Playing for Ireland in foreign fields: the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish nationalism in America

With a few exceptions, the existing scholarship on the relationship between the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Irish nationalism has largely overlooked the experiences of the Irish diaspora. This article seeks to redress this neglect by exploring the ways in which Irish nationalism has historically been produced, reproduced and contested amongst members of the GAA in the USA. In light of their status as focal points of Irish immigration and as centres of Gaelic games activity in America, the article focuses on the cities of Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It draws on extensive archival and interview research conducted in each locale since 2000 and reveals that while intensely politicised and ethnic versions of Irish nationalism have historically weaved their way through US branches of the Association, since the mid-1990s there have been a number of socio-economic and political developments both in Ireland and in America that have seen the GAA begin to articulate a more civic, less ethnically bounded version of Irish nationalism.     

Radical politics and gay activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1974–1990

The recent success of the Marriage Equality campaign in the Republic of Ireland has highlighted the underdeveloped historiography of the Irish LGBT movement. Current historical narratives of the movement focus almost exclusively on David Norris’ legislative campaign, an initiative that was criticised by contemporary activists for isolating other voices in the community, such as those of feminist, socialists and republicans. The present study examines the influence of radical politics in the early movement for gay rights through oral history and documents from the Irish Queer Archive. In doing so, the study seeks to illuminate the historical darkness surrounding the movement’s emergence in the early 1970s and a period of demobilisation in the late 1980s, a trajectory that has been occluded in narratives that conclude with the 1993 decriminalisation of male homosexuality. The study argues that the movement was marked throughout its history by a lack of homogeneity and the persistence of internal conflicts.