Category Archives: Sport

First history of GAA published 100 years ago

UPDATE:

I heard from Vincent Carmody of Listowel, a local historian and author. He writes that Thomas F. O’Sullivan and his book are not forgotten. Story of the GAA received at least five mentions in The G.A.A., A People’s History, a 2009 book by Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse.

Carmody continued:

When in Listowel, [O’Sullivan] was the driving force, both as a player and administrator of the local G.A.A. club. He later served as an administrator at both County and National level of the Association. He is credited with the proposal of Rule 27, of the G. A.A.s rule book. This came into force in 1902 and it read, ” any member of the association who plays in any way, rugby football, jockey or any imported game which is calculated or injurious affect our national pastimes, is suspended from the association” . This rule was commonly known as, The Ban. It was for a long time rigorously enforced, indeed in 1938, the then President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde, was banned from the G.A.A. , for his attendance at an International Soccer match in Dublin. The rule was deleted in 1971.

ORIGINAL POST:

A journalist’s book about the early decades of the Gaelic Athletic Association this year quietly reached the 100th anniversary of its publication. Thomas F. O’Sullivan’s Story of the GAA was based on an earlier series of newspaper articles.

thomas-f-osullivan-1The book’s 1916 publication has been lost amid all the attention to the same-year Easter Rising. Even the 1916 entry of the special 1913-1923 centenary section of the GAA’s website overlooks the book, written by one of its own members. You can read the organization’s 28 May 1916 official statement after the uprising.

Michael Cronin of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester, England, briefly noted O’Sullivan’s book in a larger essay on “Historians and the Making of Irish Nationalist Identity in the Gaelic Athletic Association.” He wrote:

O’Sullivan was a GAA official and the book presents a highly simplistic notion of the Association’s past beginning with the seven pioneers who met in Thurles in 1884 to reawaken the Gaelic nation through sport and taking the narrative up to 1916 by recounting details of major personalities, decisions taken by the Central Council and recording the results of matches.

Although there is no explicit mention of the Easter Rising as such an inclusion would have meant that the book would not be approved by military censors, there is an implicit celebration of the Rising as those GAA men who took part are included in the list of GAA personalities.

Although not a widely researched history, as it is more of a contemporary account, O’Sullivan’s book is important as it sets out an accepted chronology that is rarely challenged by subsequent authors. This chronology, while celebrating the games of the Gael, primarily revolves around the role of the GAA in reawakening the national spirit.

O’Sullivan’s book does receive several mentions in The GAA & Revolution in Ireland 1913-1923, edited by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, a 2015 commemorative publication specially commissioned by the GAA.

O’Sullivan was a Kerryman, born in Listowel, according to a short History Ireland bio. He wrote for the nationalist Freeman’s Journal. 

Supporting books and bookstores in the U.S. and Ireland

UPDATE:

Here are the winners.

ORIGINAL POST:

On our way back from a long, post-election weekend on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my wife and I stopped at Unicorn Bookshop on U.S. Rt. 50, which offers “a full range of secondhand books, everything from the average to the rare.” We walked out with an armful of books, though I couldn’t find any Irish-related titles of interest.

BGE IBA brand mark CMYK blue 2015On 16 November, Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards will announce the winners of this year’s contest at a gala ceremony in Dublin. Established in 2007 by a coalition of Irish booksellers, “the over-riding motivation behind the awards is to celebrate the extraordinary quality of Irish writing, to help bring the best books to a wider readership annually, and to promote an industry under severe competitive pressures,” the contest website says.

Winners are decided by an online web-poll divided into two constituencies, a public vote and a specialist Academy vote, weighted equally and combined to produce the winners. The Academy includes 300 booksellers, librarians, non-shortlisted authors, reviewers, and journalists.

See the shortlist for Fiction Awards in 10 categories, including the Listowel Writers Week Poem of the Year. Nonfiction Awards are being contested in six categories, including cookbook and sport.

 

On Chicago, baseball, rugby and Irish news coverage

UPDATE:

The “black stain in Irish rugby has been removed,” with a first ever victory over the New Zealand All Blacks in 29 attempts, 40-29, before more than 63,000 in Chicago.

ORIGINAL POST:

The Chicago Cubs’ historic World Series victory, which ended a 108-year championship drought, generated plenty of headlines on Irish media websites. The same was not true in print the last time the team won baseball’s fall classic.

I searched the Irish Newspaper Archive but couldn’t find any Cubs coverage from October 1908. Two days after Chicago’s Series win over Detroit, the Freemans Journal reported on a “big fire” that destroyed a railroad office and corn elevator in the city. A few weeks later, Kilkenny People detailed the sensational  case of a native-born priest who survived being shot twice outside of his Chicago church “by a ruffian whom he was attempting to arrest.”

