By Professor Marie Coleman

May 19 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Thomas William Croke, Archbishop of Cashel and first patron of the Gaelic Athletic Association, after whom the association’s headquarters and principal stadium is named. Our knowledge of Croke’s life owes much to the biography, Croke of Cashel: the life of Archbishop Thomas William Croke, 1823-1902, published by the historian and Benedictine Fr Mark Tierney in 1976, based on extensive trawls of Croke’s surviving archives in the Cashel archdiocesan archives.

Born in Dromin, Castlecor, near Kanturk in County Cork, Croke was the third child and second son of eight children from the mixed marriage of his Catholic father, William, and Protestant mother, Isabella Plummer. Isabella was related to the aristocratic Fitzgeralds, the Knights of Glin, and was ostracised by her family for her marriage so that when her husband died suddenly in 1834 the older boys were taken in by their uncle, Fr Thomas Croke, parish priest of Charleville.

Coming of age in the aftermath of Catholic Emancipation as the Catholic church became a significant force in Irish politics and society, Croke was educated in Paris and subsequently in Rome, where he was ordained in May 1847. While in Rome he was far-removed from the ravages of the Great Famine, though not from its impact; his elder brother, William, died of so-called ‘famine fever’ (typhus) while serving as curate of Charleville in 1849.

The decision to enter religious life should not appear too surprising in view of Croke’s family background. His uncle and namesake – Thomas – was clearly the most formative influence on his early life to the extent that Thomas and two of his brothers, James and William, all became priests, while their two sisters, Isabella and Margaret, joined religious orders of nuns. Religious vocations existed on both sides of Croke’s family. On his father’s side he was related to Dr Matthew McKenna, Bishop of Cloyne from 1769 to 1791, and his maternal uncle, the Reverend Richard Plummer, was a Church of Ireland rector of Broadford from 1833 until his death in 1875.

Following his ordination he served briefly as Professor of Rhetoric at Carlow College in 1847 before transferring to another academic post as Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Irish College in Paris the following year. This stint was also short-lived as he was back Ireland in 1849 to fill the vacant curacy of Charleville following the death of his brother. The start of his clerical career in Ireland coincided with significant socio-economic and political changes in Irish life after the Famine, which would influence many of Croke’s opinions and actions.

A similar climate of change within the Irish Catholic Church ensued from the seminal Synod of Thurles in 1850, the first such gathering of Irish Catholic hierarchy in over 200 years. The reforms to doctrine and practice introduced included standardization of church ceremonies, centralisation of practice within church buildings, more central roles for clergy and the discouragement of folk practices such as patterns and wakes which were considered to have pagan connotations.

The American historian, Emmet Larkin, has described these changes as a ‘devotional revolution’, though Larkin’s sense of the suddenness of the reforms is disputed by those who see them as part of a longer-term evolution. Regardless of the revolutionary nature or otherwise of the practices, the changing nature of Irish Catholicism in the third quarter of the nineteenth century established Catholic clerics as influential figures in Irish society and the career of T.W. Croke is understood best in this context.

A significant development in Irish politics and society following the famine, which would reverberate for the rest of the century, was the demand for greater security of tenure for Irish tenant farmers. This was a campaign in which Croke was to play a significant role initially as a parish priest in the Diocese of Cloyne and later as Archbishop of Cashel. Influenced by the contemporary writings of the agrarian radical James Fintan Lalor, Croke shared Lalor’s sense that the upheaval of the Famine required reform of Irish land tenure.

The Cork curate began to make his name with letters to the nationalist press from the late 1840s encouraging his fellow parish priests to take the lead in establishing at parish level tenant right organisations which would agitate for greater security against eviction and lower rents. A split in the Independent Irish Party, the political ally of the tenant right movement, over political patronage and financial irregularities, damaged this nascent land movement which fizzled out in 1858. Nevertheless, it highlighted the centrality of the land question which would re-emerge in the 1870s again with Croke’s support.

The demise of the Irish Tenant League coincided with a career change for Croke from pastoring to educating. One area in which the growing confidence and influence of the Catholic church emerged in the post-Emancipation era, against the backdrop of post-Famine modernisation and rising literacy rates, was in the provision of education. Croke was to become a very influential figure in this field during his time in Cloyne in the 1850s and 1860s.

