Journal articles on the topic 'Gaelic games, juvenile literature'

AbstractThe Gaelic sports of hurling and football, native to Ireland, are increasing in popularity worldwide. The injury profile of these sports requires multidisciplinary management by sports physicians, orthopaedic surgeons, and musculoskeletal (MSK) radiologists, among others. Advances in imaging modalities and interventional techniques have aided the diagnosis and treatment of sport injuries. In this article, we review the literature and our own institutional experience to describe common injury patterns identified in Gaelic games athletes, their main imaging features and relevant therapeutic interventions. We discuss the increasing prevalence of imaging services at sporting events and the central role of MSK radiologists in sports injury management.

Context: Groin pain is commonly experienced by athletes involved in field-based sports and is particularly prevalent in Gaelic Games athletes. The adductor squeeze test is commonly used in the assessment of groin pain and injuries. To date, no evidence in the literature provides the reliability of the adductor squeeze test using a sphygmomanometer in assessing the adductor muscle integrity of Gaelic Games athletes. Given the high proportion of groin pain encountered in Gaelic Games athletes, establishing the reliability of the adductor squeeze test will allow clinicians to monitor injury responses and to assess return-to-play criteria. Objective: To evaluate the intrarater reliability of a commercially available sphygmomanometer for measuring adductor squeeze values in Gaelic Games athletes and to determine if different squeeze values are associated with the 3 commonly used test positions. Design: Descriptive laboratory study. Setting: University clinical skills laboratory. Patients or Other Participants: Eighteen male Gaelic Games athletes without any previous or current history of groin or pelvic pain. Intervention(s): Each participant performed the adductor squeeze test in 3 positions of hip joint flexion (0°, 45°, and 90°) on 2 test days separated by at least 1 week. Main Outcome Measure(s): Adductor squeeze test values (mm Hg) quantified by a commercially available sphygmomanometer. Results: Intrarater reliability intraclass correlation values ranged from 0.89 to 0.92 (intraclass correlation coefficients were 0°, 0.89; 45°, 0.92; and 90°, 0.90). The highest squeeze values were recorded in the 45° of hip flexion test position, and these values differed from those demonstrated in the 0° and 90° hip flexion test positions (P < .05). Conclusions: A commercially available sphygmomanometer is a reliable device for measuring adductor squeeze test values.

Although Gaelic sports have been played in an organised fashion for over a century in the United States, academic research on the development and role of these sports among the Irish diaspora has been extremely limited. This is hardly surprising, given the more general disregard of the significance of sport in the burgeoning literature examining the Irish experience in America. In its most general aspect, this study seeks to redress this neglect. Drawing predominantly on archival material from the John J. Burns Library at Boston College and from Boston Public Library, the article charts and explores the processes involved in the transfer of Gaelic sports from Ireland to one of the most significant focal points of Irish immigration, Boston. This analysis not only identifies and examines the key agencies and individuals responsible for the early development of Irish sports in Boston, but also seeks to explore the role they played in the promotion and preservation of a distinctively Irish ethnic identity. In particular, the article assesses the extent to which Gaelic games have functioned as an arena in which Irish nationalism was fostered in the greater Boston area during the 1880s. Before turning to these central concerns, it is important to understand the social milieu in which these games developed. Thus the article begins with a brief context-setting discussion that charts Irish emigration to Boston and offers some insights into the socio-economic and political environment encountered by the Irish on completion of their journey.

