1 November, 1884: The birth of a sporting revolution

By Richard McElligott

On Saturday 1 November 1884, a handful of men entered Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles and started a sporting revolution. Michael Cusack’s driving ambition in founding the Gaelic Athletic Association was not just to erect a rampart against the sweeping dominance of British culture on Ireland’s sporting landscape. It was more profound than that, entailing nothing less than the democratisation of modern, codified and competitive sport in Ireland. Cusack wanted to tear down the prevailing social and sectarian stranglehold over Irish sport which he passionately believed had, up till then, been ‘entrusted to persons hostile to the dearest aspirations of the Irish people’. In the process, Ireland’s playing fields and athletics tracks were to be thrown open and the ordinary people (hitherto condemned to remain on the side-lines) would be afforded the chance ‘to take the management of their games into their own hands’.

Born in rural Clare at the height of the Great Famine, Cusack qualified as a teacher and established a grinds academy in Dublin in 1877 training those sitting British Civil Service examinations. Throughout his professional and personal life, sport was central and Cusack was a nationally successful weight-thrower, and keen cricketer and rugby player. Yet he became increasingly dismayed at how formal athletics in Ireland was developing. He was particularly affronted that by the early 1880s Irish athletic clubs were turning to the English Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) for guidance. Heavily influenced by its rules and procedures, Irish athletics began to outlaw events on Sundays, promoted running at the expense of weight-throwing and implemented a draconian amateurism that effectively barred working class participation. However, Cusack’s well-known hubris contributed to his initial attempts to try and reform Irish athletics from within being doomed to failure.

By now Cusack was also falling under the spell of the first stirrings of Ireland’s ‘Gaelic Revival’. He increasingly interpreted the AAA’s growing influence as the sporting embodiment of the tsunami of British cultural imperialism engulfing Ireland. Cusack’s quest to resurrect Ireland’s native games, particularly hurling, was another legacy of this belated conversion to cultural nationalism. He became deeply impacted by contemporary movements to promote native Irish industry and by his exposure to the raft of modern translations of the legends and heroic sagas of ancient Ireland (where hurling featured prominently). He emerged as a prominent figure in the early days of the Irish language revival, becoming treasurer of the Gaelic Union (a precursor to the Gaelic League) in 1882. This organisation served as a template for the later GAA. Attempting to resuscitate hurling in Dublin, Cusack established two clubs in late 1883, one attached to his academy the other being the Metropolitan Hurling team which, he wrote, was ‘the club out of which the G.A.A. sprang’.

Next setting his sights on creating a new national sports body, Cusack enlisted the support of Maurice Davin - perhaps Ireland’s most famous athlete at the time. Davin shared Cusack’s conviction to ‘prevent the killing of those Celtic sports which have been threatened with the same fate by the encroachment of Saxon custom, as that which menaces our nationality under alien rule’. Both were therefore determined to revive Ireland’s athletic traditions, which they perceived as being steadily marginalised in the athletic competitions increasingly run under English rules. They also wished to set their organisation apart from its mere athletic rivals by reviving and reinventing Ireland’s native field games: hurling and what Davin termed ‘Irish football’. It was that latter ambition, more than anything else, which nearly a century and a half later ensures the GAA’s enduring ubiquity in Irish life.

Ever since that first meeting in a billiard room in Thurles, a lot of effort has been spent trying to identify who else was present and how much of a role they subsequently played in the events which followed. Perhaps that is because the actual meeting itself was something of a damp squib. However, at a moment when the land question was convulsing the countryside, the Catholic Church was arising to social dominance and Home Rule looked on the verge of realisation, Cusack ensured mass publicity and the automatic attention of Irish nationalist opinion by announcing at that initial gathering that he had secured the patronage of Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Davitt and the popular Archbishop Thomas Croke.