He was approached in 1858 by the Bishop of Cloyne, William Keane, to take up the post as first president of the newly established diocesan college, St Colman’s in Fermoy. Concerns that a secular system of education was inimical to the interests of the Catholic Church, especially in the emergent domestic university system, had been a central concern of the Catholic Church in Thurles in 1850. Croke was one of the church’s most outspoken critics of the British system of ‘national education’ introduced in Ireland in the 1830s and which he saw as both anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. The response of the Catholic church was to establish a robust alternative in the form of its own schools, an effort to which Croke made a significant contribution as founding President of St Colman’s and later, while parish priest of Doneraile in the 1860s, with the invitation to the Christian Brothers to establish a school there.

Croke’s sister, Isabella (known to him affectionately as ‘Issy’), with whom he had a close relationship, was a significant figure in her own right at this time. She joined the Sisters of Mercy in Charleville in 1847, the same year as T.W. Croke’s ordination in Rome, taking the name of Mary Joseph. Seven years later she was among a contingent of Irish Mercy nuns sent to the Crimea to provide badly needed nursing for wounded British troops during the Crimean War. The two years which she spent there and which she chronicled in an extant diary, were characterised by a rivalry between the Irish nuns and the English nurses under the tutelage of Florence Nightingale. Nightingale appears to have been protective of her territory, wary of Catholicism and jealous of the success of the Irish nursing sisters to the extent that she tried, unsuccessfully, to undermine them with unfounded allegations of proselytising. On her return from the Crimea Mother Mary Joseph spent the remainder of her life in the Mercy Community at Charleville where she died, in the role of Mother Superior, in 1888.

Croke’s twenty-year pastoral career in Cloyne ended when he became a bishop in 1870. His elevation to the episcopacy came through the unusual route of New Zealand. His appointment as Bishop of Auckland in June 1870, on the recommendation of Cardinal Paul Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin, reflected the growing dominance of Irish priests and bishops within Catholicism in the English-speaking world in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This level of influence has been likened by the historian Professor Colin Barr to the establishment of an Irish empire.

His tenure in Auckland lasted a relatively short period of three-and-a-half years, from mid-1870 until early 1874, giving rise to accusations of opportunism in seeking the appointment to rise within church ranks with the eventual aim of securing an Irish bishopric. While Tierney rejected such claims, Colin Barr’s more recent analysis of the Irish influence on New Zealand Catholicism lends more credibility to it as one motivating factor in his appointment.

That Croke was an English-speaker, had independent family wealth (following a substantial inheritance from an uncle) and the support of the influential Cullen, who enjoyed significant leverage in Rome, also explain why he was chosen for the role. His skills as an organiser and his interest in education characterised his time in New Zealand where he sought to ensure adequate provision of churches and schools, appoint suitably-qualified priests and impose some order on the diocese’s precarious finances.

Suitably qualified priests were, in Croke’s view, English-speaking, and this gave rise to criticisms of his tenure among the French Catholic priests and orders which had dominated the diocese prior to the Irish gaining greater influence. A combination of these tensions, the distance from home, the death of his uncle, his own health and the lingering sense that Auckland was a stage in his ascendancy through the hierarchy culminated in his resignation and return to Ireland in 1874.

The move to Cashel took place just as the Irish constitutional nationalist movement entered its most successful phase since the O’Connellite campaigns for Emancipation and Repeal in the 1820s and 1830s. The revival of demands for tenant right, motivated by a severe economic slump in the late 1870s, coalesced with the formation of Isaac Butt’s Home Rule League, calling for greater devolved government in the wake of the failed Fenian uprising of 1867 and the subsequent campaign for amnesty for Fenian prisoners.

Croke’s previous interest in securing greater rights for Irish tenant farmers was reignited but this time he was a much more influential voice as one of the four most senior members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy. While Croke had been close to Cardinal Cullen, they differed on the extent to which Catholic priests and bishops should interest themselves in Irish nationalist politics. Cullen’s death in 1878 freed Croke to pursue his natural activist inclination, without the risk of incurring the wrath of his influential superior.

His role in the late nineteenth century land agitation was most prominent in the second phase of the land war – the Plan of Campaign of 1887 to 1889 – led by William O’Brien, a former student from his St Colman’s days, and which was particularly strong in Tipperary. Croke gave significant vocal and material support to the land agitators, supporting priests in his diocese who were involved at parish level, contributing to funds to defend those prosecuted and making controversial public statements in support of the campaign’s aims.

His outspokenness led the British government to consider prosecuting him for comments which he made regarding the injustice (as he saw it) of Irish taxpayers being made to foot the bill for the British government’s coercive measures to counteract the Plan of Campaign. Interpreted as a taxation equivalent (dubbed Croke’s ‘No Tax Manifesto’) to the Plan’s ‘No Rent Manifesto’, the government accused him of encouraging people to refuse to pay taxes. In an effort to evade legal sanction from London and papal approbation from Rome, Croke successfully moderated his views.

