The man behind the wire: Offalyman's unique book that outlines the central role of sport in Irish life

A VERY well done to Tullamore GAA stalwart, Paul Rouse on his latest publication, an absolutely compelling and engrossing examination of the central role that sport plays in Irish life.

“Sport In Modern Irish Life” is published by Merrion Press, and is currently on sale in most bookshops and via various online sites.

It is a new departure for Rouse, who is one of Ireland's top historians and is certainly right up there at the top of the tree when it comes to sports history.

The Durrow man has been instrumental in some of the great additions to the Irish sports history archive.

He has co-authored a couple of top class histories on the GAA while he fully wrote“Sport & Ireland: A History” and “The Hurlers: The First All-Ireland Championship and the Making of Modern Hurling”.

All of those publications have made terrific reading. The two books on the GAA give a great insight into how it developed into Ireland's biggest sporting organisation.

Sport & Ireland is a fascinating examination of sport on the island from the 1800s on but also giving a brief outline of how it developed in the many centuries preceding it.

The Hurlers gives a thorough outline of the first All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship in 1887 in Birr – the teams and indivuals involved as well as the venue.

This book is different. It is not a history book, though it contains come great historical anecdotes. It is a much more personal book by Rouse – it is very factual and full of common sense but it provides more opinion and grounds for argument than a historian would be comfortable with.

Paul Rouse is very well qualified to offer such an examination of sport. He lectures in Irish history and sports history at University College Dublin, writes a weekly column for the Irish Examiner and is a host of their sports podcast. He has wrote articles and profiles for many other publications and is a regular contributor to history documentaries as well as anaylsing matches and GAA affairs on TV.

Outside of all that, he has lived the life of a sports nut. He was an excellent Tullamore senior footballer for much of the 1990s on into the 2000s. He was a pivotal figure when Tullamore won the Senior Football Championship in 2000 and 2002 – the 2000 win bridged a long 23 year famine and his accuracy from frees as well as an ability to pick off scores from open play were instrumental in both wins.

He was one of the best free takers in Offaly during his playing career – Pat Daly of Rhode, Fergal McEvoy of Shannonbridge and Rouse were arguably the three best placed ball kickers in Offaly in that era. He was in the tier just below county standard – he wasn't slow but probably lacked the true pace as well as the phyisque needed to go to that level –, yet he was a force of nature in the club championship from the mid 1990s through to 2002, after which Rhode began to dominate.

He was a Tullamore selector when they won the Senior Football Championship in 2007 and 2013 and he was Offaly interim manager for a couple of months in 2018. He was a surprise choice when Kerry man Stephen Wallace was ousted in unseemly circumstances in 2018 – Wallace had been suspended for an incident at a club game in his native county and watched from the stand as Offaly gave a shocking display when losing to Wicklow in the Leinster Senior Football Championship in Portlaoise.

The County Board opted to change management in the wake of that and they turned to Rouse, who brought in his brother John and Rhode's Alan McNamee and Stephen Darby as selectors. It was a trying, chaotic time but they did very well to steady the ship and restore respectability. Offaly defeated Antrim in the qualifiers and were not far away when losing to Clare in their second game.

The indications were that Rouse would have been given a full year had he went forward for 2019 but work and family commitments and the fact he was living in Dublin resulted in him ruling himself out. He was, however, on the selection committee that put Liam Kearns forward as manager for 2023 and while he has now spent most of his life in Dublin, and abroad, earlier, his love of his home county and town is burning as brightly as ever. Despite living in Dublin, his son Joe has nailed his colours to the Offaly mast and opted to join the county's development squad system. And in a way, this showcases the point that Paul is making in his book – the powerful ties that sport entails and the way these can go down the generations.

During his brief spell as Offaly manager, he spoke with infectious passion about the team and where they could go and sport has been a very central part of his life from his earliest days.

Sport seeps out of his pores. His father Patsy was a very good footballer in the 1950s and early 1960s, winning a Senior Football Championship medal with the St Mary's-Gracefield combination of St Patrick's in 1959 and he was on the fringes of the Offaly 1960-1961 squad. His maternal grandfather, Dick Conroy, father of his mother Dolores, is one of Rhode's great legendary figures, a serial winner of Offaly senior football medals and a renowned administrator and team mentor – in both Rhode and London, where he spent several years. He features prominently in the new book.

Rouse was reared in a sporting environment and this passion has shone through in his work life. It is basically whath is latest book is all about.

Sport in Modern Irish life is a superb collection of articles and essays on many aspects of sport. It is an examination of the very central role has played in Irish life – and not just since the last third of the 19th century when sport became organised on a national scale and all of the country's major sporting organisations were established.

Most people associate sport with big days in Croke Park, O'Connor Park, the Aviva, the RDS and so much more but it is of course much more than that. It is about the fun people get from playing and watching but sport is also as simple as two siblings kicking a ball in their back yard.

He argues that sport is the main past time, the big source of conversation for a large section of society when they are not working or sleeping. He writes about the joy sport brings to people, no matter what their role in it is.

The book is divided into several different essays. Many of them are standalone, having developed from articles he wrote for the Irish Examiner or pieces he recorded for RTE's Sunday Miscellany. You could open up one of them and get full value from reading it on its own or ideally, you should read the book from front to back. Every story links well together and the book flows quite beautifully.

It starts out as a comedy treat as he relates a personal story about an attempt to purchase a new pair of football boots in his late 40s, only aborting it once he realised the futility of what he was thinking. It follows up with an absoluteluy hilarious account of him signing up for and training for a rather foolhardy boxing exhibition in 2022 – as I reread a couple of those pages while writing this review, I found myself once again giggling out loud.

The book lures you in with those stories. They are very funny but any initial impression that this might be a light hearted read, full of funny yarns, is lost fairly quickly. It is airy and funny but it is also a very serious, considered look at sport.

Rouse's passion for sport is there the whole way but he makes no effort to sugercoat it, he does not try and make the case that it is all good. Instead, he delves into the problems gambling has caused for so many individuals and their families. He made the undeniable point that not all people who claim to be sports lovers are good and that they are capable of monstrous deeds. He uses the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and Russia to make this point.

His distaste of Irish MEP, Mick Wallace, and his colleague, Claire Daly, for not supporting EU's condemnations of Russia's disgraceful invasion of their neighbours is heartfelt and impossible to argue with – he notes that Wallace has had a lifetime of involvement in soccer but this did not prevent him for a gross “moral failure”.

There are so many nuggets like this throughout and it makes the book almost impossible to put down once you start into it. You just want to stick with it, to get into the next essay, read what he has to say as he gets across the point that sport has been so important for nations and their people but this does not mean that it is always a force for good – it isn't that.

The joy of Rouse's book is that it forces you to think and think deeply some of the time. It is philosophical and there is plenty of psychology in it but not on a level that makes it difficult to comprehend or is in any way heavy.

It is none of that, just a lovely book that is so easy to read and comes with the highest of recommendations. You won't agree with everything in it but it challenges you to think about those things and that is the true joy in this masterpiece. The humour that dominates the opening pages continues to crop up intermittently throughout but the real essence is the many profound insights and engaging stories that dominate – a charming tale about Fr Tom Scully, manager of the Offaly team that was beaten by Kerry in the 1969 All-Ireland senior football final was a personal favourite.