Most contemporary Irish media coverage of the Cubs’ 10-inning win over Cleveland also included references to the 5 November rugby match between Ireland and New Zealand at Chicago’s Soldier’s Field. The teams have played 28 times over 111 years, with Ireland’s best result a 10-10 draw in 1973. Maybe another championship drought will come to an end.

Meanwhile, Cubs fans can select from plenty of Irish gear at the team’s official MLB shop.

shirt

 

Biden in Ireland; McIlroy out of Olympics

As we await the outcome of the Brexit referendum, two other stories are worth a quick look:

  • U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s sentimental state visit to Ireland, and
  • Golfer Rory McIlroy’s decision to skip the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro due to concerns about the Zika virus.

Biden, in Ireland through 26 June, has met with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and President of Ireland Michael Higgins. According to a White House statement, Biden discussed the Brexit with both Irish leaders, as well as “the continuing need for reconciliation in Northern Ireland, particularly the need to deal effectively with the past.”

In addition to numerous stops in Dublin, Biden is also visiting his ancestral roots in counties Louth and Mayo. His maternal great-great-grandfather emigrated from the port of Newry, County Down, in 1849, according to genealogists. That was the middle of an Gorta Mór.

The Irish Times said: “Biden’s gregarious and emotional, garrulous and generous. He’s also, by all accounts, a bit of a spoofer. In other words, he’s a proper Irishman.”

***

As for McIlroy, The New York Times reports:

The Olympics were fraught with complications for McIlroy from the start. As a Northern Irishman, he had the choice to compete for Britain or Ireland. In 2012, he earned the animus of people in Ireland, including those in the Golfing Union of Ireland who had shepherded his development, by suggesting that he was leaning toward representing Britain because he had always felt more British than Irish.

In 2013, he said, “If I was a bit more selfish, I think it would be an easier decision.” He later pledged his allegiance to Ireland, and when asked in May about his commitment to competing, he said he was focused on the bigger picture. With golf guaranteed a spot in the Olympics for only the next two Summer Games, he said, it was imperative that the sport put its best foot forward.

Ali in Ireland: More than a boxer

The 3 June 2016 death of boxing legend and global personality Muhammad Ali is generating retrospectives and remembrances around the world. There’s plenty of coverage of his visits and connections to Ireland.

  • Ali fought in Dublin in 1972. “Ever the showman, [he] immediately captured the heart of a nation by announcing that he had Irish roots.” Ali was the great grandson of Abe Grady, who left Ennis in County Clare sometime in the 1860s and married an emancipated slave in Kentucky. From the BBC.
  • “On the morning they played their Croke Park final against Kerry in September 2002, each member of the Armagh [Gaelic football] squad woke up in the CityWest Hotel to find an inspiring letter had been pushed under their doors in the middle of the night.” From The Belfast Telegraph.
  • In June 2003, Ali and former South African president Nelson Mandela opened the 11th Special Olympics World Summer Games in Dublin. From The Irish News.
  • Ali returned to Ennis in 2009. From the Daily Mail.
  • “The Parkinson’s Association of Ireland is deeply saddened to hear of the death of the great Muhammad Ali.” Letter in The Irish Times.
IRELAND__MUHAMMAD_ALI_2641f.jpg (636×437)

Ali in Ennis. Photo: AP.

 

Best of the Blog, 2015

This is my third annual “Best of the Blog” (BOB, as my wife calls it), a look at some of the most important news stories, historical anniversaries and personal favorite posts of the past year. The items are not numbered, so as to avoid the appearance of rank. Most links are to my own posts, but a few are to outside websites.

Enjoy. Thanks for supporting the blog. And Happy New Year!