Abstract This paper presents the study about technological involvement in game coaching. Attending multiple players with their performance and accuracy level checking is not feasible for coaches every time. Self-paced training sessions or self-learning methods are invented by different researchers & identify multiple games or the gaming apparatuses for different level automation. Methods used for analysis purpose & described the smart cricket ball & its circuit diagram. Tracking technology that are used in cricket, tennis, Gaelic football, badminton, hurling, rugby union, association football & volleyball, to visually track the trajectory of the ball, Centre of Percussion (COP) in cricket, Accelerometer & Swing angle model. Provides a systematic literature review of smart sport & various methods i.e, SVM, CART, ML, AI, CNN, SVM, ORB, SIFT & SURF. Lastly, future directions of research are proposed in the emerging field of SST.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine an ongoing process of logic assimilation within an amateur sports organisation (ASO) called the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). It seeks to develop our understanding of how forms of accounting mitigated (or exacerbated) the tensions that arose among GAA members due to the consequences of the assimilation of select elements of a professional logic and a commercial logic within its traditionally dominant social welfare logic. Design/methodology/approach Interviews were undertaken with representatives and members of the GAA to understand the effects of growing commercialisation and professionalisation on the organisation’s traditional amateur status and social mission. In particular, the authors sought to understand how accounting, in the form of financial reporting, influenced the extent of the tensions that arose. Interviews were supported by an extensive collection of podcasts and news articles that discussed this topic. Findings The paper’s findings offer unique empirical insights into the role played by forms of accounting in the maintenance of amateurism within an ASO. It reveals the conflicting role of financial reporting within the GAA whereby it was used by the GAA’s management to ease member concerns surrounding logic assimilation while simultaneously being ignored by clubs and counties to facilitate payments to managers thereby eroding the amateur status of Gaelic Games. Originality/value The paper is unique in its exploration of logic assimilation within a form of hybrid organisation that has previously been unexamined in the accounting literature. It extends extant understandings of how accounting influences the co-existence of potentially conflicting logics. The paper also discusses the implications of what accounting makes visible and keeps invisible on the longevity of the traditionally dominant social welfare logic within an ASO.

The objective of this study was to determine the diseases that are on the rise, and then to investigate whether video games can support their treatment. To achieve the goal a search based on scientific literature was conducted. The results led to the conclusion that video games are an effective tool in the rehabilitation of post-stroke patients. Compared to the standard rehabilitation, patients who were playing video games showed improvement of upper limb motor functions, better static balance and lower anxiety of falling. Similarly, statistically significant improvement measured by Quality of Upper Extremity Skills Test was observed during the rehabilitation of a pediatric group suffering from cerebral palsy. Video games successfully supported the therapy of other juvenile patients by enhancing visual acuity in cases of children amblyopia as well as lowering anxiety during the induction of anaesthesia. Moreover, the usefulness of video games was observed in treating mental disorders. It involved patients with the post-traumatic stress disorder, who presented reduced flashback frequency, and patients with depression, who showed a lower rumination score along with increasing subjective cognition. Indicating which diseases have an increasing morbidity rate as well as demonstrating positive therapeutic responses to video games can provide useful information for public health practitioners and improve the treatment of selected diseases.

Hurling is one of the world’s fastest field sports. Since the last review of science and Gaelic sports in 2008, there has been an increase in sports science provisions across elite and sub-elite cohorts, resulting in increased hurling-specific literature equating to an additional 111 research investigations into the game across all sports science disciplines. The present review aims to provide an updated analysis of the current research on the game and propose recommendations for future research. Overall, intermittent aerobic fitness remains an important physical quality during competition, with a focus on games-based training methodologies within the literature. Within the current review, we provide updated normative data on the running demands, physiological responses, and anthropometric and performance profiles of hurling players. The increased literature across the sport has led to the development of a hurling-specific simulation, that can now be utilised practically in training and research processes for hurling cohorts. Furthermore, the monitoring of internal and external training loads across training and match environments, in addition to response variables such as well-being, appears to have become more prominent, allowing practitioners to design training regimes to achieve optimal dose and response characteristics. Analysing the game from a scientific perspective can allow for more efficient preparatory practices, to meet the specific requirements of players at all age levels. Collaborative research among the various sports science disciplines, is required to identify strategies to reduce the incidence of injury and enhance performance in hurling. The current review provides updated information to coaches and practitioners regarding position-specific physical qualities, and match-play demands that can concurrently support the training process within hurling.

AbstractIn examining how children engaged with the British Empire, broadly defined, during the long eighteenth century, this article considers a range of materials, including museums, printed juvenile literature, and board games, that specifically attempted to attract children and their parents. Subjects that engaged with the wider world, and with it the British Empire, were typically not a significant part of formal education curricula, and so an informal marketplace of materials and experiences emerged both to satisfy and drive parental demand for supplementary education at home. Such engagements were no accident. Rather, they were a conscious effort to provide middling and elite children with what was considered useful information about the wider world and empire they would inherit, as well as opportunities to consider the moral implications and obligations of imperial rule, particularly with regard to African slavery.