Relations between the Irish hierarchy and Rome became especially tense at the height of the Plan of Campaign when in 1888 Pope Leo XIII, at the urgings of English Catholic leaders, issued a ‘rescript’ condemning violence and boycotting. Croke took the lead in hitting back against this interference and making clear to the Vatican that its meddling was not appreciated in Ireland. R.V. Comerford has shown how Croke’s association with the land campaign enhanced his reputation among Irish nationalists at the time: ‘Croke … became a revered national figure because he came to symbolise the identification of the church with the agrarian campaign’.

By the time the Plan of Campaign petered out in 1890 Irish nationalism was engulfed by serious internal strife which would involve the Catholic church leaders taking sides against their erstwhile ally, the Irish Home Rule Party leader, Charles Stewart Parnell. It is unclear if the revelations of Parnell’s adultery in the divorce case taken by Captain William O’Shea against his wife, Katherine, in November 1890, were news to Croke. His initial response was to wait and see if Parnell would be cleared, as he had been in the Piggot forgery case, and when it became clear he would not to hope that he would retire gracefully.

Pressure from the Pope and the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, eventually led him into the anti-Parnellite camp and he joined his fellow bishops in declaring Parnell to have ‘disqualified himself’ from the right to lead Irish nationalism ‘by his public misconduct’. He even threw away a marble bust of Parnell which has previously ‘held a prominent place’ in his hallway, alongside one of William Gladstone. The split disillusioned the aging prelate deeply and his interest and involvement in Irish nationalism waned in the 1890s mirroring the weakened state of nationalist politics for most of that decade prior to the reunification of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1900-1901, a year before his death.

In light of Croke’s support for Irish nationalist causes, and his concern about the growing dominance of English influence in spheres such as education, his enthusiasm for the Gaelic cultural revival is hardly surprising. These views and his standing within Irish society led to the invitation from the founders of the Gaelic Athletic Association in December 1884 to become the inaugural patron of the new organisation, founded in Croke’s diocese the previous month. Although he was not the first choice of the founders (Bishop Patrick Duggan of Clonfert having turned down their initial invitation) he responded with the enthusiasm they would have hoped for.

Croke’s letter of acceptance gives an insight into his views on cultural nationalism. Echoing many of his criticisms thirty years previously of Anglo-centric national education, be bemoaned the ‘ugly and irritating fact’ of Ireland’s ‘daily importing from England … her fashions, her accents, her vicious literature, her music her dances and her manifold mannerisms, her games also and her pastimes, to the utter discredit of our own grand national sports’. The enthusiasm with which Croke embraced the new association is seen as an important factor in its success in spreading throughout Ireland in the 1880s. His opinion that Gaelic games could be safely be played on a Sunday without disrespecting the sabbath helped the association to benefit from scheduling its activities for a day which was traditionally free from work and other sporting events which eschewed playing on the Lord’s Day.

The role of patron was not for him solely a titular one and he emerged as a key figure in settling internal disputes in the association’s early years. He opposed the initial exclusivity of the association which sought to ban its members from involvement in a rival Irish Amateur Athletics Association and promoted its adoption of a politically neutral stance, leaving him at odds with some other bishops who wanted a stronger line against Fenian influence. He was particularly influential, along Michael Davitt, in negotiating a truce between different factions aligned respectively to Maurice Davin and to the Fenian element within the association, which threatened its survival in 1888.

The contribution of Archbishop Croke as the inaugural patron of the GAA to the association’s growth and consolidation in its formative years was recognised officially by the association in the decision to name its newly-acquired premises in Jones’s Road in Dublin in his honour in 1913. Today the name of the stadium is what keeps his name to the forefront of Irish society two centuries after his birth. Yet this connection should not obscure his wider significance beyond the GAA.

Croke was one of the most influential figures in the Irish Catholic church in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a crucial phase in the church’s history as it emerged in the post-Emancipation as one of the most influential institutions in Irish society and further afield as his sojourn in New Zealand demonstrated. He was an important player in all of the key social and political movements of the post-Famine period including the expansion of educational opportunities for Irish Catholics and the inter-linked campaigns for tenant right and home rule. There are very few aspects of life in nineteenth century Ireland where his influence cannot be detected. The last word on his career from his biographer, Mark Tierney, sums up the ubiquity of his activity: ‘What more could any man ask of life!’

Professor Marie Coleman is Professor of Twentieth Century Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast and is a member of the GAA’s History and Commemorations Committee.