Bringing the GAA to book
IT’S been a fortnight or so full of GAA books, but don’t roll your eyes when we mention another one.
Paul Rouse, Mark Duncan and Mike Cronin have written “The GAA – A People’s History”, part of the GAA’s oral history project, run by Boston College Ireland.
“Like the title suggests, it focuses on people’s experiences of the GAA,” says Rouse. “Many other GAA books have tended to be administrative studies or player autobiographies and so on.
“We’ve tried to put together a history not just of the 60 or 70 minutes of a match on Sunday, but to outline people’s week-long engagement with the GAA.”
Something that comes across very strongly in the book was the grip that one “foreign game” in particular had on the country at the time the GAA was founded.
“It’s extraordinary,” says Rouse, “In the winter of 1882 Michael Cusack, who was a devoted cricketer, wrote: ‘Boys dream away the winter nights spend the winter nights dreaming of hitting the six to win for their parish, and to be the toast of that parish’.
“He argued that every parish should have a cricket club, which shows you the hold that cricket had at that time. Kilkenny had a thriving cricket scene, for instance. Tullaroan, which has obviously become synonymous with hurling, had several cricket clubs.”
There’s a good sense of Cusack the man in the book, or as Rouse puts it, Cusack the flawed genius.
“He was not a man for understatement in anything he did,” says Rouse. “A genius, but a flawed genius.
“His achievements were immense – he said from the outset that they would sweep the country and control sport and he was right up to a point.
“Cusack was very temperamental, and there were very few people who got involved with him that he didn’t fall out with. Which is not to say he should be confused with the cruel caricature Joyce drew of him in Ulysses, but I doubt that the GAA would have survived without Maurice Davin’s calming influence.
“They were a perfect match – Cusack the visionary and Davin, the meticulous committee man. Remember, Cusack was removed as secretary of the GAA in 1886 – it’s a fair achievement to get thrown out of your own Association.”
A striking photograph in the book shows church dignitaries at the grand opening of Fitzgerald Stadium – with comfortable armchairs in place for them along the sideline.
“It should always be remembered that the Church was very involved for the first couple of years of the GAA,” says Rouse. “Then it withdrew due to the involvement of Republicans with the association.
“It’s only with the foundation of the Free State that you get the absolute affinity or identification between the Catholic Church and the GAA. The idea of the parish and the club in the parish – it’s interesting to see how much that rooted the GAA in the church as opposed to just being a structural convenience for the GAA.
“I personally would feel the involvement of individual churchmen in the GAA was rooted in whether they were interested in hurling or football on an individual basis. To what extent is the GAA still connected? Its constitution says it’s non-sectarian, but the symbols of the church are everywhere within the GAA.”
Rouse gives full credit to the photographs in the book for bringing bygone days back to vivid life.
“We were given a complete free run through the archives of the GAA, and we found original documentation there with the help of Mark Reynolds, the GAA archivist, that was fantastic – original documents from Cusack and Davin, and when you see that kind of stuff it’s amazing.
“The second thing is the photographs – we pulled together thousands of images – there’s one photograph from that era which shows action from a hurling match played near Borrisoleigh, and a football game in Dungarvan. Those are absolutely extraordinary.
“You’d read about these games, but to actually see photographs of the players in action is fantastic.”
* ‘The GAA: A People’s History’ by Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse is published by Collins Press.
michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