At the beginning of the twentieth century about one in twenty American teenagers graduated from high school; by mid century over half of them did so; and today six of seven do. Along with this expansion in graduation, the experiences of high schooling became more significant. Though diversity existed at the school level, by the interwar period most high schools offered courses in “higher” academic subjects (literature, mathematics, and ancient and foreign languages), while they gave large numbers of students a chance to practice music, drama, and other fine arts. Business leaders and educators developed programs in technical-skill training. Courses in household economics, personal hygiene, and sex and reproduction appeared as well. A few schools operated with two shifts: day and night Many maximized their capacity by rotating students between newly constructed gymnasiums, stadiums, fields, swimming pools, showers, cafeterias, laundries, machine shops, laboratories, performance halls, and libraries. Some provided up-to-date diagnostic and preventative medical and psychological services. Others developed vocational guidance. Nearly all established relationships with juvenile justice and youth custody agencies. More than any other institution, the increasingly comprehensive high schools of the twentieth-century redefined the social lives of American youths through teams, clubs, bands, and groups engaged in a long list of contests, games, performances, and other events. Early in the century extracurricular activities began to rival formal class work as the primary focus of secondary schooling. Today there is a joke told from Ohio to Texas, funny for its sad truth. Q: How do you pass a school levy? A: Put football on the chopping-block.

AbstractIntroduction. The number of children and adolescents hospitalized due to suicide attempts caused by stress, low self-esteem, lack of acceptance and peer violence, as well as family problems, increases every year. In addition, there may occur disturbed self-perception or depression. This is a very complex phenomenon, the scale of which should induce immediate multidimensional activities.Aim. Analysis of the occurrence of suicide attempts among minors on the example of the city of Lublin.Material and methods. The statistical data obtained from the Polish Police Headquarter and from the report of the Foundation We Give Children Strength – “Children count 2017” was analyzed and a review of the literature on the subject for the years 2014-2018 developed using the descriptive method was made.Results. The report of the Foundation We Give Children Strength shows a huge scale of the phenomenon. According to its data, as many as 72% of children aged 11-17 have experienced at least one form of abuse in their lives, 7% of respondents have attempted suicide, and 16% of teenagers have mutilated themselves. The statistics conducted in Poland in 2017-2018 recorded: in 2017 the number of 116, and in 2018 – 97 suicide attempts ended in death. There were 5 deaths in 2017 and 9 in 2018 in Lubelskie Voivodeship, what shows an increase by 80% in 12 months. In the 7-12 age group in 2017, only one suicide attempt ended up in death was reported, in 2018 the number increased to 5 – none of them concerned the Lublin Province.Conclusions. Suicide attempts ending up in death in 2018 accounted for 2.30% of suicide attempts undertaken in Lublin, while in Poland they constituted 1.87%. The main reasons for suicide attempts among minors are: the lack of acceptance, low self-esteem and peer violence, both physical and mental. Mass media have an influence on juvenile suicides. Belief in “multiple lives” perpetuated by computer games and films can have an impact on suicide attempts.

Abstract The expectation that voters behave rationally has been challenged through studies suggesting that “irrelevant events” like natural disasters and sports results change voting behavior. We test the effect of irrelevant events by matching candidate-level election results from Irish general (1922–2020) and local elections (1942–2019) with games in the men's Gaelic football and hurling championships, the most popular sports in Ireland. Although Irish citizens care deeply about sports, we fail to find any relationship between match results and support for incumbents or politicians of government parties. These findings hold when applying an “unexpected event during survey design” to two representative surveys. Our results contribute to the literature on political accountability and point to conditional effects of irrelevant events.

