Unrecognized Middle-Class Revolutionary? Michael Cusack, Sport and Cultural Change in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

From Robert Emmett's uprising of 1803, through the years of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Emancipation campaign, the Young Irelanders, the Fenians, the founding of the Gaelic League and the era of Charles Stuart Parnell, middle-class revolutionaries endeavoured to transform the economic, social and political landscape of Ireland. Likewise, the country's cultural revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century can be considered important in that they created, revived and helped sustain ideologies that contributed to the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Such revolutionaries did not change Ireland overnight but they did help to articulate the sense of difference and distinction that demanded expression in the shape of an independent Ireland.