BLOODY SUNDAY’S IMPACT ON THE GAA
Bloody Sunday changed outlook of a great sporting organisation
THE SEVEN men who gathered in Hayes’ Hotel on November 1, 1884 had grand ambitions, but the organisation they founded on that famous day rapidly outgrew their designs. Within a matter of decades, it was the most powerful cultural organisation in the country – a status it maintains to this day.
Gaelic games survived the War of Independence and the subsequent Civil War.
Some of the men who met on that November afternoon hoped the GAA would become an auxiliary force in the battle for independence. It became much more than that. So important did it become, in fact, that even the British authorities in Ireland recognised its importance.
That is why on November 21, 1920, a little over 36 years after the GAA was founded, British troops murdered 14 people attending a challenge match between Dublin and Tipperary in Croke Park.
The game was targeted because of what it represented. In perpetrating a slaughter that placed the GAA squarely in the centre of the political upheavals of the time, the authorities acknowledged the enormous role it had assumed in Irish life.
The RIC, the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans were deployed at Croke Park as part of a response to the murder of 14 British intelligence officers by the IRA in Dublin earlier that day.
The killings in Croke Park were reprisals, the venue an obvious target for a frightened and enraged governing power.
From the outset, one of the strengths of the GAA lay in its independence. It fought against being entirely consumed by political forces agitating for independence, and successive leaders of the association resisted an explicit political role.
While nationalist in outlook, the association artfully skirted politics. That the match went ahead was itself evidence of the separation between the GAA and the IRA. The leadership of the latter wanted the match cancelled because they feared the British response to the assassinations planned for the morning.
Reprisal was an explicit British policy at the time, and Michael Collins and Sean Russell were afraid of Croke Park becoming a soft target.
The GAA authorities insisted on the game going ahead, proof of its determination to remain independent.
However, those nuances were lost on – or ignored by – the British forces in Dublin.
Chaos and tragedy were the result.
And in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, there was a real danger that the GAA would fall to the forces of outrage, that it would become just another symbol of resistance against British rule.
That didn’t happen, thanks to extraordinary leadership. The association could have easily become weaponised for the sake of the larger struggle.
Instead, it remained an inclusive, thriving force all over the island. It also became more deeply entrenched within the Irish establishment.
‘The horrific event strengthened the bond between the GAA and the government of Dáil Éireann, an attachment that went beyond mere sentiment and sympathy, as the Dáil moved to assist the GAA in the financial difficulties with which it was beset,’ wrote Páraic Duffy and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh in an essay in the tremendous book, ‘The GAA and Revolution in Ireland 1913-1923.
‘In January 1921,’ they wrote, ‘the Dáil sanctioned a loan to the GAA on favourable terms, and so cleared its debt, which represented a major relief, not least for those awaiting payment for works carried out in Croke Park.’
The British military machine had identified the GAA as an obvious example of Irish identity in targeting the 10,000 that attended the match between Dublin and Tipperary.
And in its aftermath, many Irish nationalists — suspicious of the GAA’s determination to remain separate from the political struggle — also identified it as a powerful manifestation of what it was to be Irish.
‘Bloody Sunday would raise the GAA in the national struggle to the position of victim at the heart of the narrative, along with all those who had paid the ultimate price for national freedom,’ wrote Professor Mike Cronin in the same publication.
‘The games of the GAA, which had always been imbued with nationalism, were elevated by the events of November 1920 so that the Association became the ultimate symbol of sport in national service, and Croke Park became a shrine to those who had been killed there.
‘Never again could the GAA be simply a sporting body.’
And yet nor did it become a divisive organisation, either. In the decades after Bloody Sunday, it maintained its political relevance mainly in the north of the island, where it is a powerful cultural signifier to this day.
The events of Bloody Sunday were memorialised, with the Hogan Stand named in memory of Michael Hogan, the Tipperary player shot dead.
Other victims took longer to be recalled, with the Bloody Sunday Graves Project, involving the GAA, descendants of the dead and the Glasnevin Trust, erecting headstones in recent years for some of the victims, who had lain in unmarked graves for over 90 years.
Through it all, the GAA endured. The assistance from the Dáil helped a parlous financial position worsened by the cancellation of matches in response to Bloody Sunday.
When The Truce was agreed with the British in July 1921, GAA activity increased. Soon, the Civil War would erupt and a whole raft of new challenges would present themselves.
Communities cleaved along pro and anti-treaty lines.
And still the matches continued, and splintered communities healed, helped by sport.
Violence tore through the GAA on Bloody Sunday, but in surviving it, the association showed its toughness and its tenderness.
It simply refused to bend.