It is unlikely that many Irish Olympians could lay claim to getting a mention in a Christy Moore song and being early proponents of the notion that you should ‘vote early, vote often’
An Olympian, a revolutionary and a Christy Moore song: Bob Hilliard was the boxing Irish clergyman who fought against Franco
An Olympian, a revolutionary and a Christy Moore song: Bob Hilliard was the boxing Irish clergyman who fought against FrancoIn his 1998 book Unusual Suspects: Twelve Radical Clergymen, Denis Carroll devotes a chapter to Hilliard that captures just how extraordinary his life was. He could, most probably, have set aside all 292 of the book’s pages for him.
It was in boxing, though, that Hilliard excelled, and after winning the Irish amateur bantamweight title he was selected for the boxing team for the 1924 Paris Olympics, the first time Ireland competed in the Games as an independent nation. Of the eight men picked – only seven competed in the end, Cork’s Dan Flaherty failing to make the weight – Hilliard was the sole non-Army man.
In all, five of the seven Irish fighters were beaten in their opening bouts, Tipperary welterweight Paddy Dwyer faring the best of all by reaching the quarter-finals. It wasn’t the most auspicious of Olympic debuts for independent Ireland, then, the only medals won in 1924 were those of the non-sporty kind –There was no athletes’ village back then, certainly not as we know them now, but you’d guess Hilliard would have enjoyed being shacked up with Yeats, and especially Gogarty.
Hilliard returned to Dublin to complete his erstwhile abandoned degree in Trinity, while also resuming his boxing career, winning the Irish featherweight championship in 1931. He was subsequently ordained as a pastor, took up a position at a church in Belfast, before suffocating debt and disillusionment with his role prompted him to leave his family and return to London in 1934.
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