a Leaving Certificate examination subject in a number of secondary schools.⁷

Deputy Deenihan was not the only politician to win All-Ireland medals, but he was one of the few to push for the development of an adequate system of physical education in Irish schools. This reluctance on the government’s part to take physical education seriously contrasted to most other countries in Western Europe. The development of sport in Ireland followed patterns elsewhere to a certain extent, but there were also distinct differences. Christopher Young has noted the unique way in which codified sport grew in Ireland.⁸ In looking at how it developed differently there, he points to the arguments of Richard Holt. Writing in 2009, Holt stated that

British sport claimed proudly to be above politics, but it was permeated with imperial values and class distinctions. French sport was based on the British model but explicitly designed to strengthen France after her defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870. In Germany and more widely in continental Europe more attention was given ←2 | 3→to collective forms of gymnastic exercise than to modern sports. America invented a new national sport [baseball] and turned it into a business.⁹

As Holt has also noted, ‘Ireland picked its way through this maze, rejecting the monotony of mass gymnastics but also refusing to follow the dominant forms of British sport. It adopted amateur values but rejected the social distinctions that went with them.’¹⁰ The Irish public ‘embraced spectator sport but refused the American model of sport as commercial entertainment’ and ‘in doing so Ireland created a unique blend of the traditional and the modern’, with the Gaelic Athletic Association [GAA] emerging, after a rocky start, as the most successfully organised sporting organisation in Ireland by the early twenty-first century.¹¹ Efforts to develop a satisfactory system of physical education ebbed and flowed over the course of the twentieth century, with the Irish government generally reluctant to invest heavily in sport for much of that period following partition in 1921.¹²

This book explores a major aspect of the daily school lives of children and teenagers who grew up in twentieth-century Ireland which has not yet received a full academic assessment.¹³ Set within the period from 1900 until ←3 | 4→2000, it is the first detailed study of the history of physical education across Ireland and examines why Independent Ireland’s governments neglected its place within primary and secondary schools for the greater part of the twentieth century. The state of PE in Ireland in the early twentieth century is assessed, and the factors which fostered, or discouraged, the implementation of this subject within Irish schools are examined. The reasons why Irish governments failed to establish PE as a compulsory subject within Irish schools until the 1970s are investigated, and a comparison of wider international trends, and more closer to home, with Northern Ireland, which is examined through separate chapters, is given. How PE became integrated into Irish schools and became accepted as a genuine subject worthy of teaching is established through an investigation of the role of the government, teacher-training bodies and educationalists in its development. This book also examines some of the educational experiences of retired and active primary and second level school teachers from the late 1940s until the early 2000s.

This monograph makes a significant contribution to the historiography of education while adding to the increasing range of academic writing on the development of sport in Ireland. It is also highly significant in terms of contemporary European Commission debates about obesity, health care, socio-economic accessibility and state-saving and whether or not sufficient time is being devoted to physical education within schools.¹⁴ While naturally there is some overlap with school sports and games, and these have been assessed at various stages throughout, it is important to state that this is not a history of school competitions. As the main focus is on mainstream primary and second level schools, it is also not intended to examine PE within Reformatory or Industrial Schools in this monograph. A dearth of space also means that the development of PE in Special schools is similarly not given the analysis merited, but it is intended to return to research this more fully at a later stage.