Homage to the Gaelic Athletic Association

The attendance at Croke Park for the Ireland v England game was a tribute to the GAA and its stadium.  

The founding meeting of the GAA in Hayes's Hotel, Thurles on 1 November 1884 designated the title “The Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes” to the new organisation. There was no mention at that first meeting of Gaelic football and hurling – the focus was entirely on athletics.

One of the founders at that first meeting was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), Thomas St George McCarthy, a Kerryman, based in Templemore. Others were J K Bracken, father of Viscount Brendan Bracken, who was in Winston Churchill's war cabinet, and two journalists, John Wyse Power and John McKay. The presence of the journalists ensured that first meeting got widespread publicity, although their respective accounts of what happened did not tally. The first patrons were Archbishop Croke of Cashel, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt.

The impetus for the foundation of the new organisation came from Michael Cusack, who became its first secretary. He was a teacher in one of the principal rugby schools in Ireland, Blackrock College, Dublin. In 1877 he established a cramming school in Dublin, the Civil Service Academy, to prepare students for entry examinations into the British civil service. He made a large fortune from it. He became known as “Citizen Cusack” and has been identified as the model for the bigoted nationalist character “The Citizen” in the ‘Cyclops' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The initial emphasis was on the revival of the Tailtean Games, an athletics festival that was held in Ireland from around 1800 BC to 500 AD, but a short time later the focus shifted to the standardisation and promotion of Gaelic games.

The GAA was built around Catholic Church parishes and the British-created counties, parishes and counties becoming the locus of Irish identities. It also became a major force in nationalist Ireland. It was banned in 1918, without effect. It became one of the great unifying and reconciling forces in the country in the aftermath of the civil war, but it also became an agent of disunity through its ban on “foreign” games (instigated by Archbishop Croke) and its exclusion first of RIC members and members of the British army (this arose from the surveillance of the organisation by the security forces) and later the RUC.

Through voluntary effort it became by far the most powerful sporting organisation in Ireland, with over 2,500 clubs around the country and up to 800,000 members and, through that, it became influential culturally and politically.

The success of the GAA in preserving and growing Gaelic football and hurling in the face of the globalisation of sport – and especially of soccer and rugby – has been immense. Attendance at GAA matches has grown in the decade that rugby and soccer have become world sports, supported by massive television coverage. The foresight of the GAA in itself perceiving the power of television and opening its games throughout the country to live coverage was a major factor in that success.

But the monument to its achievement has been Croke Park. Originally the “City and Suburban Racecourse” and a site from early on for Gaelic games, it was purchased by a far-seeing journalist, Frank Dineen, who was also an early member of the GAA, for £3,250 in 1908. He sold it on to the GAA in 1913 for £3,500.

Hill 16 was constructed from the O'Connell St rubble of 1916. In 1924 the Hogan Stand was built (called after Michael Hogan, the Tipperary footballer who was killed by the Black and Tans at Croke Park on Bloody Sunday, 21 November 1920) and the Cusack Stand built in 1937.

Then in 1991 the reconstruction of the ground comenced at a final cost of just €260m (remember the Bertie Bowl's estimated cost was heading towards €1bn?). The completed new stadium was opened on 14 March 2005. Only Nou Camp in Barcelona and San Siro in Milan rival it in Europe, as of now.

Meanwhile the old trappings of sectarianism have been dropped. The ban on “foreign” games went in 1971 and on 16 April 2005 the congress of the GAA voted to open its stadium to rugby and soccer during the period of the reconstruction of Lansdowne Road.
Croke Park was the venue for one of the most significant occasions of modern Ireland on Saturday, 24 September, 2007. For there that evening were people from all Ireland, from much of the Irish middle classes (Protestant and Catholic) that belittled the GAA for decades, there proudly singing the Irish national anthem, ‘Amhrán na bhFiann', in homage to the new unity of Ireland, the new confidence of Ireland, and in homage to the GAA and its remarkable stadium.

There was a further significance (aside from the respect shown to the playing of the English national anthem) in that the homage to the stadium and to the GAA was homage to voluntary and community effort and achievement, unspoiled by self-enrichment or monetary incentive. It was a token of what Ireland could achieve through the same means.