Oscar Traynor; revolutionary, visionary, politician, FAI president...
Niall Quinn tells of a sliding doors moment in the life of the War of Independence leader.
“He cared deeply for the game. He was a very good player, good enough to be poached by Belfast Celtic,” says the former Republic of Ireland international.
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Quinn recently completed a Masters in History at DCU, with Traynor’s life the subject of his 25,000-word thesis.
His studies led him to newspaper and military archives, and to some fascinating discoveries about one of that period’s lesser-known, yet pivotal figures.
Quinn continues: “Traynor was a goalkeeper and he played for one of the most famous Belfast Celtic teams, who won all around them for a couple of years.
“But it was around the time when tensions were creeping in, it was just before the war and the protestants up north were arming themselves.
“It was a tough time and he had a great start, a great year and a half as a professional goalkeeper for Belfast Celtic.
“Linfield were the big rivals and their goalkeeper, Elisha Scott, went to Liverpool at that time, and he ended up playing for Liverpool for 20 years and is still a legend on the Kop.
“There are still murals of him there.
“But Traynor at one stage was arguably better than him, so he wasn’t a million miles away.”
Scott still holds the honour of being Liverpool’s longest serving player, his career there spanning almost 22 years.
He arrived on Merseyside in 1912, the same year that Traynor packed it in at Belfast Celtic and returned to Dublin, as sectarian tensions began to flare in the north.
Quinn explains: “There was one big moment in Traynor’s life and his football career completely dipped afterwards.
“He was playing against Linfield. Everything was fine, it was a quiet enough game, Linfield went in 1-0 up at half-time.
“The players came out for the second-half and a row started on the terraces. Guns came out, the game was abandoned, five people were shot.
“They had a replay two weeks later and Linfield won 4-0. Traynor let in four soft goals.
“At the bottom of this match report, and it’s an amazing report, it read, ‘Little wonder he was nervous, gunshots going off throughout the game’.
“He was back in Dublin not long after that, before the Dublin Lock-out when the RIC were beating the s*** out of all the civilians on O’Connell Street. He was in Dublin for that.
“But I’d love people to know more about that Linfield game, a huge match, thousands of people, but they didn’t have enough police at the match.
“One of the English papers, the Daily Mirror, did an article on it saying, ‘The sectarian genie is out of the bottle’."
During the six months Quinn dedicated to writing the thesis, he grew obsessed with the life of Traynor.
“My wife jokes that he was the third person in our marriage,” says the 92-time capped former striker. “I’d go to bed thinking about it (the thesis) and I’d wake up thinking about it.”
Quinn could have gone for easier subjects such as Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera or a host of other figures whose lives had been documented in far greater detail.
But he was drawn to Traynor, a fellow football man.
“I remember waiting for a meeting one time in the boardroom at the FAI,” he recalls, “and there was a picture of every president since the Association broke away from the IFA.
“Underneath was the time they spent in the job and it was all, two years, two years, two years.
“There was one that I knew from when I got into the (Ireland) team first, Pat O’Brien from Cork, and he died very young. He was only six months into the job.
“Oscar Traynor was 14 years in the role and I wondered why. I was intrigued by that.
“When I did the course in DCU, he featured heavily in the revolution, so I decided to choose Oscar Traynor for my thesis and find out more about him.
“There are people who did half of what Traynor did and there were volumes written about them. He shunned the limelight, but there was no book written about him.
“I found out that he was a great friend of football at a time when the church and the GAA and the big power players in the country were trying to suppress it.”
Quinn was fascinated by how much Traynor packed into his life.
“He did cross-country running, so he was in running teams and taking part in race days. He was as good a sportsman as you could be in those days, without being a GAA man.
“He fought in 1916, in the Imperial Hotel across from the GPO, he escaped with the last escapees out of the GPO and was arrested with them.
“He went to jail in England and came back and was very instrumental with the volunteers in Dublin. He led them towards the end of the War of Independence.
“He was in jail three times, got married, had children and became a politician.
“He was Minister for Defence during World War Two. He was Minister for Justice when the first female member of the Gardai was recruited. Big portfolios.
“Through it all he advocated that there shouldn’t be a ban (on soccer), that all young people should play whatever sport they wanted.
“During one Dail session he was so far ahead of his time that he spoke of having a sports council, where we could provide money for young people to play whatever sport they wanted, and to maybe get better on the international stage.
“This was 40 or 50 years before it came in.”
As for Traynor’s legacy as a freedom fighter, Quinn argues: “People say his ability as a revolutionary leader is always questioned because he led the burning of the Custom House.
“I think four IRA were killed and some innocent people were killed. There was a backlash because about 90 were arrested, it was seen as a bit of a military disaster.
“But actually, it brought England to the table. It led to the truce and to negotiations with Lloyd George.
“The Custom House was, I suppose, the engine room of British control of Ireland at the time.
“They had Dublin Castle, but this was where all the records were kept, all the wills and deeds to all the properties, and they were all burned.
“It was seen as a disaster but new revision has proven that, actually, it helped push England to the edge.”
Back to the genesis of Quinn’s curiosity about Traynor - a picture on the wall of the FAI’s Abbotstown headquarters of their long-serving president.
“He was a man of real importance, being in ministerial roles, and he was football’s loudest voice in the highest of positions,” Quinn says.
“To take him out for a fella from Cork who might be on the local county council wouldn't have made sense. It was a powerful position for football to be in.
“He did great things. He took on Archbishop McQuaid, who famously wanted a match against Yugoslavia banned, because Yugoslavia was a communist country and the communists had killed catholic priests there.
“There were protests outside the ground, they tried to block fans from getting in.
“But he stood up to them and more than 20,000 people broke the picket, if you like.
“Liam Tuohy tells a great story. It was his debut and they were all aware that they were playing communists. Yet when they ran out onto the pitch, all the Yugoslav players blessed themselves.
“Another big moment in Traynor’s life was shortly after De Valera announced us as a Republic in ‘49.
“Traynor led the delegation to go and play England at Everton’s ground.
“He was in 1916, the War of Independence, he was anti-treaty in the Civil War, he worked his way into politics, and suddenly he was there leading the delegation of the first team from outside of Britain to beat England in England.
“I think football people should know about him. We know there is a pitch named after him and a road too, but nobody really knows the story.
“Football needed Oscar Traynor in those times. The game could have disappeared.
“The GAA would have you believe that all the farmers grabbed their hurleys and came into Dublin and fought.
“That didn’t happen at all. The majority of the fighters in 1916 were Dublin city people - and football was prevalent. Soccer was the sport.
“If you were to do a circle of a couple of miles around the GPO, there were far more soccer clubs than GAA clubs.
“Yet the game came under attack. Michael Cusack started it. He regretted it in later life. But there were a lot of prominent figures who really made it difficult for people to play football.
“But Traynor was there, steadfast in his defence of the game. Yet we don’t know enough about him.
“People who love and play this game here don’t understand what Oscar Traynor did to keep the game alive here.
“I think our sport is richer because of him and will be richer if we celebrate him a bit more.”
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