140 years of the GAA

Killinan End column

Some ninety years ago, the GAA reached its first significant milestone when celebrations of the association’s Silver Jubilee took place. Half a century into the organisation’s existence it was time to not only celebrate and acknowledge the achievements of the founders but to take stock and consider the strengths and weaknesses of the organisation.

It was an organisation which came into being in 1884 at a meeting in Thurles which had a relatively low profile. That the association was formed at the time it was is perhaps unsurprising. It was a time of revival of national ideals, a renaissance of the literature, language, and theatre of the country, to recognise that an Ireland striving for ultimate independence needed to have a separate cultural identity to Britain.

It was also a time when codification of sports was truly underway with rules being agreed and competitions inaugurated in many sports. With the advent of rail travel in the nineteenth century the idea that teams from different counties might be able to play each other in competition and travel to do so did not seem absolutely unimaginable. It is also reasonable to suspect that the GAA’s founder members were not inclined to give all other major sporting organisations a jump start in providing well-organised competitions for their participants.

The GAA had managed to remain – organisationally at least - non-political since its foundation. At the same time, it was a very porous vessel in the context of political realities in Ireland. During the Revolution years post-1916, while the GAA avoided public proclamations, its players and officials were up to their necks in events. On one occasion Tipperary travelled to play Cork in the Munster championship and part of the pre-match activity was to have a meeting of the teams to discuss progress of the Irish Volunteers in their local areas.

The controversy around Charles Stewart Parnell – the so-called Parnell Split – caused ructions in the GAA in the 1890s and the association did well to surf the wave of such discord and friction in that decade. Some counties were split into a couple of County Boards vying for authority over the organisation during that decade which cannot have done much for broader unity and cohesion.

Emigration was a social reality as well. The population of Mayo had decreased almost as much since the foundation of the GAA as it had over the decade of the Famine. It was hardly coincidental that the GAA, in 1888, had organised a promotional tour to the USA. That was the very same year that ‘The Celtic Football Club’ was established in Glasgow as a charitable organisation to raise funds for impoverished Irish in the East End of that city. This was inspired by the foundation of Hibernian Football Club in Edinburgh a few years earlier. It gives some indication how these cities were teeming with Irish as does the returning to Parliament of an Irish Nationalist MP in Liverpool as in UK elections as late as 1929. Naturally those who had emigrated included many potential future leaders and organisers.

The years of Revolution and Civil War took their toll, yet the games were kept going and the roll of honour has no blank spaces despite years of monumental upheaval from 1919 onwards. Across the border, challenges of a different sort emerged. That was, politically, a Unionist state, which was naturally hostile to the GAA and in the early twentieth-century the GAA was in ribbons organisationally in counties such as Derry and Down, yet it came back powerfully.

It is only fair to say that the South, as GAA official historian Marcus de Búrca has observed, was a cold house for Protestants which perhaps reflected the situation in the country generally after the revolution. Nonetheless he has also noted that there is no evidence of the Catholic Church influencing the GAA on any major decisions or policy. Of course, where you often had priests in charge of County Boards and involved in running the organisation at various levels perhaps the influence of the church was wielded more subtly.

But substantial organisation across the country was a slow process. Waterford did not become a force in Munster hurling until the 1930s. Their appearance in the 1934 Munster Final against an all-conquering Limerick team was the Déise’s fourth final in six years – they had played in just two finals in the first forty years of the GAA.

Tipperary by contrast was in a heathy state. In 1934, the Irish Independent and the Irish Press published supplements to celebrate the GAA’s milestone. The nom de plume of the writer on Tipperary - ‘Cathedral Town’ – might suggest some bias but they were bullish about the county’s contribution. The legendary names get their due; Tubberadora, Horse and Jockey, Two-Mile-Borris, Thurles, Toomevara and Boherlahan. Perhaps a future writer in the 2034 version will find a place for Loughmore-Castleiney too.