By Michael Foley, author of The Bloodied Field

When the shooting stopped in Croke Park on Sunday November 21, 1920, most of the Tipperary players were corralled together by the police at the Hill 60 end of the ground. Two players were detached from their group, off to the left. One was lying on the ground. The other, Jim Egan, was walking back towards the others, the blood on his hands glinting in the winter sun. “Mick Hogan is dead,” he said. “Could we get a priest?”

Of the 14 victims killed that day, Hogan’s status as a Tipperary footballer ensured he would be remembered as the most visible image of the tragedy at Croke Park, but his story gathers all the intertwining strands of Irish life, politics, war and sport at the time. He was born in 1896 and grew up on the family farm outside the village of Grangemockler in Tipperary, the second eldest in a family of nine.

His older brother, Dan, was an excellent footballer who played for Monaghan and refereed Ulster championship games having moved north to work as a clerk with a railway company. He also became close friends with Eoin O’Duffy, quickly becoming a major figure in the northern IRA as the War of Independence took shape.

Michael also grew up a talented footballer, playing his first game at Croke Park in 1919, almost exactly a year before Bloody Sunday, in a challenge game against Dublin. When Tipperary returned in 1920 to play Dublin again, Hogan was still a young, developing defender.

He was picked at right-corner-back and due to mark Frank Burke, one of Dublin’s greatest forwards. That made him anxious. Just before they went out onto the field Hogan asked Bill Ryan, picked at right-half-back, to swop places with him. He couldn’t. Ryan had lost his boots in a scuffle with a group of soldiers on the train to Dublin the previous day and his replacement pair were too big. The boots just weren’t right. Hogan returned to his kitbag and pulled out a spare lace which he gave to Ryan to tighten around his boots. Ryan kept the lace for the rest of his life.

The game was ten minutes old when the shooting started, Hogan racing towards the ball with Burke. Both of them dived flat on the ground and began crawling towards the edge of the pitch. “We’ll lie in here close,” Hogan shouted. “We might get some protection.”

They kept crawling towards the sideline, hoping to jump the white picket fence surrounding the pitch and blend into the escaping crowd. Then Burke heard Hogan moan. “I’m shot,” he said.

A spectator, Tom Ryan, ran to Hogan and whispered a prayer in his ear before being shot. Ryan crawled off the field and died that night in hospital. Hogan’s body was taken to Jervis Street hospital and lay in the Pro-Cathedral before being brought arriving at Clonmel by train the following Wednesday. His coffin emerged from the carriage draped in a tricolour and was carried through the town by friends and neighbours, soldiers saluting as the cortege passed by.

From there, a hearse brought him home to Grangemockler. The blinds were drawn on the houses along the route. Footballers, local politicians, volunteers and members of Cumann na mBan all lined the route. When the coffin reached the church in Grangemockler village, the tricolour was removed to reveal a glass lid, added to grant his mother one last chance to see her son.

Volunteers stood vigil all night around the coffin before Hogan was buried the following day, wearing a Tipperary kit donated by his team mate Jack Kickham. In time, his memory was enshrined by the naming of the Hogan Stand in his honour in 1926. Dan Hogan would ascend to Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces in the new Irish Free State. Tom Hogan’s work in the GAA was acknowledged in 1946 by the Hogan Cup, the All-Ireland trophy for the highest ranking secondary schools’ competition in gaelic football.

Their contributions to Irish life and gaelic games were rich and varied, but destined forever to be shadowed by the loss of their brother, the tragic emblem of the darkest day in the GAA’s history.