Time to reflect
It may have taken time, but the Association has taken a small step in acknowledging an aspect of its past that was, for so long, overlooked
The GAA remembers Great War heroes who perished
MEMORY has nourished the GAA and helped it become the most powerful organisations in Ireland. Great deeds, enduring heroes and, in Bloody Sunday, a harrowing brush with the cruelties of revolutionary times, are celebrated in its history.
The past is a powerful actor in the modern theatre of the games, framing the greatness of the Dublin footballers and the comeback of the Galway hurlers.
Memory is treasured – most of the time. The history of any powerful movement is formed by omissions as well as inclusions, though.
What goes unsaid, unremembered, ignored, is not worthless, and in recent days the GAA took a small step in recovering one aspect of its past.
Over 11 days, from November 1 to today, Armistice Day, the GAA website has profiled a GAA member who fought in World War One.
The number 11 is significant, as schoolchildren have learned for decades. It was at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month that an armistice was signed signalling the end of fighting on the Western Front.
Thousands of those fighting in the British forces were Irish, a fact with which our society has only in recent years started to make peace with (and as recently as this week, they were being described as traitors on a radio phone-in show).
And of those, many were members of the GAA. In forgetting about them, the Association was doing nothing more than mirroring wider Irish society. There is a modesty to the gesture taken by the GAA in honouring the memory of those who died a century ago, but there is a poignancy to it, as well.
‘There is a lot of research done on GAA players who were involved in the Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War,’ says Damian White, the chair of the GAA’s History and Commemorations Committee.
‘People came home from the war and kept quiet. It’s important to acknowledge them and the sacrifice they make. It mightn’t have been everyone’s choice, but they did what they thought was right.
‘We as an organisation should acknowledge their sacrifice.’
Research into this area is expanding. Dr Dónal McAnallen has been studying the topic for some years, and Ross O’Carroll wrote an illuminating essay on the subject in ‘The GAA & Revolution in Ireland 19131923’, a marvellous collection edited by Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh that was published in 2015.
Dr Richard McElligott lectures on Irish History in UCD, and is the author of ‘Forging a Kingdom: The GAA in Kerry 1884-1934’.
He wrote the first of the profiles featured on the GAA website. Its subject was Charlie Duggan, who played on the first Kerry team to win an All-Ireland, in 1903. He was also a veteran of the Boer War who, as a reservist, was mobilised when war with Germany was declared in 1914. Duggan joined the Munster Fusiliers and was injured at the Battle of Mons.
There was no official GAA policy regarding its members joining the British Army, says Dr McElligott, in contrast to other sporting bodies, in particular the IRFU, which urged its membership to sign up. This was, perhaps, an early instance of the pragmatism and ability to adapt that has been a feature of the GAA for over a century.
‘In the early 1890s, the GAA was almost destroyed,’ says McElligott. ‘With the fall from grace of Charles Stewart Parnell as the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the GAA very much backed Parnell in the massive split that happened in nationalist politics at the time.
‘That almost tore the GAA asunder, and from then on they were terrified that if they became too political, if they took too-political a stance one way or the other, the same thing would happen.
‘And you see the same thing again with the Civil War. The GAA very much clamps down completely on being perceived as being pro-Free State or anti-Treaty. It’s that experience of the 1890s and how the GAA came perilously close to actually collapsing and ceasing to exist.
‘We know the GAA is a nationalist body and there were a lot of radical nationalists in the higher echelons. We can suspect it would have been anti-war but officially it didn’t really take a side.’
There is no accurate figure for how many GAA members fought in World War One. This is due, in part, to the fact that there is no official figure for how many Irishmen fought in the conflict.
‘We don’t know how many GAA members joined up, and that’s not surprising because even today we don’t know exactly how many Irishmen in total did. We think it’s around 210,000 but we’re not sure. And we certainly don’t know how many Irishmen died in the war. It’s anywhere between 25,000 and 49,000.
‘It’s generally believed to be in or around 36,000.’
