Colin Sheridan: GAA missionaries represent the ideals of the association 

Next week, in a small town in West Thailand over 60 players will meet to play a domestic tournament as part of the Thailand GAA club. A Castlebar man was instrumental in making this happen

Young Gaelic footballers at Thailand GAA Picture via: thailandgaa.com

Buried deep in Don DeLillo's prescient opus Underworld, there is an obscure and forgettable reference to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx; ‘where the Irish play their games’. It’s a throwaway sentence in a book of wild magnificence, but there it sits for eternity as maybe the only tip of the cap in living literature to the GAA abroad.

Underworld was published in 1997 and spans decades, and though Van Cortlandt Park, and Gaelic Park and Canton in Boston and Ruislip in London are still very much where the Irish still play their games, the reach of the Irish diaspora has evolved since DeLillo wrote about life above the subways. A new GAA has emerged, in Hanoi and Helsinki and countless other cities across the globe. Gaelic games have gone global, and in doing so, have never been more connected to their origins; promoting community and culture.