Tailteann Games (Irish Free State)

This revival "meeting of the Irish race" was announced by Éamon de Valera in Dáil Éireann in 1921. The 1922 Irish Race Convention supported the plan for an "Irish Race Olympic".[3] However, due to the Anglo-Irish War and Civil War it was not held until 1924.[4] The meeting was launched to celebrate the independence of Ireland. The Hogan Stand was built and opened for the 1924 games.[1]

A report to revive the games was debated in the Dáil in June 1922. Modern sports such as motorcycling and shooting were to be included, along with a parade of massed choirs. The possibility of out-doing the Olympic Games was mentioned: "We have got representations from America to the effect that it would be advisable to depart from the idea of confining the Tailteann games to the Irish race and seeing that they predated the Greek Olympic by a thousand years we should be justified in entering upon a more varied programme."[5] The games were delayed by the Irish Civil War of 1922–23.

Commemorative medals were struck for all three games, in gold, silver, silver gilt, and bronze. They depict Tailtiu, the patron deity of the ancient Tailteann Games, with inscription "An Bhainrioghan Tailte" ("Queen Tailte").[6]

The games opened with the "Tailteann choir" singing the "Tailteann ode", with words by Oliver St. John Gogarty and music by Louis O'Brien.[7] The ode won Gogarty a bronze medal in the literature section of the 1924 Olympic art competition. The Irish flag was carried by Tom Kiely, winner of the 1904 Olympic all-around (decathlon) title.[8]

To increase the quality of the competition, some Olympic stars without Irish heritage were invited to compete as guests.[9]

The dissident Irish republican government which had lost the Civil War urged a boycott of the games "falsely described as Aonach Tailteann", because it rejected the legitimacy of the Free State government which sponsored the games.[10] Rugby union was excluded from the program because the Irish Rugby Football Union was seen as "undemocratic and almost un-Irish".[11]

Bobolink 2nd.,

Cultural programme

Irish and foreign dignitaries at the RIA

W. B. Yeats persuaded the Royal Irish Academy to award prizes. The gold medal went to Stephen MacKenna for his translation of Plotinus; other winners were Oliver Gogarty, Francis Stuart, and James Stephens. A banquet presided over by T. M. Healy, the Governor-General of the Irish Free State, had an "oddly assorted" group of guests invited by Yeats, including Augustus John, Sir Edwin Lutyens, writers Compton Mackenzie, G. K. Chesterton, Lennox Robinson, and Carlos Magalhães de Azeredo; cricketers Ranjitsinhji and C. B. Fry; and diplomats Willem Hubert Nolens and Erik Palmstierna. Chesterton accepted the medal on his behalf of the absent MacKenna, who later refused it.[18]

An art and craft exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy displayed 1,597 works, more than half entered for competition in 32 categories.[19] The overall "Tailteann Trophy" went to Seán Keating's Homage to Hugh Lane.[20] Other gold medallists included Margaret Clarke, Francis Doyle Jones, Letitia Hamilton, Power O'Malley, and Patrick Tuohy.[20]

At the Theatre Royal two recent operas by Irish composers were performed: Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer's Sruth na Maoile (1922) and Harold White's Seán the Post (1924), along with Shamus O'Brien (1896) by Charles V. Stanford.[7] The last was not successful: "there seemed to be a greater number of people in the orchestra than in the audience".[21]

In the genre painting competition, Charles Lamb won a silver medal for Dancing at a Northern Crossroads, depicting a traditional crossroads dance.[22]

The programme for the 1928 games included athletics, billiards, boxing, camogie, chess, cycling, Gaelic football, golf, gymnastics, Gaelic handball, hurling, motorcycling, rowing, and swimming.[23]

At the awards ceremony in the Iveagh Gardens, the pageant The Coming of Fionn by Seamus MacCall was staged.[24]

With the 1932 Summer Olympics begin held in Los Angeles, the Tailteann Games was originally scheduled for 1931 to avoid a clash, but postponed to 1932, which meant Olympic athletes from Ireland or abroad could not be present. The Games' main backer, minister J. J. Walsh, lost office when Fianna Fáil took power after the 1932 election, and public funding was cut. Against a background of the Great Depression and the Anglo-Irish Trade War, the Games cut from two weeks to one; they made a £12 profit.

In 1937 Éamon de Valera organised an inter-departmental committee into the feasibility of staging another games, which reported in June that it would be possible to stage one in 1939. De Valera used the split in Irish athletics governance as an excuse to defer consideration, to the chagrin of J. J. Walsh. The onset of the Second World War deferred any progress and nothing further happened after the war.[26]

• Bell, Daniel (17 November 2011). "Tailteann Games". Encyclopedia of International Games. 2. McFarland. pp. 373–375. ISBN 9781476615271. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
• Cronin, Mike (July 2003). "Projecting the Nation through Sport and Culture: Ireland, Aonach Tailteann and the Irish Free State, 1924–32". Journal of Contemporary History. 38 (3): 395–411. doi:10.1177/0022009403038003004. ISSN 0022-0094. JSTOR 3180644 – via academia.edu.
• Cronin, Mike (Autumn 2005). "The State on Display: The 1924 Tailteann Art Competition". New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua. University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies). 9 (3): 50–71. doi:10.1353/nhr.2005.0050. JSTOR 20558012.
• Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick (2014). All Dressed Up: Modern Irish Historical Pageantry. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 9780815652847. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
• Reynolds, Paige (2007). "Fictions in the Free State: the 1924 Tailteann Games". Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. Cambridge University Press. pp. 156–198. ISBN 9780521872997. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
• Rouse, Paul (2015). "Sport on a Partitioned Island 1920 to the New Millennium". Sport and Ireland: A History. Oxford University Press. pp. 243–328. ISBN 9780198745907. Retrieved 1 August 2017.

• Tailteann Games index of Pathé newsreel clips
• Tailteann Games, digitised photographs from the Irish Independent at the National Library of Ireland