GAA is a connection to home that spans several centuries

Patrick Kavanagh only wrote a little about Gaelic football, but what he wrote was wonderful. He understood its place in rural Ireland and his observations on the language of the game and its rhythms were perfectly judged.

This was an understanding that extended beyond Ireland. In one article he wrote of how his brother told him a story of how, on a lovely Sunday morning, he was strolling around San Francisco on the edge of the Pacific Ocean when he saw ‘men of a rural Irish complex’ hurrying along with little bundles under their arms.

A short distance away, he came upon a Gaelic football match: ‘Everything was at home: there were the men running up and down the unpailed sideline slicing at the toes which encroached with hurleys and crying: “Keep back there now, Keep back there now.” And all around the pitch, the familiar battlecrys of the Dalcassians were to be heard: “Gut yer man”, “Bog into him.” Not a man of them had ever left home and the mysterious Pacific was just a boghole, gurgling with eels and frogs.’