Second Innings Frank McNally on the post-independence cricket revival in Co Meath The Irish Times

One of the lesser-known effects of Irish independence appears to be the encouragement of a resurgence of cricket in Co Meath.

The revival was as short-lived as it was enthusiastic, lasting from the end of the civil war until about 1948, and was thus almost parallel to the life of the free state.

However, it was not the first cross-party coalition or declaration of a republic to influence Meath’s cricketing renaissance. If any single calamity can be blamed, the usual culprits are the provincial Gaelic footballers who beat Cavan in the 1949 All-Ireland final.

The bat and ball game never recovered from that. But as Adam Burke explains in a handsome new book, Wielding the Willow Cricket in South Meath: 1860-1950, the truth was a little more complicated.

As the subtitle suggests, his research focuses on those parts of the royal county bordering Kildare and north Dublin. The latter is still a bastion of the game today: perhaps the last one left in the Republic, at least outside the cities.

By contrast, in the late 1800s, cricket was played throughout rural Ireland, with strongholds including Tipperary and Kilkenny. The rise of the GAA and the break-up of the big estates (of which the workers were the mainstay) eventually sank it in these areas.

And in Meath there was a similar, if later, decline from 1909, when Gaelic games, land reform and revolution combined to damage crickets. But when the Troubles were over and Ireland began to look after themselves, the need to abstain from English games was no longer so pressing.

On the contrary, Burke writes, quoting JP Farrell: people felt it was time to get back to the things they really liked, such as cricket, badger hunting, greyhound painting and other traditional country pastimes.

So instead of disappearing in the Free State, South Meath cricket now entered its golden age. Within months of the end of the Civil War there were active clubs in Agher, Dalystown, Gilbertstown, Isaacstown, Longwood, Newcastle, Rathcore, Rathrone and Trammon.

An accidental consequence of this revival, as the 1930 trial illustrated, was the associated Irish sport of shebeening. As always, the game involved serving or consuming alcohol cheaply and without a license, as long as it was not sold or paid for.

When the Garda visited Thomas Doran’s Cloneycurry one night in 1930, they found a kitchen full of men drinking Porter from cups and mugs. They were celebrating the season in which Cloncurry had won the B Division of the Meath Cricket League (in itself a symptom of a renaissance).

A lawyer later claimed that a quarter barrel of Porter had been bought with club funds and then offered free to members as a fringe benefit of their 2s 6d subscription. No sale had taken place.

Unfortunately, members that night had been unable to defend this legal avenue against the bowling of Garda interrogations. One respondent said there was a charge of 2s 6d to enter the house, although he did not remember paying for a drink when ill.

The court also heard that such events were very common among local cricket clubs. There were even vague suggestions that certain clubs were less likely to be raided by the Garda than others. Nevertheless, the end result was the Salomon’s Judgment, where drinkers were fined 2s 6d each.

The rise in the fortunes of Meaths GAA certainly undermined cricket’s popularity as the 1930s and 40s progressed. As well as fostering success in football for the counties, the ban on foreign games also meant that the scrutineering committees were always on the lookout for the GAA sheep scattered in the garrison game pastures.

A Longwood hurler was banned for six months in 1934 after a club colleague said he had been standing by the roadside in Ballyclare watching a cricket match. […] over the ditch. Meanwhile, the lost but repentant sheep were reinstated and accepted back into the GAA church on the condition that they sin no more.

On the other hand, the proximity of the Kildare border reduced the effectiveness of the South Meath ban. You can play football or hurling with Longwood, for example, then jump across the county to Moyvalley for cricket. Kildare GAA supervisors were unlikely to testify at the Meath GAA hearing or vice versa.

But ban or no ban, the rise of Gaelic football was not just a challenge to cricketers. The mechanization of agriculture reduced the playing field in the countryside. So did the land commission’s work in breaking up and redistributing viable farms.

The famous All-Ireland victory may have been a coup. But the game collapsed locally even before that. South Meath cricket’s oldest clubs date back to the 1860s and it had been phased out, still well under a century old, by 1948.