James Nowlan (right) pictured with Michael Collins and Harry Boland and the Dublin and Kilkenny teams before the 1921 Leinster hurling final at Croke Park.
By Cian Murphy
The GAA proudly celebrates its 140th anniversary this year. However, within 10 years of that momentous foundation event in Hayes’s Hotel, the Association was in perilous danger of collapse, and it would be men like James Nowlan who would be vital to its eventual survival and success.
It is for this reason that his remarkable 20-year service as Uachtarán Chumann Lúthchleas Gael is being acknowledged on the centenary of his passing, and that we are here in the field named in his honour, in the city which he diligently served, and presenting a cup that also bears his name.
James Nowlan was certainly someone who believed in a life less ordinary.
The GAA had exploded into life in late 1884 and Michael Cusack famously recorded its early growth and establishment of clubs as “being like a prairie fire.”
But Cusack himself was ousted and gone barely two years later. Political infighting, power struggles linked to Republican revolutionaries and significantly, massive Church opposition of the GAA after it sided with Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 over his adulterous affair, damaged and weakened the fledgling body.
According to his history of the GAA, Marcus de Búrca recalls how the 1892 GAA convention, not held until spring April 1893, had delegates from only three counties in attendance – Kerry, Cork and Dublin. Dublin would later refuse to affiliate that year and didn’t contest the championships.
Those 1893 championship campaigns, delayed and the finals not played until June 1894, saw Blackrock of Cork comfortably beat Confederation of Kilkenny. Among the Confederation club officials was a certain James Nowlan in attendance at the match played in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
It was the beginning of what was to be a seismic involvement in GAA affairs.
At a time when there were open debates about whether the GAA should stick to the original plan of focusing on Irish control of Irish athletics and stop administering football and hurling, there were a handful of figures who stepped into the breach and assured that the GAA managed somehow to survive the worst of times and keep a pulse.
Some, like Meath’s Dick Blake, were crucial in bringing order and certainty to the playing rules.
Others, like James Nowlan and Wicklow born Ard Stiúrthóir Luke O’Toole, who served 28 years, were of crucial importance off the field in steering the GAA into the 20th century.
Nowlan, son of a Kilkenny cooper who himself would enter the brewery business, was raised initially in Kildare before returning to the Marble city. He was already a public figure through his involvement in the Gaelic League and the GAA and in 1899 his election as an independent Labour councillor to the city council made him an alderman – a position he’d hold for 20 years.
His interest in the GAA and the Irish language was in keeping with the character of someone who was said to have been a close ally of James Stephens and was himself a member of the IRB.
It has been well documented how the GAA at this time was strategically targeted and infiltrated by republicans.
Nowlan’s own revolutionary beliefs were no secret. He was on a British watch list and was arrested under heavy escort and interned after the Easter Rising in 1916.
Whatever about his views on linking the GAA to revolutionary activity, his interest in supporting the GAA and its promotion of sport was genuine.
His influence on the city council was vital in assisting the GAA in Kilkenny and beyond as a push for new clubs was made – so too the access to adequate playing facilities.
For an insight into the struggles that the GAA faced, this period is brilliantly researched and captured by Paul Rouse in his acclaimed book The Hurlers (Penguin, 2018).
Organisationally, the GAA was being rebuilt and effectively restarted in the mid to late 1890s. Nowlan was a part of this restructuring which would among other things recommend the establishment of provincial bodies with Leinster being the first to be established in 1900 and with Nowlan serving as its first Chair.
To consider how his 20 years as GAA President intersected with such enormous upheavals in Irish life as the 1913 Lockout, eruption of the Great War in 1914, the Rising and then the War of Independence give an indication of the challenges which Nowlan and his fellow administrators faced.
The Gaelic Sunday national act of disobedience in August 1918 and the Bloody Sunday atrocity at Croke Park in November 1920 were just two events which would have stretched and stressed the leadership of the Association to an extraordinary level.
This was at a time when, in a country at war, playing off a championship in a calendar year was regularly impossible.
Ever since the failed fundraising trip to America in 1888, the GAA had been saddled with crippling debts, bailed out by a £450 loan from land league champion Michael Davitt. O’Toole and Nowlan were part of a GAA leadership that took office in 1901 and knew that to grow the Association, its finances had to be put in order.
Venues were inadequate to cater for crowds that attended big matches. Big crowds meant the possibility of charging admission.
As Uachtarán, Nowlan presided over the decision on where the GAA would settle on a permanent Dublin home as their HQ, culminating in the 1913 decision to buy Frank Dineen’s field on Jones’s Road and name it Croke Park. In 1920 Congress passed a motion making it the first-choice venue for All-Ireland finals. At present Croke Park holds no memorial to James Nowlan, despite his rich connection, something that will be addressed this year, with Nowlan the GAA’s longest serving President and holder of the title of Honorary Life President upon his departure.
Kilkenny already led the way – buying this ground in 1927 and naming it in his honour after ill health and advancing years had seen him step away from GAA politics in 1921 and passing away in 1924. By 1924 Ireland was emerging out from that decade of upheaval and conflict and a war weary Irish public were ravenous for entertainment and latched onto the GAA Championships with crowds thronging to big games. In many ways the Association has never looked back.
The request from Kilkenny County Board, which as supported by the GAA History Committee for the 2024 U20 hurling final and the prize of the James Nowlan Cup to be decided in UPMC Nowlan Park is a fitting way to remember an official who packed a lot into his life and who played a part at ensuring that the GAA survived its turbulent early years.