ABSTRACT
Surfing does not invoke the same ‘national’ affiliations in either practice or spectatorship in comparison to other ‘sports’ on the island of Ireland, such as hurling, rugby or football. This chapter asks why, arguing that dominant Irish sports and their mediated representations throughout the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries have been informed by modernist political and religious narratives and limiting discourses of Irish ‘national’ identity. It then argues that the practice and cultural representation of surfing offers a postnational and postmodern alternative to traditional definitions of Irish identity. This postnational shift (caused by myriad factors) situates an Irish local subcultural identity as part of a global imagined community unconcerned by national borders or previous constructions of an Irish national identity or heritage. Rather than being an esoteric point, this has significant implications for the funding of surfing as a ‘sport’ within Ireland, and for how the state regards the practice and its institutional bodies.