  • Four years into the “Decade of Centenaries,” 2015 proved that even as Ireland remembers its past, Ireland is not bound by its past. This was most dramatically demonstrated in May as Irish voters enshrined same-sex marriage rights in the Republic’s constitution, becoming the world’s first nation to give such approval through popular referendum. The outcome prompted Catholic Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin to comment: “The Church needs a reality check right across the board, to look at the things we are doing well and look at the areas where we need to say, have we drifted away completely from young people?”
  • Other long-standing Irish institutions also changed in 2015. Clerys, a landmark department store on O’Connell Street in Dublin, closed in June after 162 years in business. … In August, Aer Lingus was acquired by British Airways owner IAG for €1.5 billion after nearly 80 years of state ownership.
  • The erosion of the Irish language continued at “a faster rate than was predicted” by a 2007 study and “demands urgent intervention,” a government agency reported in an update this year.
  • 2015 was the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats. His poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” was celebrated during the year. And, of course, “Easter, 1916.”
  • The Republic’s official remembrance of the Easter Rising began in August with a commemorative re-enactment of the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. The original Dublin funeral of the Fenian leader, who died in New York, set the stage for the Rising eight months later. Pádraic Pearse’s oration at Rossa’ graveside became a call to arms that continues to inspire Irish patriots. One of my Kerry relatives kept a copy of an August 1933 reprint of the speech, cut from the pages of The Gaelic American.
  • I also reflected on my copy of a 1953 St. Patrick’s Day greeting from another Kerry relation.
  • In Northern Ireland, the International Fund for Ireland launched a new “Community Consolidation-Peace Consolidation” strategy for 2016-2020 focused on removing some of the more than 100 “peace walls” that separate Catholic and Protestant communities. “We have a role to take risks that governments can’t take,” IFI Chairman Dr. Adrian Johnston said during a September briefing at the Embassy of Ireland in Washington, D.C. … But a new poll showed that support for removing the physical barriers has dropped to 49 percent, compared to 58 percent in 2012.
  • The British and Irish governments announced a new political accord to overcome various crises in the North. … Seventeen years on from the historic 1998 Good Friday Agreement, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell told a Washington audience the peace talks got off to “a very rocky start” due to the long history of mistrust in Northern Ireland and “no habit of listening to the other side.”
  • An RTÉ/BBC poll revealed two-thirds of respondents living in the Republic favor political reunification of the island within their lifetime, while just under one third of those surveyed in the North share the view. … In what was described as a “rogue action,” the Republic’s tricolour flag flew over Stormont for a few hours in June.
  • Irish Minister for Diaspora Affairs Jimmy Deenihan, speaking at the  Embassy of Ireland in Washington, announced “a new strategy to improve Ireland’s connection with the diaspora.”
  • More historical records continued to be made available in 2015 for online inspection, including:

Dublin Metropolitan Police Detective Department’s “Movement of Extremists” reports leading up to the Rising, held at the Irish National Archives;

Long-awaited Catholic parish records, held by the National Library of Ireland; and

Fenian Brotherhood records and O’Donovan Rossa’s personal papers, held by The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

River Shannon by Therea M. Quirk.

Departed in 2015:

  • Six college students, five from Ireland and one holding Irish and U.S. citizenship, were killed 16 June in Berkeley, California, when the fifth floor apartment balcony where they were partying collapsed and plunged them 50 feet to the ground.
  • Dublin-born actress Maureen O’Hara, who co-stared with John Wayne in the 1952 screen hit, “The Quiet Man,” died at 95. … More than three dozen other notable Irish and Irish American deaths from the arts, sports and politics are listed here.

From the Archive:

New content added to previous posts

I’ve updated three posts from earlier this year. Circle back to see the fresh content, or read them for the first time:

  • Former Irish President Mary McAleese on the disappearing Irish language.
  • Support for removing Northern Ireland’s peace walls has dropped to 49 percent, compared to 58 percent in 2012.
  • Unesco wants to add the Irish sport of hurling to its list of the “world’s intangible cultural heritage.”

I’ve also updated a 2013 post on Skelling Michael with a few links about the uproar over using the heritage site in the filming of the new “Star Wars” movie.

And on the winter solstice, this image of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, from the Aran island of Inis Oírr.  Photo by Cormac Coyne, from The Irish Times.

The aurora borealis as seen from Inis Oírr, Aran Islands. Photograph: Cormac Coyne

Dubs beat The Kingdom in All-Ireland

Hate to say it, but Dublin beat defending champions Kerry in the All-Ireland Finals on Sunday. The match played through torrential rain at Croke Park, home of the Gaelic Athletic Association.

“The win was sweet because it was the first time Dublin have beaten Kerry in three successive championship encounters (after 2011 and ‘13) and two successive final contests,” The Irish Times reported. “In the end the disappointment was far more profound for Kerry, who never performed – as acknowledged by manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice.”

The All-Ireland championship dates to 1887. Kerry has won 37 times, the most any county.

On hurling … and moonlighting … in Ireland

UPDATE:

Hurling is expected to be included on the Unesco list of the “world’s intangible cultural heritage” in 2016, The Irish Times reports.

Unesco defines “intangible cultural heritage” as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.”

ORIGINAL POST:

I always enjoy Dan Barry’s pieces about Ireland or Irish America in The New York Times, including his latest on the very Gaelic sport of hurling. (Barry’s 2013 story about Duffy’s Cut is linked in my last post.)

