SPORT: The Gaelic Athletic Association 1884-2009 Edited by Mike Cronin, Paul Rouse and William Murphy Irish Academic Press, 300pp, €29.95 - STRANGE, but after a turbulent 125 years at the centre of Irish life, the GAA is no closer really to being fully understood and appreciated as a cultural phenomenon than it was at its founding.
As Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh states in the closing essay of this fine collection: “In general histories of modern Ireland, the social importance of the GAA remains curiously understated.”
In the United States, baseball is still happily nurtured, not just as a pastime but also as a metaphor for that nation’s personality. Jacques Barzun’s observation to the effect that whoever wants to know the heart and mind of the US had better learn baseball is still quoted as being irrefutable. And in Canada there is only one game in the nation’s heart: ice hockey. The GAA, however, we take for granted. The vehicle which its games offer for expression of our national temperament is often belittled as lacking the dubious but craved-for external validation of international competition. The Association gets dragged into almost every bunfight when not staging bunfights itself.
The GAA’s immense energy, its network of volunteerism, its remarkable physical infrastructure and its status as an amateur sporting body are celebrated less than they should be, and almost always with the caveat that to celebrate, praise or defend the GAA isn’t to belittle other sports.
Perhaps the omnipresent nature of its existence not just in rural life but across suburbia and exurbia makes it hard to get the distance required for perspective. In a world shaped by homogeneity and franchised order, however, perhaps the GAA is the last and most vibrant expression of our unique selves that we have.
Yet, as Diarmuid Ferriter points out in his wise introduction to this collection of explorations into the caverns of the GAA's personality, until 1984 and the publication of Breandán Ó hEithir's seminal Over The Bar, no serious attempt had been made to fully understand or contextualise the GAA's role in Irish society or culture. Ó hEithir's masterpiece was the first inkling that Barzun's words about baseball and the heart and mind of the United States might be applicable to the GAA and Ireland.
Things have improved since Ó hEithir nourished us with his words but still there is a tendency in coverage of the GAA and in even the GAA’s approach to itself to be imitative of the slicker packaging which big-time professional games receive. When discussing the GAA, the invisible two-thirds of the iceberg is dismissed easily with the word grassroots, while the visible tip of the Association, the players who become household names, absorbs almost all coverage and consideration.
All of which misses the point of the GAA and betrays its history and intent. This collection, born out of collaboration between the GAA’s Oral History Project and Sports History Ireland, lifts the canon of GAA literature out of the swamp of vibey self-congratulation and into a field where fissures and failures can be examined along with the Association’s achievements and views of itself.
Michael Cusack, for instance, has long been a curiosity for many of us who wondered about the perfunctory nod given to him in the naming of a ground in Clare and a stand in Croke Park but little else. Paul Rouse gives the old boy’s reputation a vigorous dusting down.
The image of this impetuous, full-bearded man playing in goal every week for the Metropolitan Hurling Club in the Phoenix Park has always been appealing, but Rouse’s insights into Cusack’s rambunctious personality and his splendid mastery of the abusive one-liner (“I received your letter this morning, and burned it”) does much to explain how he came to be ushered gently from the stage when the GAA began to develop a sense of itself.
His wonderful invective (often directed at this newspaper as well as at the GAA which had moved on without him) is sufficient surely to earn him a recall to central prominence in any understanding of the Association. His brilliant tongue and sharp penmanship and the poignance of his later life make him worthy of still more study.
Any collection of essays on the modern GAA should be bracing and challenging and should occasionally take the GAA by the lapels and fling it against the wall.
Brian Ó Conchubhair’s examination of the GAA’s sometimes tokenistic but occasionally jealous efforts at assisting in or effecting a revival of the Irish language frames that entire debate within the difficulties we have as a nation in redefining ourselves, in encompassing new cultures and influences and yet retaining fidelity to the past and our own cultural aspirations.
There are many who rely on the GAA to be more than a mere sporting organisation. There are others who will engage with the GAA only if that is all it is.
Richard Holt's discussion of Ireland and the Birth of Modern Sportplaces the GAA as somewhat fortunate to be founded when it was, at a time when sports were being codified and organised and evolving from village recreations to being the new opiate of the masses.
The Irish contribution to nascent sporting organisations across the globe, especially in Britain and North America, prompts you to wonder how the nation’s personality would have been changed had the GAA never been dreamed of or if it had failed in its infancy.
The GAA, in this, a significant anniversary year, has outgrown at last the need to pay maudlin tribute to itself and has acquired the ability to examine itself in the context of a modern and changing Ireland. In that respect, the GAA has grown more in the last 25 years than it did in the first century of it’s existence.
Croke Park will be neither annoyed nor frightened at such a rigorous academic examination of its credentials, and that confidence is perhaps the theme of the modern GAA, a big clamorous, complex and eternally relevant sporting body which needs to be more than that or just that depending on your view.
The Association is unfathomable, but here, at the very least, is another way into its labyrinthine heart.
Tom Humphries is an Irish Timesjournalist