If Blake is right and the path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom then video games ought to provide plenty of shortcuts along the way. Wading through gore, dismemberment and the occasional bout of torture, violent games have pushed the limits of depiction of violence. While even video nasties pad the ‘money shot’ scenes of extremity with exposition and story (however flimsy), video games concentrate more carnage per minute than any other media form – so why are so many of us increasingly drawn to them as a leisure activity? Of course it is wrong to lump all video games together with violent games, as game critics are liable to do. US lawyer and anti-video game campaigner Jack Thompson describes games as ‘murder simulators’ that train players into violent responses through operant conditioning and rewards. He describes game playing as an antisocial, “”masturbatory activity”:http://www.netjak.com/review.php/1091”. Indeed it is mainly through the conduct of critics like Thompson and censors that games are visible in mainstream culture, which is ironic given the large audience that games have. In Australia, video games have been at the vanguard of the steady censorship creep which has been occurring over the last few years, banning games outright or forcing local distributors censored versions. Unless they are regular visitors to the Office of Film and Literature Classification website, or one of the watchdog sites, such as Refused Classification, most Australians are unaware that they are watching censored films, playing censored games. Earlier in 2006 the graffiti game Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents under Pressure was banned on a little-used regulation that it promoted crime (in this case the crime was graffiti and fare evasion; the OFLC did not have an issue with the violence in the game). Since then, these ‘crime promotion’ principles have been extended to ban Islamic books, a return to direct political censorship in Australia. So what is it about games that have stirred regulators into action? Why are games convenient scapegoats to extend the net of censorship? It is certainly not because game playing is not a minority activity – a recent survey conducted by Bond University indicated that 76% of Australian households have game hardware, that the average age of gamers is 24 and that 38% of gamers were female. Perhaps it has to do with ambivalence toward the extreme content in games, even from those who play them. With a brief excursion through a set of recent video games I can sneak up behind the unsuspecting and slit their throats (Splinter Cell), shake down prostitutes (Grand Theft Auto), torture enemies with power tools (The Punisher) and tear off someone’s arm and beat them with it (Stubbs the Zombie). These are just the interactive elements, if we figure in the horrors we observe rather than perform in games like the Resident Evil or Silent Hill series we have a catalogue of extremity that surpasses the video nasties of the 1980s. The extremity does collect around violence and horror, sexual content is largely missing, at least from the games available through game retailers (the adult industry has their own interactive content). Recently the first Sex in Video Games conference was held in San Francisco, flagging emerging trends in this area. One of the more high profile games to be banned for sexual content in Australia, then released in an edited form was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas because of the ‘hot coffee’ sexual content. What is striking about this content is that is was only accessible through a downloaded modification in the PC version and not accessible from the console versions – which did not stop the censors banning all versions of the game entirely. These concerns about extreme violence and sexual content are made more complicated when we go beyond elements scripted by game designers and begin to consider interactively generated content, emergent gameplay, online interaction and the ability to modify games. It is clear that this is media that is very different to older media forms, yet too often we criticise and censor the gaming experience using film as a benchmark. Concepts of realism, impact and justification are borrowed directly from film analysis, primarily because we lack a critical language to understand and discuss video games. But 50 Cent: Bulletproof is different to Salo, on so many levels. We do not understand the impact that video games have on us, and particularly the effect that they have on children. Media studies research does not help, being intractably locked between the those who see media as programming human behaviour and those who believe audiences are in control. As a result is all too easy to give into moral panics, on the basis of what games might do. Games are also a convenient scapegoat for other social problems, such as with the Columbine massacre. Regulators therefore take a conservative stance on video game dangers, using children as the benchmark for everyone. In Australia there is no R rating available to games. If games fulfil the criteria for an R, they are Refused Classification, in the same category as child pornography and extreme violent pornography. The federal laws control commercial distributors but the classification decisions also feed into ancillary state laws which give police wide powers to detain, search and prosecute those who distribute informally. This is of concern for game players but more worrying now that the principles used to regulate games have been extended to political texts. In Australia we also have the unusual principle that media which promote crime or instruct in the matter of crime can be refused classification and fall into the same regulatory net. This was the principle under which Getting Up was banned but has potential for growth to other games and media generally. There have only been a few decisions in this area but they make clear that censors have very broad discretion (most crime movies could fall foul of this provision), that the regulators have very little empirical evidence on what causes criminality and that they adopt a zero tolerance attitude to satire. So what does this increasing surveillance mean for the future of video games? For mainstream gaming not much, the industry has always had peripheral controversy. From the blocky extremity of 1982’s Custer’s Revenge to modern games like Reservoir Dogs (banned in Australia in June 2006) some developers have pushed the boundaries, usually overtly courting controversy but the backlash seems to be gaining momentum. The trend toward censorship of games in Australia would seem to bear the hallmarks of a moral panic, if not for the medium’s widespread penetration into our culture and the size of the audience. Most of the games which have been banned have passed unnoticed not being commercially successful or reviewed well overseas, but this censorship sets ugly precedents. Video games are yet to really develop an avant garde or art-house, but if they are, this process will be hampered by legal controls that do not understand the medium and are not committed to free expression as an ideal. It is clear that, for various reasons, there is little serious public discourse around games beyond what is lead by pro-censorship critics and regulators. The statistics indicate that the majority of Australians play games or at least have contact with someone who does, yet games enjoy little of the public discussion and criticism that films or television do, where the audience is presumed to be broader. Many gamers are even embarrassed to discuss their hobby, putting it on par with consumption of pornography as embarrassing, juvenile or as Thompson would suggest masturbatory. But just as pornography has become subject of more serious critical attention despite the potential cringe, so to do games. Part of the change will come as there is more critical academic engagement. This is not suggesting that games should ‘grow up’ or aspire to art. Part of their appeal lies in their engagement with the id, the potential for extremity. Rather than argue that games are valid despite their excesses, might we perhaps look to the excesses in order to understand the appeal? Don’t knock the pleasures of beating someone to death with their own arm until you’ve tried it. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Beattie, Scott. "Extremity, Video Games and the Censors." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php>. APA Style Beattie, S. (Nov. 2006) "Extremity, Video Games and the Censors," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/08-beattie.php>.

