Sport in all its forms is central to many people's lives and is an expression of culture that is very much rooted in place. It creates its own emotional attachments and loyalties.
Different localities across Ireland have been defined by their sporting endeavours and achievements. This new atlas will trace the history of Ireland's sporting culture and identity from the earliest times to the present. It will look at the evolution of different sports before the advent of rules and codification in the late Victorian period.
The modernisation of Irelands sporting culture will be explored through the prism of major sports like horse racing, Gaelic football, hurling, soccer, rugby, athletics etc. as well as minority sports. The history of Irish sport extends beyond the island and the sporting traditions of Ireland's diaspora will also be examined in detail.
Comprehensive in scope and richly illustrated the atlas will include contributions from Ireland's leading historians and sports writers.
John Crowley is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University College Cork. He is co-editor of the Atlas of Cork City (2005), The Iveragh Peninsula: A Cultural Atlas of the Ring of Kerry (2009) with John Sheehan, the Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012), and the Atlas of the Irish Civil War (2024).
Cormac Moore is founder and director of the history consultancy company, History Link. He was an historian in residence with Dublin City Council from 2017 to 2025. He has published widely. His publications include The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission (Irish Academic Press, 2025), The Sweetness of Lemon's: The Story of Ireland's Favourite Confectioner, co-written with Alan Tate, (Merrion Press, 2025), Laois: The Irish Revolution, 1912-23 (Four Courts Press, 2025), Birth of the Border: The Impact of Partition in Ireland (Merrion Press, 2019), The Irish Soccer Split (Cork University Press, 2015) and The GAA V Douglas Hyde: The Removal of Ireland’s First President as GAA Patron (The Collins Press, 2012). He is a columnist with the Irish News as well as editor of its daily ‘On This Day’ segment. He is co-host with Tim McGarry of The Irish History Boys podcast show.
Mike Cronin is the Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland and a member of the University’s Irish Studies faculty. His early work concentrated on the history of fascism in Britain and Ireland, before he started working on the history of Irish sport. This work led to a wide range of publications including Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity Since 1884 (Dublin, 1999), with William Murphy and Paul Rouse (eds.), The Gaelic Athletic Association, 1884-2009 (Dublin 2009), with Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse, The GAA: A People’s History (Cork 2009), and with Roisin Higgins, Places We Play: Ireland’s Sporting Heritage, (Cork 2011). Committed to publicly engaged history he was the director, between 2008 and 2012 of the GAA’s Oral History project, and between 2013 and 2023 of the Century Ireland project which was a large-scale digital project as part of the Irish government’s Decade of Centenaries. His most recent publication, with Kevin Tallec Marston, was Inventing the Boston Game: Football, Soccer, and the Origins of a National Myth (Amherst, 2024). He is a Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University where he teaches on the FIFA Master, and an Honorary Professor in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Studies at the University of Queensland.
Charlie Roche is the founder and co-director of MobileGIS, a technology and mapping company based in Cork, Ireland. He has been involved with the Atlas Series by Cork University Press since 1995, when he completed a two-year project to digitise the historical towns and parishes of Ireland, attaching the 1841 and 1851 Census data. This project formed the basis for many of the maps in Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (2012). He was an Associate Cartographer/Researcher for Atlas of the Irish Revolution (2017) and worked on The Great Irish Famine Online project (2018). In a collaboration with Military Archives, he worked on the IRA Companies 1921-1922 interactive online map (2019). And with the Lisburn Museum, he created the interactive map Mapping the Swanzy Riots, 1920. In 2024, he worked on The Irish Civil War Fatalities Project – Interactive Map, based on research by Dr Andy Bielenberg (UCC) and John Dorney.
