EURO VISION
AMSTERDAM TO FROM GALICIA IS GAELIC GAMES VIA GERMANY, THE CONTINENT THRIVING ON
INEVITABLY lost in the slew of results last weekend, Amsterdam made their exit from the Leinster club Junior Football Championship quietly, but with their dignity very much intact.
They lost to Tallaghtbased Dublin champions St Mark’s, 3-8 to 1-9 at Parnell Park; a result that hinted at their true potential.
The usual obstacles of a European mainland-based GAA club have been magnified over the last 20 months, as a result of the pandemic that has made travel problematic and competition almost impossible.
In winning the European Championship, Amsterdam played less than a handful of games before beating Paris and Madrid to clinch the title in the Netherlands city of Maastricht last month.
Their trip to Dublin was funded by the players digging deep into
“In Galicia, the vast majority of the players are locals”
their own pockets, while their accommodation was sourced simply from wherever they could lay their heads.
And yet for their lack of practice and impoverishment of resources, they more than held their own.
In so doing they provided an accurate health-check of what is the GAA’s most dynamic unit, with Gaelic Games Europe now having established an impressive 92 clubs in 24 countries; from Finland to the Mediterranean, from the Channel Islands to Moscow, it continues to evolve in ways that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.
Cork man John Murphy kept goal for Amsterdam last weekend but earlier this year, in his role as chairperson of Gaelic Games Europe, he helped engineer one of the GAA’s great PR coups.
He convinced a Galician TV station to take RTÉ’s live stream of both All-Ireland football semi-finals and then the final between Tyrone and Mayo, with the games’ commentary in the local tongue.
It was one of those quirky prefinal stories that got oxygen but it also went to the heart of the matter as to what is driving the growth of the GAA in Europe.
At the last full count in 2019 – for obvious reasons completing such a census in the interim has been problematic – 60% of the playing membership in Europe was made up of non-Irish nationals.
‘To have crossed that 50% threshold was a huge moment because it is evidence of a sense of tribalism and passion that seems to far outweigh any flag or passport,’ explained Murphy, a native of Glenville in east Cork.
‘I think our games have a very tribal, almost primitive appeal, in both the physicality and skilllevels of the games. ‘And the other thing, and it should not be underestimated, is that people really buy into the craic after games and that social element draws in a lot of people who believe sport should be fun at every level.’ That buy-in is particularly evident in Galicia, where the number of clubs is now in double digits, with the vast majority of players being locals. That might explain why the local TVG station previously broadcast a documentary on the GAA World Games, ensuring they were receptive to streaming the AllIreland series, but it was a conversation Murphy had with another indigenous GAA club that provided his light-bulb moment. Darmstadt GAA club in Germany’s South Rhine region is effectively a hurling club – they play some football but it is very much the second code – founded, run and played by locals.
The club owes its origins to a simple twist of fate when 16-year-old Jakob Feldmann washed up in Carlow on a student transition-year placement programme and stayed in digs where the man of the house was from Kilkenny.
When he got home, he not only convinced his friends to take up hurling but is now supported by the local university, while the club goes from strength to strength.
‘They are just wonderful,’ gushed Murphy.
‘Their enthusiasm for it is unbelievable; they are the same as any place in Kilkenny, Tipperary or Cork. They absolutely love it.
‘I was chatting to them and I was saying to them how can I get 10 more German hurling clubs up and running?
‘And they were saying, “why can’t you put it on German TV. This sport sells itself, just get it out there and people will go for it”.
‘That really put the idea in my head about getting our showpiece games broadcast to a wider audience, and Galicia was the best opportunity where that could be done,’ he added. For all kinds of reasons too. No more than the Darmstadt club, Gaelic football in Galicia took root on the back of a visit by a local academic, Garcia Zapata, to Croke Park where he saw the 2010 Leinster football semi-finals and when he went back to his home city Coruña he started up a club.
Such is Galicia’s history – an autonomous region which passionately identifies with its language and music – it has always felt culturally close to Ireland which meant that was not as hard a sell as might have initially been imagined.
Now there is a club in every city in a region of 2.8 million people and it was estimated that of the 300 playing Gaelic football there in 2019, fewer than ten were Irish.
‘The big challenge when doing something like this is how do you pitch hurling or football to a TV channel that knows absolutely nothing about those sports?
‘It is very difficult to put it mildly, but because this TV channel had already done a documentary on the GAA’s world games in the Middle East they had this lingering relationship with the local clubs, so I asked if I could get them the All-Ireland series would they consider showing it and they were really positive.
‘I told them they could have the hurling too but they had no interest,’ he laughed.
‘The lie of the land, so to speak, in Europe is that the Nordics and the Germans have a stronger preference for hurling, whereas in Iberia and France football is the more popular,’ he explained.
The pay-back from the exposure has seen another club founded in Galicia. But the real dividend is that the game is now being developed in a manner that not only suggests the current growth rates will be sustainable, but may actually accelerate.
‘The reaction to it locally was
“Why can’t hurling be put on German TV? This sport sells itself. Just put it out there”
brilliant and the meantime another club has started there.
‘But what has transpired as a result is that local Galician schools have signed an agreement with the local regional educational authority that will, over the next five years, see Gaelic football played in those schools.
‘That is the big one for me because we need to build a sustainable model and a tradition and that means bringing kids up through our system, as such, in a way that is similar to what we have at home.’
And that is even being replicated in big cities like Amsterdam, where inevitably clubs tend primarily to be at the heart of the local Irish community.
In providing a sense of home-from-home, that role can never be underestimated, but the flip-side is that it is always vulnerable to the transient nature of its membership. But the pandemic also provided a window of opportunity in addressing that issue. For the first time this year, they started to organise introductory coaching sessions for children at their municipal training base. ‘Our club was founded in 2003 but because there is such a turnover of personnel, it is very transitional by nature and I would say that we are probably in our fourth crop of members as such, which is a lot given the age of our club.
‘But during the pandemic, when not much was not happening on the field, other things started to happen off it. When restrictions lifted, to allow sport back, we experienced such an increase in women joining that we were able to field a ladies’ team for the first time, rather than having to amalgamate with others.
‘We started a youth initiative in the autumn for six weeks and we have 20/30 kids attending but the big bonus was that one or two of the lads who were involved right at the very start with the club, came back again with their kids this time.
‘It was just very special to see that circle being completed. When you see that happening, and see what is happening with indigenous people taking on the game, it really gives you a sense that this is only going to grow stronger,’ he said.