The reasons for the uncertainty are practical and stark. Many Irishmen already living in Britain, as well as Canada and Australia, enlisted but there are no detailed figures available.
A German bombing raid during the Blitz on London in the Second World War destroyed the War Office records, says McElligott, depriving historians of masses of detail.
And the third reason? ‘Most GAA members, they weren’t high-profile people when they joined up.
‘When they died, it wouldn’t have been reported in the newspapers. They were only basic-level soldiers, a lot of them.’
Donal McAnallen’s research into the numbers of GAA members that fought in the war has turned up dozens of names in Ulster alone, and it is supposed the island-wide figure runs well into the hundreds at least, and probably beyond.
Reasons for joining were many, from plain economic necessity, to a conviction they were helping Ireland’s cause for Home Rule.
Laurence Roche is another of the 11 highlighted by the GAA. He was the most senior GAA figure to fight
in the war, and came from a relatively prosperous background.
Roche played in the All-Ireland football final won by Limerick Commercials that decided the 1896 championship (played in 1898), and also in 1896, Roche was elected a vice-president of the GAA.
Roche enlisted in 1914 and was given a commission as a captain in the Royal Munster Fusiliers.
His experience attests to some of the hostility endured by Irishmen on their return fr om the war, with attempts made to seize his lands during the Civil War.
‘I was a marked man,’ Roche once recorded, ‘and was several times threatened and revolvers pushed in my ribs’.
Ross O’Carroll records some of the hostility within the GAA itself, to men enlisting during the war years. In February 1915, for instance, Sean Etchingham, president of the Wexford board, demanded that money given to a player injured in a football match, be taken back because the player had enlisted.
And in July 1915, he writes, ‘the honorary secretary of the Galway county board, Stephen Jordan, was charged with having made statements considered prejudicial to recruiting’.
Yet in the same year, the Laois board put forward a motion arguing that members should be allowed to volunteer during the war without exclusion from the GAA, and that the prohibition on ex-British servicemen should be lifted, too.
A ban on British police or military personnel joining the GAA had been reintroduced in 1903 as Rule 21, and the infamous ban forbidding GAA members participating in foreign games had been in place since 1905, enshrined in Rule 27.
John Fox played on the first Clare team to win an All-Ireland hurling championship, in 1914, and would live to be the last-surviving member of that side before his death in 1967. He is, along with Duggan, one of two All-Ireland winners who fought in the war.
He was one of 80 young men from Newmarket on Fergus alone that joined the British Army to fight in the war.
Fox was injured at the Somme, and lived the rest of his life with shrapnel lodged in his head.
On his return to Clare, Rule 21 prevented him from playing the game he loved, but he remained involved – despite, according to O’Carroll’s account, him being jeered at matches for taking ‘John Bull’s soup’.
McAnallen has elegantly referred to men returning to Ireland after fighting in the British ranks as feeling ‘slightly displaced’. They were returning to a society not directly impacted by a brutal conflict, and where nationalist sentiment ran high. Rather than outright hostility, their lot was often to find their experiences ignored. ‘They went through a horrifying experience, and the physical and psychological trauma of that is something we’ve never really looked at in Irish history,’ says Richard McElligott. ‘What happened to these men? I’m sure a lot of them felt displaced. It was a different Ireland to the one they knew, because of the 1918 general election, because of the popular mandate for Sinn Féin and subsequently the IRA’s campaign. ‘They were coming back to being branded as traitors or as less Irish because of what they did. ‘Down in Kerry, for example, Tom Crean, one of our great national heroes, never talked about his life or his adventures because he was associated with the British Navy. He couldn’t tell his story because of the prevailing attitudes.’ James Rossiter played for Wexford in All-Ireland football finals in 1913 and 1914. By the time the county were winning the first of their famous four in a row in 1915, Rossiter was fighting in France. He was injured at the Battle of Loos and died within days. In his last letter home, Rossiter had written that playing in an All-Ireland final made him more nervous than going into battle against the Germans.