The control of Irish athletics would be the GAA’s first imperative. This was not only due to their prominence in Cusack and Davin’s sporting past, but also simple pragmatism. Athletic competitions under long established and commonly accepted rules were far easier to organise than hurling and football. Personifying Cusack’s belligerent nature, in January 1885 the GAA announced that no athlete would be allowed enter their events if they had competed under the rules of another athletic body. The GAA therefore demarcated itself immediately as a nationalist counterpoint to its pro-British opponents, with Cusack declaring that Irishmen must ‘choose between Irish and foreign laws’.

Enraged by the GAA’s draconian legislation, rival athletic representatives united with the intention ‘to quash’ it, forming the Irish Amateur Athletic Association (IAAA). This war to govern Irish athletics, played out across 1885, would be another propaganda triumph for the GAA. Cusack had already decided on Tralee as the decisive battleground. On 17 June, he personally supervised a massive GAA athletics meeting which completely overshadowed the local annual athletics event being courted by the IAAA. The monster GAA sports saw 464 athletes compete in front of an estimated crowd of 10,000, ‘a great tide … of human life that poured [from] every artery of the town’. By the year’s end, over 150 athletics meetings had been held under the auspices of the GAA. The Association’s dominance of national athletics, particularly across rural Ireland, was already secure.

During the winter of 1884, Davin worked on codifying rules for hurling and what became Gaelic football. In this he was influenced by both tradition and the templates provided by contemporary British sports, particularly soccer and rugby. The first set of GAA rules were published in the United Ireland newspaper in February 1885. They listed ten guidelines for Gaelic football and twelve for hurling, yet they were so vague they gave little insight into how a match in either code was in practice played. That the initial rules allowed for two opponents to break from play and wrestle each other onto the ground, highlighted how some traditional aspects of both games were being incorporated into the modern sports Davin was creating. Originally only goals decided matches. However, in 1886, point posts were introduced, placed twenty-one feet away on either side of the goalmouth. In the event of no goal being registered, the greater number of points would now decide a match.

All the while through his travels and national newspaper columns, Cusack spent the next two years adding flesh to the sparse skeleton of Davin’s published rules. Responding to one query in April 1885, Cusack had to remind players that running with the ball, rugby style, was not permitted. As the GAA swept across Ireland, the playing guidelines of Gaelic football and hurling were increasingly disseminated and soon the Association’s field games graduated from mere sideshows to centre stage. The organisation of local and then inter-county club challenges throughout 1886, paved the way for the creation of the first All-Ireland championships and individual county boards to oversee its feeder competitions. This further propelled hurling and football to the forefront of GAA activity. The results were startling. By 1889, the GAA was recorded as having at least 777 affiliated clubs, dwarfing the numbers of other sporting codes.

Long before that however, the Association’s originator had become an outcast. In July 1886, Cusack was ejected from his own organisation. His arrogance and legendary bellicose proved to be a fatal cocktail, demonstrating what the newspaper Sport described as ‘the unfortunate knack possessed by Mr. Cusack in a superlative degree of offending and insulting those with whom he comes in contact’. Added to this was the valid complaints that ‘no secretary of any body was so remiss’. So scorned, Cusack now created his own newspaper, the Celtic Times. Over the next year he used its pages to rage against his enemies within the Association while etching an evocative eyewitness account of the spread of Gaelic games across Ireland. However, a lack of finance led to its collapse. Following the death of his wife in 1890, Cusack spent the rest of his days eking a living from private teaching and occasional journalism. In his final years a rapprochement did take place between the GAA and its creator. Before his death, he wrote that he had founded the GAA, ‘to rouse the people from the appalling torpor that was creeping over them … I took it into my head to strike one smashing blow on behalf of Ireland’. He may have died in poverty in November 1906 but the ‘prairie fire’ he lit 140 years ago burns more fiercely than ever.

Dr Richard McElligott is Lecturer in Modern and Irish History at Dundalk Institute of Technology. He is a member of the GAA’s History and Commemorations Committee and author of Forging a Kingdom: The GAA in Kerry, 1884-1834.