Bohemian Football Club Crest

Historian and Bohemians supporter Ciarán Priestley recently presented an academic paper on the club's place in Dublin and Irish history. 

You can download the full paper  here (1.78 MB)

Ciarán also has provided bohemians.ie with a brief summary.

The Bohemian Football Club: The Enduring Legacy of an Idle Youth

When a small group of aspiring footballers from Bells Academy, a civil service college in North Great Georges Street, joined with students from the Hibernian Military School at the North Circular Road Gate Lodge in the Phoenix Park on 6 September 1890, they formed a club to partake in the fledgling Dublin scene of association football. On this day, the Bohemian Football Club was born.

A cohort of young college students in their late teens or early twenties, they came from a variety of religious backgrounds and counties as far apart as Cork and Antrim.

The young Bohemians shared the distinction of choosing to practise their sport outside the patronage of their educational institutions as they sought to create an autonomous and independent club to develop the sport in Dublin. This missionary spirit was an important factor in the early development of the club and subsequent construction of Dalymount Park.

Formed in the year before the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, the birth of Bohemians coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history, which culminated in the Great War, the 1916 Rising and the Irish Revolution. The legacy of Parnell’s demise casts a lingering, emotive and poignant shadow over the period covered in this research.

The political vacuum which followed this event instigated a flurry of influences, innovations and ideologists to articulate their vision for the future of Ireland.

The young men who established the Bohemian Football Club would go on to lead decorated and diverse careers in the civil service, military, education, medical and legal professions and religious orders, to name but a few.

It is likely that they would have taken opposing views of the great political questions of the day, given their respective life paths and choices of allegiance.

Nonetheless, the spirit with which they formed, established and developed their football club made an enduring impact on the city in which they lived and the sport which they played.

This research suggests a context in which to understand the lives of those who found themselves at a crossroads in Irish history that is without an overtly political motive.

The growth of Bohemian Football Club provided a unique distraction from everyday life and afforded the opportunity of channelling time and energy into a positive means of professional and personal development. It may also provide an insight into the society which changed around it.