The Irish championship 1974 was an 8-round, 28-player Swiss held in the Dublin C.C. clubrooms at 20 Lincoln Place from July 6-13, 1974. A full report has been added to the archives here: see also the Irish championships and Tournaments pages.
Irish chess was in the middle of a major generational transition: the Fischer boom was in full swing, and numbers for the championship were correspondingly up; though many of the players drawn in had still to work their way through the system and it would not be until the end of the decade that numbers would peak. Added to that, almost of the players who had dominated the championship for the previous decade and more almost simultaneously stopped participating. Wolfgang Heidenfeld (champion in 1958, ’63, ’64, ’67, ’68, ’72) had played his last Irish championship the previous year, but it would not have been evident at the time that the defending champion Hugh MacGrillen would never play in another championship, or that Paul Henry (1970) and John Moles (1966, ’71) would likewise drop out.
The proximity of the Nice Olympiad (June 6-30, 1974, ending six days before the championship) must have been a contributing factor: in the event, there were no participants from the Olympiad team (MacGrillen, Michael Littleton, David Cox, Henry, Heidenfeld, Ray Cassidy) in the championship. There were also no former champions.
For all that, the event was roughly as strong as a typical championship of the era, with Bernard Kernan as top seed, and the major challenges expected to come from Tony Dennehy, Paul Cassidy, and Art Coldrick. As it happened, Kernan was off form throughout the event, and Dennehy and Cassidy lost in the first round. This opened the way for Tony Doyle, who raced into a lead with 5/5, and then easily held off Cassidy, Kernan, and Dennehy in the last three rounds to win in a bit of a canter, finishing a point clear of the field. Dennehy finished clear second, and Joe Noone tied for third with Kernan.
No games are available, unfortunately.