MAKING HISTORY SKILLS BOOK Hill 16 or Hill 60?


Hill 16 is a terraced area of Croke Park. Evidence suggests it was once called Hill 60. Study the sources below and answer the questions that follow.


LSource 1: CrokePark.ie During Easter Week 1916 Irish nationalists staged a Rising against British rule in Ireland with headquarters in the GPO on Dublin’s O’Connell Street. In the aftermath of the Rising rubble from the bombed out buildings on O’Connell Street was brought to Croke Park to construct a viewing mound for spectators at the north end of the stadium. This mound became known as Hill 16.


(Accessed in November 2017, this has since been removed from CrokePark.ie.)


LSource 3: RTÉ.ie [In September 1931] Dan McCarthy, a former president of the GAA and then Chairman of the Munster Council, said that he took exception to the use of the name Hill 60.He said that Croke Park was ‘sacred ground … sanctified by the blood of martyrs’. The fight for Irish freedom should be commemorated, McCarthy argued, rather than one that ‘took place in a foreign country, fought by a foreign army’ … Finally,McCarthy said that they should call it Hill 16, but that if they couldn’t, they should find some other appropriate title. They called it Hill 16 … It was one thing, of course, to change the name; it


was another to change its origin myth… The first mention of the rubble of the 1916 Rising being used in the redevelopment comes from a letter from ‘Two Gaels’ to the editor of the Meath Chronicle. These men in urging Meath to victory in an All-Ireland Final in 1939, note that the team will be facing the tricolor that will fly above Hill 16 during the playing of the National Anthem ‘in respect to Ireland’s fallen heroes, whose blood stains the debris in that immortal hill’. And so the story began to take hold; it was


repeated in the newspapers and eventually hardened into fact: Hill 16 had been built from the rubble of the 1916 Rising.


LSource 2: www.SportsJoe.ie Despite Croke Park’s account of history, and the story around Dubliners carrying rubble on carts from O’Connell Street to build the terrace, this is a complete fabrication, according to leading historian Dr Paul Rouse. Rouse says the terrace was actually built in 1915, in


time for that year’s All-Ireland Finals, and was named Hill 60 after a battle in the First World War in Gallipoli. The August 1915 battle for a hill in Turkey saw the


Royal Dublin Fusiliers suffer heavy losses, and, in keeping with the tradition at the time, the hill was named in its honour. Just as the Kop in Anfield is named after a battle in the Boer War, the terrace became Hill 60. According to UCD’s Dr Rouse: ‘The redeveloped


corner of Croke Park was considered to resemble the description of Hill 60, and soon after that part of the ground became known as Hill 60.’


LSource 4: Connaught Tribune, 1 October 1938 If you were on ‘Hill 60’ at Croke Park during the All- Ireland Final, then you can start looking for yourself in the huge crowd pictured … The attendance at the match was seventy thousand.


LSource 5: Munster Express,


11 September 1936 When describing the attendance at the 1936 All- Ireland; ‘Two-Mile-Stone and Piltown were well represented on Hill 60 at Croke Park’.


LSource 6: Irish Press, 12 September 1933 In reference to the Cavan v. Galway All-Ireland football final, you quote me as referring to the shilling side of Croke Park as ‘Hill 60’. This should have read ‘Hill 16’.


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