Paul Cooke and Oscar Traynor, FAI Presidents, rebel hearts and football conviction

Paul Cooke is the current President of the FAI, at the forefront of an Association defying vociferous protests about playing a football match.

Oscar Traynor was President of the FAI in 1955 when he faced down the Government and Catholic Church-led protests about playing a football match.

Both Cooke’s game(s) against Israel and Traynor’s game against Yugoslavia at Dalymount Park, were shunned by RTE.

The source of Traynor’s problems were compounded by the Catholic Church’s denunciation of the godless Communists – FIFA World Cup quarter-finalists 1950, 1954 and 1958 – from every pulpit in the country at the time, asking for a de facto boycott.

A Catholic Church in a ‘special position’ within the Irish constitution at the time, although this was removed on January 5, 1973, following a public referendum held on December 7, 1972. The change was approved by 84 percent of the voters.

The 1955 Taoiseach and Governments ministers abided by the boycott as Traynor, in opposition at the time, pressed ahead with the game that was attended by 21,000 supporters and who had to pass a Legion of Mary cordon of protestors to gain access ground.

Similarly Cooke and the FAI, citing a members’ mandate, have faced down the latter-day equivalent of Archbishop McQuaid’s public reach from the pulpit, facing down celebrities and sections of the media.

The Kosovo game was almost sold out, the Israel-Ireland game held in Hungary had just under 750,000 TV viewers, the Austria game had an almost capacity attendance, the Ireland-Israel game in Serbia will go ahead.

Cooke has gone from a man who could have walked down O’Connell Street without being recognised to Public Enemy No1!

Back in 1955 Traynor’s Republican credentials, political career and football credentials were impeccable.

His soccer career, initially resembling that of Irish hero and Barcelona superhero ‘Patricio’ O’Connell in going Frankfort-Strandhill-Belfast Celtic, had it’s moments.

Ireland hero Niall Quinn did his Masters research at DCU on Traynor and will present a talk on the footballer, rebel and politician at the National Handball Centre in Ballybough as part of the Dublin Festival of History next weekend.

“Oscar Traynor was on a journey, following in the footsteps four years after O’Connell, and he had a brilliant start to his career with Belfast Celtic, came into the 1910/11 side where they won the Gold Cup and they also won the league,” says Quinn.

“The top two sides then were Belfast Celtic and Linfield, Patrick O’Connell would go on to star at Manchester United and Linfield had a goalkeeper Elisha Scott, who went to Liverpool and, spanning WW1, was there 1912 to 1934.

“That first year Traynor was being compared to Scott and, in some cases, was said to be better.

“I got a lot of match reports from that time and Oscar was spoken about very positively by the press, to the point one national paper said he is destined for bigger and greater things.”

Traynor was at ‘Paradise’ for just over two years where he won the reserve league and ended up on a tour to Europe.

“This must have been one of the first, if not the first-ever, Irish trip abroad to play football,” says Quinn.

“They would have gone to Bohemia and Prague, which I suppose at that time could be compared very similarly to Irish nationalism.”

However Traynor was about to suffer a dip in form – albeit there is a half-in-jest, half-macabre potential excuse here.

“Traynor had played in the famous game against Linfield that was abandoned because of shots in the crowd; it was replayed and there was even more shots in the crowd,” says Quinn.

“Now, he was a goalkeeper and standing still. The rest of them were running about, so you wouldn’t blame him for feeling somewhat exposed and that his career, his form might have suffered a little bit.

“Correspondingly, it started to go wrong for him and the press reports of his performances are unflattering.

“He was deemed at fault and blamed for a lot of the defeats and he was gone very quickly because when they released the retained list for the following season he wasn’t on it so by the end of 1913, he was without a club.”

But then here was a rebel about to embrace his cause as back in Dublin James Larkin is leading an increasingly militant workers face-off and, side by side, nationalism is on the rise.

In this milieu Traynor was unlikely to need a push towards the nationalist cause – he was from solid Fenian/IRB stock.

“His father, an antique dealer by trade, was a pallbearer at Parnell’s funeral, he was brought to protest against Queen Victoria’s visit as a young child,” says Quinn.

“But when his father died Oscar, who was the eldest, had to go out to work, firstly as a woodwork apprentice in woodwork before he went into printing.

“But in the middle of this as a young man, he is playing football and getting noticed and he secures that spell in Belfast.

“When he came back to Dublin in 1913, he would have seen the lockouts, the workers on the docks and everything that was happening there with James Larkin and WP Murphy. You had James Connolly drilling the Citizens’ Army.

“He joined the Volunteers and rose quite high, to the point where when 1916 came along, he played a very influential role as Commandant (OC) in the Metropole Hotel across the road from the GPO and where Pennys is now.

“He wrote in his papers about how when holding the position became hopeless they ran and got back over to the GPO and then tried to make their way out from the far side but ended captured.”

This, Quinn points out, was Traynor’s first of two brushes with firing squads, this first time for his role as OC Metro Hotel and the second when captured by the Free State Forces in Dublin in 1922.

The Crown Forces simply didn’t pick him out of the line for Kilmainham; while as one of the five most prominent anti-treaty Civil War military commanders and his avoiding being shot remains something of a mystery.

Of IRA’s five, Rory O’Connor and Liam Mellows were executed by the Free State, Liam Lynch was killed in action, Traynor would be captured and interned at Gormanstown.

Sean Russell, who was IRA Chief of Staff at the outbreak of WWII, died aboard a U-Boat (U46) off the coast of Galway in August 1940 transporting him clandestinely to Ireland. Russell was buried at sea.

“So the whole point of my thesis was to raise the question: Would Oscar Traynor be better known had he been killed and as a martyr?

“I looked deeply into that and there was, I suppose, a price to be paid, for staying alive in terms of how he is remembered.

“He wasn’t interested in writing books, whereas a lot of them were writing books and becoming these superheroes –Dan Breen, for instance.

“But in fairness to Traynor, he was a Fianna Fail man, and he always held his counsel and didn’t seek the limelight.”

The last of the major anti-treaty IRA military leaders to die, Traynor’s second chapter would come helping to govern and guide the fledgling state through formative and difficult times.

He served as Minister for Posts & Telegraphs in the thirties at a key point in trying to modernise Ireland, Minister for Defence during The Emergency (WWII) and a second time in the fifties and, later, as Minister for Justice.

Indeed it harder to think of any other of the high-ranking 1916 insurgents who would go on to hold so many key ministries without much reference to that past other than James Ryan – who has his sporting connection too via his great grandson James Ryan who is an Ireland rugby international.