I called your producer on the way here in the car because I was very excited. I found out … I did one of those genetic testing things and I found out that I'm 63 percent Irish … I had no idea. I had no idea! I thought I was Scottish and Welsh. It turns out my parents are just full of shit, I guess. But now I’m Irish and it just makes so much sense! I'm a really good drinker. I love St. Patrick's Day. Potatoes are delicious. I'm looking forward to meeting all my cousins … [to Conan O’Brien] You and I are probably related! … Now I get to say things like, “It’s in me genes! I love that Conan O’Brien; he’s such a nice fella.” You’re kinda like a giant leprechaun. (Reese Witherspoon, Tuesday 21 March 2017)IntroductionAs an Irishman and a football fan, I watched the unfolding 2016 UEFA European Championship in France (hereafter ‘Euro 2016’) with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Although the Republic of Ireland team was eventually knocked out of the competition in defeat to the host nation, the players performed extremely well – most notably in defeating Italy 1:0. It is not the on-field performance of the Irish team that interests me in this short article, however, but rather how Irish fans travelling to the competition were depicted in the surrounding international news coverage. In particular, I focus on the centrality of fan footage – shot on smart phones and uploaded to YouTube (in most cases by fans themselves) – in this news coverage. In doing so, I reflect on how sports fans contribute to wider understandings of nationness in the global imagination and how their behaviour is often interpreted (as in the case here) through long-established tropes about people and places. The Media ManifoldTo “depict” something is to represent it in words and pictures. As the contemporary world is largely shaped by and dependent on mass media – and different forms of media have merged (or “converged”) through digital media platforms – mediated forms of depiction have become increasingly important in our lives. On one hand, the constant connectivity made possible in the digital age has made the representation of people and places less controllable, insofar as the information and knowledge about our world circulating through media devices are partly created by ordinary people. On the other hand, traditional broadcast media arguably remain the dominant narrators of people and places worldwide, and their stories, Gerbner reminds us, are largely formula-driven and dramatically charged, and work to “retribalize” modern society. However, a more important point, I suggest, is that so-called new and old media can no longer be thought of as separate and discrete; rather, our attention should focus on the complex interrelations made possible by deep mediatisation (Couldry and Hepp).As an example, consider that the Youtube video of Reese Witherspoon’s recent appearance on the Conan O’Brien chat show – from which the passage at the start of this article is taken – had already been viewed 54,669 times when I first viewed it, a mere 16 hours after it was originally posted. At that point, the televised interview had already been reported on in a variety of international digital news outlets, including rte.ie, independent.ie., nydailynews.com, msn.com, huffingtonpost.com, cote-ivoire.com – and myriad entertainment news sites. In other words, this short interview was consumed synchronously and asynchronously, over a number of different media platforms; it was viewed and reviewed, and critiqued and commented upon, and in turn found itself the subject of news commentary, which fed the ongoing cycle. And yet, it is important to also note that a multiplicity of media interactions does not automatically give rise to oppositional discourse and ideological contestation, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, how ostensibly ‘different’ kinds of media can work to produce a broadly shared construction of a people and place is particularly relevant here. Just as Reese Witherspoon’s interview on the Conan O’Brien show perpetuates a highly stereotypical version of Irishness across a number of platforms, news coverage of Irish fans at Euro 2016 largely conformed to established tropes about Irish people, but this was also fed – to some extent – by Irish fans themselves.Irish Identity, Sport, and the Global ImaginationThere is insufficient space here to describe in any detail the evolving representation of Irish identity, about which a vast literature has developed (nationally and internationally) over the past several decades. As with other varieties of nationness, Irishness has been constructed across a variety of cultural forms, including advertising, art, film, novels, travel brochures, plays and documentaries. Importantly, Irishness has also to a great extent been constructed outside of Ireland (Arrowsmith; Negra).As is well known, the Irish were historically constructed by their colonial masters as a small uncivilised race – as primitive wayward children, prone to “sentimentality, ineffectuality, nervous