The lede of the hurling story, datelined Kinvara, in County Galway, is a little curious, or ironic, to my thinking:

Thirty men battle on a deep-green field, each one wielding what looks like a field hockey stick moonlighting as a broken oar.  (My emphasis.)

Of course Barry is using the verb moonlighting in its common definition of a secondary job. But the word has origins in the nighttime agrarian violence of late 19th century Ireland. It was the guerrilla warfare or terror tactic of rural nationalists fighting against the English land tenure system.

The-Hurling-Match. Painting by Martin Driscoll.

The Hurling Match. Painting by Martin Driscoll.

Barry hints at some of this background as he outlines hurling’s history:

For a while, the game enchanted the gentry, with landlords fielding teams to play other estates. But they gradually distanced themselves from the game, either having concluded that such Irish pursuits were beneath them or suspecting that hurling smacked of rebellious nationalism.

The game’s hold had loosened by the mid-19th century. The Roman Catholic clergy disapproved. The police distrusted large gatherings. Some areas used matches to settle scores. And the wholesale death and emigration caused by the Great Hunger, the potato famine, darkened everyday life in places like Kinvara.

But in the early 1880s, Michael Cusack … began championing Irish customs, at a time when English games, especially cricket, were growing in popularity. His crusade coincided with a renewed push by Irish nationalists for home rule. He and others soon established the Gaelic Athletic Association, which provided a nationwide structure for Irish sports based on parishes and territorial boundaries, all with an implicit rejection of English ways.

The game survived, and even thrived, in the destiny-determining decades that followed, through the audacious acts of rebellion, the Irish War of Independence, the civil war.

There is certainly plenty of evidence of nationalist sentiment within the ranks of the fledgling G.A.A., especially in the west of Ireland. For those interested in the subject, I recommend “Forging A Kingdom: The G.A.A. in Kerry, 1884-1934,” by Richard McElligott; and “Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: The Case of County Kerry, 1872-1886,” by Donnacha Sean Lucey.

A search of Hansard, the official record of British Parliamentary debates, returns hundreds of hits for the term “moonlighting” from the 1880s into the early 20th century. For example, from May 1887: “The Government say they want to put down exceptional crimes—such as murder, firing into houses, mutilation of cattle, and Moonlighting.”

That is not to say that all hurlers or other G.A.A. participants were moonlighters. But some of these young, single men likely did engage in such activity, and everyone living in Ireland at the time was aware of the term. Surely nobody in late 19th century Ireland would have described a hurley, or camán, as “moonlighting as a broken oar.”

I don’t know if Barry and the Times‘ editors are aware of the historical meaning of moonlighting. I’ve dropped him a line to ask and will post his response, if any. It’s use here certainly isn’t incorrect. And at least the story doesn’t mention anyone boycotting the hurling matches for being too rough and tumble.

But that would be another blog post.

 

Remembering the dead with annual cemetery Mass

The annual Mass for the dead at Killahenny graveyard is 17 July at 8 p.m. I wish I could attend. My maternal great grandparents and numerous relations are buried at this tiny cemetery next to the Ballybunion Golf Course.

Undated photo of John and Johanna Diggin, who died in 1940 and 1945, respectively.

Undated photo of John and Johanna Diggin, who died in 1940 and 1945, respectively.

“The Cemetery Mass, or annual Pattern, is a very special date that communities revolve around,” Miriam Donohoe wrote in this 2014 piece for the Irish Independent. She continued:

“A lot of work goes into sprucing up graveyards. Weathered headstones are freshly scrubbed, graves decorated with fresh flowers and wreaths and plots weeded. It is significant event, reaffirming bonds of kinship through the previous generations. Cemetery Sunday [not always on a Sunday] is about honoring ancestors, remembering parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and reminding ourselves of the larger connections within the community.”

Here’s another story about Cemetery Sunday from the A Trip to Ireland Blog.

As for Killahenny, it came to great attention after President Bill Clinton played the Ballybunion Golf Course (opened in 1893) in September 1998. In a Golf magazine story about his favorite courses, Clinton recalled:

I stood on the first tee in front of more than 10,000 people, without having taken a single practice shot, looking at one of the most intimidating opening shots in golf. A cemetery borders the fairway for 200 yards down the right side, and on that day, a strong wind was blowing from left to right. I aimed the driver well left but the wind curved it over and beyond the cemetery anyway. I was so keyed up I missed the next two shots and made a triple-bogey 7.

A 2002 story in the Wall Street Journal quoted a course official as claiming the cremated remains of at least 50 golfing businessmen from around the world had been scattered from the bunker above the 17th tee, the highest point on the course. Friends of other deceased fans of the course reportedly have returned with the clubs of their playing partners, burying them in the Killahenny cemetery.