This Saturday (January 14th) Dalymount Park, specifically the Member’s Bar, will host a League of Ireland football history conference to mark the publiction by Routledge of it’s new academic collection The League of Ireland: An Historical and Contemporary Assessment which is edited by Conor Curran.

I have a paper included which looks at several case studies highlighting the complex patterns of migration of players into the League of Ireland over the last century. The conference is free to attend and you might even get a cup of tea and a sandwich.

Conference schedule

• 9.30-10 am: Conor Curran (Trinity College Dublin) – Introductory Comments
• 10-10.30 am: Julien Clenet (University College Dublin) – Association football in Dublin in the late Nineteenth Century: an Overview
• 10.30-11 am: Cormac Moore (Dublin City Council Resident Historian) – The Formation of the Football Association of Ireland
• 11.00-11.30 am: Aaron Ó Maonaigh (Independent Scholar) – ‘In the Ráth Camp, rugby or soccer would not have been tolerated by the prisoners’: Irish Civil War attitudes to sport, 1922–23.
• 11.30-12 pm: Conor Heffernan (Ulster University) and Joseph Taylor (University College Dublin) – A League is Born: The League of Ireland’s Inaugural Season, 1921–1922
• 12-12.30 pm: Conor Curran (Trinity College Dublin) – The cross-border movement of Republic of Ireland-born footballers to Northern Ireland clubs, 1922–2000
• 12.30-1.30 pm Lunch
• 1.30-2 pm: Gerry Farrell (Independent Scholar) – One-way traffic? – 100 years of soldiers, mercenaries, refugees and other footballing migrants in the League of Ireland, 1920 -2020
• 2-2.30 pm: Tom Hunt (Independent Scholar) – Ireland’s Footballers at the 1924 and 1948 Olympic Games: Compromised by the Politics of Sport
• 2.30-3 pm: Michael Kielty (Dublin Business School): Peter J. Peel: The Soccer King
• 3-3.30 pm: Ken McCue (De Montfort University) – Who’s SARI now: Social enterprise and the use of the medium of sport to further human rights in society
• 3.30-4 pm: Helena Byrne (Independent Scholar) – Breaking new ground: The formation of women’s football governing bodies in 1970s Ireland
• 4-4.15pm Closing Comments
• Papers will be for the duration of twenty minutes, with ten minutes afterwards for questions.

You can attend for free by registering through eventbrite.