excitability and unworldliness” (Fanning 33). When pondering the “Celtic nature,” the renowned English poet and cultural critic Mathew Arnold concluded that “sentimental” was the best single term to use (100). This perception pervaded internationally, with early depictions of Irish-Americans in US cinema centring on varieties of negative excess, such as lawlessness, drunkenness and violence (Rains). Against this prevailing image of negative excess, the intellectuals and artists associated with what became known as the Celtic Revival began a conscious effort to “rebrand” Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, reversing the negatives of the colonial project and celebrating Irish tradition, language and culture (Fanning).At first, only distinctly Irish sports associated with the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) were co-opted in this very particular nation-building project. Since then, however, sport more generally has acted as a site for the negotiation of a variety of overlapping Irish identities. Cronin, for example, describes how the GAA successfully repackaged itself in the 1990s to reflect the confidence of Celtic Tiger Irishness while also remaining rooted in the counties and parishes across Ireland. Studies of Irish football and rugby have similarly examined how these sports have functioned as representatives of changed or evolving Irish identities (Arrowsmith; Free). And yet, throughout Ireland’s changing economic fortunes – from boom to bust, to the gradual renewal of late – a touristic image of Irishness has remained hegemonic in the global imagination. In popular culture, and especially American popular culture, Ireland is often depicted as a kind of pre-industrial theme park – a place where the effects of modernity are felt less, or are erased altogether (Negra). The Irish are known for their charm and sociability; in Clancy’s words, they are seen internationally as “simple, clever and friendly folk” (98). We can identify a number of representational tropes within this dominant image, but two in particular are apposite here: ‘smallness’ and ‘happy-go-luckiness’.Sporting NewsBefore we consider Euro 2016, it is worth briefly considering how the news industry approaches such events. “News”, Dahlgren reminds us, is not so much “information” as it is a specific kind of cultural discourse. News, in other words, is a particular kind of discursive composition that constructs and narrates stories in particular ways. Approaching sports coverage from this vantage point, Poulton and Roderick (xviii) suggest that “sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama.” Similarly, Jason Tuck observes that the media have long had a tendency to employ the “vocabulary of war” to “hype up sporting events,” a discursive tactic which, he argues, links “the two areas of life where the nation is a primary signifier” (190-191).In short, sport is abundant in news values, and media professionals strive to produce coverage that is attractive, interesting and exciting for audiences. Stead (340) suggests that there are three key characteristics governing the production of “media sports packages”: spectacularisation, dramatisation, and personalisation. These production characteristics ensure that sports coverage is exciting and interesting for viewers, but that it also in some respects conforms to their expectations. “This ‘emergent’ quality of sport in the media helps meet the perpetual audience need for something new and different alongside what is familiar and known” (Rowe 32). The disproportionate attention to Irish fans at Euro 2016 was perhaps new, but the overall depiction of the Irish was rather old, I would argue. The news discourse surrounding Euro 2016 worked to suggest, in the Irish case at least, that the nation was embodied not only in its on-field athletic representatives but more so, perhaps, in its travelling fans.Euro 2016In June 2016 the Euros kicked off in France, with the home team beating Romania 2-1. Despite widespread fears of potential terrorist attacks and disruption, the event passed successfully, with Portugal eventually lifting the Henri Delaunay Trophy. As the competition progressed, the behaviour of Irish fans quickly became a central news story, fuelled in large part by smart phone footage uploaded to the internet by Irish fans themselves. Amongst the many videos uploaded to the internet, several became the focus of news reports, especially those in which the goodwill and childlike playfulness of the Irish were on show. In one such video, Irish fans are seen singing lullabies to a baby on a Bordeaux train. In another video, Irish fans appear to help a French couple change a flat tire. In yet another video, Irish fans sing cheerfully as they clean up beer cans and bottles. (It is noteworthy that as of July 2017, some of these videos have been viewed several million times.)News providers quickly turned their attention to Irish fans, sometimes using these to draw stark contrasts with the behaviour of other fans, notably English and Russian fans. Buzzfeed, followed by ESPN, followed by Sky News, Le Monde, Fox News, the Washington Post and numerous other providers celebrated the exploits of Irish fans, with some such as Sky News and Aljazeera going so far as to produce video montages of the most “memorable moments” involving “the boys in green.” In an article titled ‘Irish fans win admirers at Euro 2016,’ Fox News reported that “social media is full of examples of Irish kindness” and that “that Irish wit has been a fixture at the tournament.” Aljazeera’s AJ+ news channel produced a video montage titled ‘Are Irish fans the champions of Euro 2016?’ which included spliced footage from some of the aforementioned videos. The Daily Mirror (UK edition) praised their “fun loving approach to watching football.” Similarly, a headline for NPR declared, “And as if they could not be adorable enough, in a quiet moment, Irish fans sang on a French train to help lull a baby to sleep.” It is important to note that viewer comments under many of these articles and videos were also generally effusive in their praise. For example, under the video ‘Irish Fans help French couple change flat tire,’ one viewer (Amsterdam 410) commented, ‘Irish people nicest people in world by far. they always happy just amazing people.’ Another (Juan Ardilla) commented, ‘Irish fans restored my faith in humanity.’As the final stages of the tournament approached, the Mayor of Paris announced that she was awarding the Medal of the City of Paris to Irish fans for their sporting goodwill. Back home in Ireland, the behaviour of Irish fans in France was also celebrated, with President Michael D. Higgins commenting that “Ireland could not wish for better ambassadors abroad.” In all of this news coverage, the humble kindness, helpfulness and friendliness of the Irish are depicted as native qualities and crystallise as a kind of ideal national character. Though laudatory, the tropes of smallness and happy-go-luckiness are again evident here, as is the recurrent depiction of Irishness as an ‘innocent identity’ (Negra). The “boys” in green are spirited in a non-threatening way, as children generally are. Notably, Stephan Reich, journalist with German sports magazine 11Freunde wrote: “the qualification of the Irish is a godsend. The Boys in Green can celebrate like no other nation, always peaceful, always sympathetic and emphatic, with an infectious, childlike joy.” Irishness as Antidote? The centrality of the Irish fan footage in the international news coverage of Euro 2016 is significant, I suggest, but interpreting its meaning is not a simple or straightforward task. Fans (like everyone) make choices about how to present themselves, and these choices are partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly spontaneous and partly conditioned. Pope (2008), for example, draws on Emile Durkheim to explain the behaviour of sports fans sociologically. “Sporting events,” Pope tells us, “exemplify the conditions of religious ritual: high rates of group interaction, focus on sacred symbols, and collective ritual behaviour symbolising group membership and strengthening shared beliefs, values, aspirations and emotions” (Pope 85). Pope reminds us, in other words, that what fans do and say, and wear and sing – in short, how they perform – is partly spontaneous and situated, and partly governed by a long-established fandom pedagogy that implies familiarity with a whole range of international football fan styles and embodied performances (Rowe). To this, we must add that fans of a national sports team generally uphold shared understandings of what constitutes desirable and appropriate patriotic behaviour. Finally, in the case reported here, we must also consider that the behaviour of Irish fans was also partly shaped by their awareness of participating in the developing media sport spectacle and, indeed, of their own position as ‘suppliers’ of news content. In effect, Irish fans at Euro 2016 occupied an interesting hybrid position between passive consumption and active production – ‘produser’ fans, as it were.On one hand, therefore, we can consider fan footage as evidence of spontaneous displays of affective unity, captured by fellow participants. The realism or ‘authenticity’ of these supposedly natural and unscripted performances is conveyed by the grainy images, and amateur, shaky camerawork, which ironically work to create an impression of unmediated reality (see Goldman and Papson). On the other hand, Mike Cronin considers them contrived, staged, and knowingly performative, and suggestive of “hyper-aware” Irish fans playing up to the camera.However, regardless of how we might explain or interpret these fan performances, it is the fact that they play a role in making Irishness public that most interests me here. For my purposes, the most important consideration is how the patriotic performances of Irish fans both fed and harmonized with the developing news coverage; the resulting depiction of the Irish was partly an outcome of journalistic conventions