Film traces the Irish roots of hockey
When Eamonn O’Cualain tells you the Irish invented hockey, you tend to listen.
That’s because the 36-year-old filmmaker has produced a documentary, The Puck of the Irish, that backs up his argument.
“I have family here (Toronto) . . . and I read in some of the books they have on hockey and ties to (hurling), and that fuelled my interest,” O’Cualain said Thursday, on the eve of the debut of his documentary, screening Friday to Sunday, at the TIFF Lightbox as part of the Toronto Irish Film Festival.
“We started asking people in Canada, in Nova Scotia, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto . . . it gets to be a bit of a story, so you try and find out what’s true and what’s not.”
O’Cualain not only crossed portions of Canada where Irish immigrants told varying stories about how their national sport — hurling — was brought over to Canada almost three centuries ago, he enlists the input of some of Ireland’s most famous hockey-playing sons and daughters.
That would be Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, and fellow hall of famer Geraldine Heaney.
The two hockey stars are part of the framework of the documentary, which traces Irish immigrants all the way back to the late1700s, when they organized hurling games at King’s College, N.S., on fields frozen by the Canadian winter.
A natural progression was to “turn a field game into an ice game,” O’Cualain says, but the process of separating fact from fiction is part of what his documentary is all about.
“There’s so many tales about the origins of hockey, that there was once a game like it invented in ancient Greece, all the way to its ties to hurling and Irish immigrants,” said O’Cualain, from Galway, Ireland.
“Like I said, you try to sort out what’s true. We took three and a half years to get to this point, where we can show our documentary to the public. You’re taking a position by saying the Irish invented hockey . . . then finding out it’s true.”
Hockey historians could mention the historical origins of ice hockey, which are widely believed to be rooted with British soldiers based in Canada in the 1850s. The essential rules were established by students at McGill University in 1879.
O’Cualain aims to show how natives of Ireland — whose history with hurling predates Christ — spread to Canada with the first Irish settlers who came to the country.
The documentary also shows the influence of the Irish on the game, from the Montreal Shamrocks and the Toronto St. Pats to Shanahan and Heaney, both of whom were inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2013.
O’Cualain — through host Ger Loughnane — interviews Shanahan, and discusses Shanahan’s impact on hockey, part of which includes the famous “Shanahan Summit” during the 2004-05 NHL lockout.
Shanahan convened a group during the lockout to earnestly gauge hockey’s on-ice product — leaning toward a renaissance of skill and a departure from fighting — and it precipitated the formation of the competition committee, which now allows players to have a say in the direction of the game.
Shanahan’s parents hail from Belfast and Cork, while Heaney — a pioneer in advancing the women’s game — was born in Lurgan, County Armagh.
“We (with Shanahan) talked about the game’s history and how it changed in the 1970s and ’80s,” O’Cualain said. “It was a tough, tough game then, and Brendan remarked on how there are a lot of similarities to (hurling), that it’s a tough game as well.”
O’Cualain will take his documentary to several film festivals over the next few months, and hopes to have it aired on TV by the end of the year.