Dick Fitzgerald – A Revolutionary Like No Other

While the history of the relationship between sport and politics in Irelandhas been a long and often turbulent one, few men have embodied thisinterplay as vividly as Dick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a revolutionary inevery sense of the word. His politics were unashamedly republican in formand he was a longstanding member of the Irish Volunteers. At the sametime he was an outstanding Gaelic footballer with the famed Kerry team ofthe early part of the twentieth century and published what was at that timea seminal text on the coaching of the indigenous Irish sporting code. Thisarticle captures the essence of Fitzgerald’s impactful dealings in Irish sportand politics and argues that he was both an architect and an outcome of animportant and revolutionary era within Irish life.