and partly a consequence of the self-essentialising performances of Irish fans. In a sense, these fan-centred videos were ready-made or ‘packaged’ for an international news audience: they are short, dramatic and entertaining, and their ideological content is in keeping with established tropes about Irishness. As a consequence, the media-sport discourse surrounding Euro 2016 – itself a mixture of international news values and home-grown essentialism – valorised a largely touristic understanding of Irishness, albeit one that many Irish people wilfully celebrate.Why such a construction of Irishness is internationally appealing is unclear, but it is certainly not new. John Fanning (26) cites a number of writers in highlighting that Ireland has long nurtured a romantic self-image that presents the country as a kind of balm for the complexities of the modern world. For example, he cites New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who observed in 2001 that “people all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of spirituality hoping to siphon off what they can feed to their souls which have become hungry for something other than consumption and computers.” Similarly, Diane Negra writes that “virtually every form of popular culture has in one way or another, presented Irishness as a moral antidote to contemporary ills ranging from globalisation to post-modern alienation, from crises over the meaning and practice of family values to environmental destruction” (3). Earlier, I described the Arnoldian image of the Irish as a race governed by ‘negative excess’. Arguably, in a time of profound ideological division and resurgent cultural nationalism – a time of polarisation and populism, of Trumpism and Euroscepticism – this ‘excess’ has once again been positively recoded, and now it is the ‘sentimental excess’ of the Irish that is imagined as a salve for the cultural schisms of our time.ConclusionMuch has been made of new media powers to contest official discourses. Sports fans, too, are now considered much less ‘controllable’ on account of their ability to disrupt official messages online (as well as offline). The case of Irish fans at Euro 2016, however, offers a reminder that we must avoid routine assumptions that the “uses” made of “new” and “old” media are necessarily divergent (Rowe, Ruddock and Hutchins). My interest here was less in what any single news item or fan-produced video tells us, but rather in the aggregate construction of Irishness that emerges in the media-sport discourse surrounding this event. Relatedly, in writing about the London Olympics, Wardle observed that most of what appeared on social media concerning the Games did not depart significantly from the celebratory tone of mainstream news media organisations. “In fact the absence of any story that threatened the hegemonic vision of the Games as nation-builder, shows that while social media provided an additional and new form of newsgathering, it had to fit within the traditional news structures, routines and agenda” (Wardle 12).Obviously, it is important to acknowledge the contestability of all media texts, including the news items and fan footage mentioned here, and to recognise that such texts are open to multiple interpretations based on diverse reading positions. And yet, here I have suggested that there is something of a ‘preferred’ reading in the depiction of Irish fans at Euro 2016. The news coverage, and the footage on which it draws, are important because of what they collectively suggest about Irish national identity: here we witness a shift from identity performance to identity writ large, and one means of analysing their international (and intertextual significance), I have suggested, is to view them through the prism of established tropes about Irishness.Travelling sports fans – for better or worse – are ‘carriers’ of places and cultures, and they remind us that “there is also a cultural economy of sport, where information, images, ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where metaphorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of publicly listed sports clubs) stocks rise and fall” (Rowe 24). There is no question, to borrow Rowe’s term, that Ireland’s ‘stocks’ rose considerably on account of Euro 2016. In news terms, Irish fans provided entertainment value; they were the ‘human interest’ story of the tournament; they were the ‘feel-good’ factor of the event – and importantly, they were the suppliers of much of this content (albeit unofficially). Ultimately, I suggest that we think of the overall depiction of the Irish at Euro 2016 as a co-construction of international news media practices and the self-presentational practices of Irish fans themselves. The result was not simply a depiction of idealised fandom, but more importantly, an idealisation of a people and a place, in which the plucky little people on tour became the global standard bearers of Irish identity.ReferencesArnold, Mathew. Celtic Literature. 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