A DAY FOR REFLECTION
Bloody Sunday left a scar on the GAA that was in danger of fading until one writer began to champion the cause of all those who died
TWELVE years after the lack of detail first grated with his journalistic i nsti ncts, Mick Foley found himself at a graveside i n Glasnevin Cemetery paying tribute to a 10-year-old child he never met but knew as well as himself.
That personal journey of discovery has coloured how the GAA will mark the 100th anniversary of Bloody Sunday at Croke Park tonight, ensuring it is no longer viewed through a prism of martyrdom, but humanity.
It is quite the feat given that Foley, a sports journalist with the Sunday Times, started out simply irritated by the fuzziness of the information in the build-up to the historic Ireland-England rugby i nternational i n Croke Park in 2007.
That fixture was an invite to pull at the scab of November 21, 1920, when British forces entered Croke Park during a Dublin versus Tipperary football challenge game, leaving Tipp’s Michael Hogan and 13 spectators dead in what was a reprisal for an IRA mission that morning targeting the agents of British rule that had resulted in 15 casualties.
But it was a wound so carelessly attended to that even the base details were blurred, with contra
“I started to immediately identify with these victims”
dictory reporting of fatalities and mangled identities.
It was a story begging to be told and in 2014, after three years of painstaking research, The Bloodied Field hit the shelves, not just retelling what happened but telling it for the first time through the eyes of those who perished and those left behind.
And for the man who afforded them that voice, it has become a story deeply affecting and inspiring.
While the hard facts were yielded by the British Military archives, offering up documents that had remained sealed until 1999 and which detailed on a map where each fatality had occurred in the ground, as well as autopsy reports, it was a trip to the British Newspaper Archive in London which made the most powerful of first impressions on Foley.
‘ On some microfilm I came across a picture of Jerome O’Leary, and it was the first time I saw a picture of any of the victims other than Michael Hogan,’ says the writer.
‘Suddenly, you are looking at this kid who is 10 years of age and all I could think of is, I went to my first game in Croke Park when I was the same age to see Cork play Galway in an All-Ireland football semi-final. I started immediately to identify with all these other victims in the sense that they are us and we are them.
‘It is 100 years ago but when you delve into the simple details of their life, it’s the things that brought them to Croke Park that really registered.
‘Jane Boyle was getting married, she was a Dub, her husband-to-be was a Tipperary man and they were engulfed in wedding preparations, so to get away from all the madness they went to the match. I mean, that is such a human thing to do.
‘The same with young William Robinson (11) who scooted up a tree as he was too small to see the game because of the crowd and you c an al most s ense hi s anticipation.
‘It seemed to me at every turn that the Bloody Sunday victims were becoming victims again. Quite apart from being killed, their stories are sandpapered out. You have the British authorities claiming that inside the ground they were acting in self- defence and that these people were just caught in the crossfire, which is not true and is a reducing of their story.
‘And it is a huge trauma for the GAA to have to deal with at that time. They are almost numbed by it and what they essentially do is they drive on because they are worried if they don’t drive on, they won’t have any organisation at the end of all this.
‘Those families, those victims were completely airbrushed out of the story. They needed to be at the centre of it and that is the whole point of this, so that in future if anyone thinks of Bloody Sunday, they think of the victim and not just have a vague number in their head as to how many died there,’ explains Foley.
It has achieved so much more than that. In the rush by the British authorities to cover their tracks they demanded the victims be buried quickly and quietly meaning that more than half were buried in unmarked graves.
The GAA’s establishment of the Graves Project, in which Croke Park official Cian Murphy has been a driving force, has gone some way to, if not addressing that injustice, at least providing a sense of closure.
And witnessing it has had a profound impact on Foley, whose book formed the basis of a podcast as well as a gripping documentary which was aired on RTÉ this week.
One of the very first interviews carried out for that documentary was with Nancy Dillon, who was still in her mother’s womb when her father James Matthews was shot that afternoon. Nancy passed away in 2018, but not before she was taken to see her father’s grave with accompanying headstone for the first time.
‘To see her reaction was very poignant. My own father had passed away four months earlier and then my uncle, so I was spending a lot of time in graveyards around then and because of that it had a particular impact on me.
‘What funerals can do to and for families? What can a gravestone do? It brought all these people together, not that they were estranged, but many meet people they had not met in years. And this happened at a number of the unveilings. There were people there who had never met before, they met up again after it and that is a wonderful legacy.’
It has also been to the GAA’s benefit. Up until the publication of Foley’s book the GAA’s efforts to process and commemorate what happened were predictable but hardly all embracing.
They chose to focus on Michael Hogan, naming the stand in Croke Park after him in 1926. Foley says: ‘Michael Hogan became the single image, the story was told through him even though we knew nothing about him. It was much more convenient from the GAA’s point of view to tell the story of the martyred hero who fell on Croke Park, his blood spilt on this hallowed place and use that narrative, particularly when the Free State was formed and evolving, to place themselves in a higher state of Irishness.
‘They now had a footprint in the national struggle, they had suffered too. And that is a story to be told but their relationship with it is much more complex and when you move forward in that way, people are left behind and those people were the Bloody Sunday families.
‘It is in the last five years, with the Graves Project, that the GAA has found a different way to access what Bloody Sunday means to them,’ explains Foley.
More than that, though, it is the story of the ordinary lives that reminds you of the extraordinary hold that the GAA has on Irish
life, back then and now. ‘The lives of the victims tell us that we were always a broad church, now and then. If you look at the victims alone, you have three children, a woman, an ex- British Army man, labourers, a mechanic and you have IRA volunteers as well. You have this huge spread of Irish life. You would have had people at that time who would have associated very closely with the cause of independence, and would have seen their attendance at match or the fact that they played the games as an extension of that.
‘Equally you would have a huge number of people who went to matches to be distracted for a while, have a bit of craic, hopefully win and have something to shake at the other crowd when we come home. It nourishes your daily life, it is something you enjoy, you love. It means no more or no less than that.’
Every day there is a phone call here or a snippet of information there, and earlier this year an updated version of The Bloodied Field was published. More than a book, it demands to be part of the national curriculum and national conversation. In the nine years since he started writing the book, Foley’s life has been utterly transformed, he has moved back to his native Cork, married and i s expecting his fourth child in the coming months.
But this story will not leave him, nor does he want it to. Last year, as the GAA unveiled three more headstones to mark the graves of those who had fallen, Patrick O’Dowd, Michael Feery and Jerome O’Leary, Cian Murphy rang to advise that no member of O’Leary’s family could be found and would he oblige by saying a few words.
‘It was one of the most affecting things I have ever done standing at the grave of this boy who will be forever 10 years of age, sitting on a wall watching a game of football,’ says Foley.
‘I said that we are all here for him, he is part of our Bloody Sunday family now.’
And that is what tonight at Croke Park is all about.