The letter that changed Irish sporting history

The letter that changed the course of Irish sporting history

ONE of the enduring truths of the GAA speaks to the importance of sacrifice. None of it would be possible without the dedication of thousands: the juvenile coaches, the caretakers of pitches and dressing-rooms, the parents carting kids to games and training; and the hundreds of thousands of players at every level.

And that selflessness, that enthusiasm for and belief in a greater good, has distinguished the association from the start.

In fact, there would have been no Hayes’ Hotel without that animating spirit.

‘Our business now is to work together caring for none but the Irish people and quietly shoving aside all who would denationalise these people,’ wrote Michael Cusack towards the conclusion of his letter to Maurice Davin in August 1884.

This is one of the most important documents, not only in the history of the GAA, but in the annals of modern Ireland.

Cusack was an outsized example of the type of character required to forge a new movement in a time of febrile politics on this island.

He was intellectually rigorous, a passionate nationalist, but also a personality so robust and forceful that he could be infuriating and divisive.

Cusack (right) is properly celebrated as one of the inspirations behind the founding of the GAA, but his tireless championing of a distinctive Irish identity would also see him lampooned by James Joyce as The Citizen in Ulysses, a frothing nationalist repulsive to Leopold Bloom.

He was an enormous character, then, but an inspired one, too.

He understood that political independence would not of itself suffice, that sustained freedom could only be secured in concert with cultural independence, manifested most obviously in a separate language but also in indigenous sports.

This need for the political and cultural to be intertwined is stressed in Cusack’s letter to Davin, which facilitated the meeting in Thurles on November 1 1884 that founded the GAA.

‘I have found it to be utterly hopeless to revive our national pastimes without the assistance of the leaders of the people and I have not hesitated to urge my claim with a persistence that brooks no refusal,’ wrote Cusack.

So it would be that at the meeting in Hayes’s Hotel, three of the seven attendees were IRB members: John Wyse Power, James K Bracken and FR Malone.

It was a sound decision on Cusack’s part to identify Davin as an important figure in realising a national movement of the kind he desired. Maurice Davin, born in 1842 and from near Carrick-onSuir in Tipperary, was an outstanding athlete. At the age of 34, at the first international athletics meeting organised between Ireland and England and held in Lansdowne Road, he set a world record in the hammer throw.

He was so good that a competitor, one DH Brownfield, once wrote to him enquiring if Davin intended competing at an event in Stoke-on-Trent.

‘If you are coming to jump, I shall not train,’ said Brownfield. ‘So by letting me have a line you will save me all the grind of training.’

Davin retired in 1879, aged 37, but returned briefly two years later to compete in the British Amateur Athletics Championships in Birmingham.

This was prompted by the claim in a British newspaper that there were no outstanding athletes in Ireland any longer. Davin competed in the hammer and the shot putt, won both and slipped back into retirement.

Davin was recognised as an outstanding figure in 19th century Irish sport, while his involvement with the Land League also met with the approval of more hardened nationalists.

Cusack thus proposed him as first president of the GAA at the fabled Thurles meeting. Two months later, at its second meeting in Cork, Davin was asked to draft the rules of the new association.

He was troubled by the influence of the IRB, though, and resigned in 1887, only to be elected again in 1888. However, his decision to send a touring party to the United States in 1888 to raise badly needed funds was a disastrous one. More than 20 of the 51 chosen to go and play exhibition matches stayed in America. The trip became famous as the Invasion Tour, and it ended Davin’s active involvement.

Those travails are the cost of engagement, as administrators continue to learn up to this day.

And they could not have been envisaged when Davin received the famous letter from Michael Cusack.

Had they been, one supposes both men would have been undeterred; they were set on ambitions that would shape Ireland for generations to come.

‘Dear Mr Davin,’ began Cusack in his note, ‘The Irish Association with its members must be formed before the end of this year.

‘The Association could organise the whole country within the year.’

The GAA did indeed spread as quickly as Cusack hoped – even if he had no great expectations of its success within the capital city.

‘Don’t bother your head about Dublin,’ advised Cusack. ‘The place couldn’t well be worse than it is. We’ll have to look to the provinces for me. Dublin will have to fall in or keep up the connection with England.’

A flavour of Cusack’s combative-

ness can be detected there, and Dublin supporters might console themselves with the knowledge that they were targeted for trenchant criticism even before the GAA was founded. They would fall into line, as the entire country did.

There were rows and ructions, schisms and tragic upheavals. But the GAA thrived, and in ways neither Cusack or Davin could have foretold. It was employed in the fight for independence, and continued to have a political relevance for years thereafter.

But it soon outgrew politics, becoming an end in itself all over the island. It had a particular importance as an organising power in rural Ireland, before becoming a means of identification for communities beset by problems.

It spread through the towns and cities, too, with Cusack, despite his doubts about its appetite for cultural revolution, becoming one of the best-known figures in Dublin.

He carried around a large blackthorn stick he called Bás gan Sagart (Death without a priest), a nod towards its supposed employment in faction fights by his ancestors. That appetite for engagement survived in Cusack, inspiring him to sit down one August day and write a letter to Maurice Davin.

Ireland would never be the same after it.