If the Gaelic League attempted to stay non-political, the other key cultural organisation of the period from the Parnell split to the Easter Rising had no such inhibitions. On the contrary, the Gaelic Athletic Association was a Fenian vehicle from the start. It has also been the most successful popular association in modern Irish history.
It was founded in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, in 1884. Its purpose was to preserve and promote the ancient game of hurling. In addition, it developed a code of football which went on to become the most popular spectator sport in twentieth-century Ireland. For the Fenians, it offered a perfect recruiting vehicle and its politics reflected Fenian radicalism right from the beginning. It was aggressively Parnellite at the time of the split and thereafter was to be found on the left of the nationalist movement on every occasion. It was republican in politics; hugely supportive of the Irish language and of Gaelic culture in general; tacitly Catholic, although not clerical, in its assumptions; and ferociously opposed to the symbols of British rule, not least the police. It imposed a ban on its members playing ‘foreign games’ — defined as soccer, rugby, hockey and cricket — which lasted until 1971.
In part, it was a reaction against the exclusiveness of other sports. Rugby was focused on elite private schools; cricket had a long association with both army and ascendancy; athletics was administered by a Trinity College elite which discouraged, to put it no more strongly, the participation of the wrong sort of chaps. The GAA was perfect for the people whose faces did not fit. To be fair, this point can easily be exaggerated: there is much local evidence from the late 1880s, when things were still fluid, that GAA clubs were founded by athletes who cheerfully played cricket and association football (soccer). The exclusiveness was not all one way: the ban on foreign games was also a form of exclusion, a kind of recreational tariff wall willed by the Fenian element in the GAA for political-cultural reasons.
At any rate, the GAA became the great popular mobilising force in Irish recreational life. And it did so in a context that applauded exclusion, that insisted on the separateness of Gaelic games and the social life that revolved around them. Matches were played on Sundays, the only free day in the working week, which guaranteed that sabbatarian Protestants were unlikely to participate. The GAA soon spread to every Catholic parish in the country, with a local club often named for a saint or a patriot: thus Naomh (Saint) this-or-that, plus various Emmets, Tones, Sarsfields and so on. There were few named for O’Connell, whose aversion to violence made him persona non grata in Fenian eyes.
The codification of sports — a mid-Victorian phenomenon — meant the establishment of uniform rules for a game from a multitude of regional variants. The antecedents of soccer and rugby were local rough-and-tumbles with local rules. The codification of hurling followed a similar path to other sports. The game had been particularly popular in three areas in pre-Famine times: in south Leinster and east Munster; on either side of the middle reaches of the Shannon; and in the Glens of Antrim. The Famine dealt what was nearly a death blow to the game in the first two areas. It was the need to revive hurling that inspired the founders of the GAA.
And revive it they did. But in codifying the game they faced a problem. The game played in the Glens of Antrim was significantly different to the southern game, being closer to Scottish shinty. Modern hurling was, however, codified along the lines of the South Leinster game. Antrim had to adjust accordingly if it was to participate at national level, which it has done with immense commitment but little success.
The early years of the twentieth century established a pattern that has persisted to the present day, with only occasional interruptions. Three counties, all bordering on each other, have dominated the All-Ireland championship: Kilkenny, Tipperary and Cork. Between them, they have won more than 70 per cent of all championships since the first contest in 1887. Of the other counties that have won the championship more than once, only Dublin (last victory in 1938) doesn’t have a border with one of the Big Three. Antrim have never won it at all.
Hurling is effectively a regional rather than a truly national sport, in that it is only played seriously in its heartland. That heartland is the flat limestone countryside south of the Dublin–Galway line. In general, once you hit the rising ground and head into hilly areas, it yields to football.
Yet it is thought of as the national game because of its uniqueness and despite its regional bias. In this it is similar to Australian Rules, another regional game unique to its locale. While hurling may not be as popular as Gaelic football — which is played with varying degrees of skill and success everywhere in Ireland — it is still capable of drawing impressive crowds to big championship matches. It is, moreover, a quite magnificent spectacle when well played, a game of astonishing speed, skill, robust courage and elegance.
Sport demands heroes, and Gaelic games are no exception. In addition, it demands spiritual homes: Newmarket, Lord’s, Yankee Stadium, Camp Nou. For hurling, hero and home meet in Thurles, where the GAA was founded.
Tom Semple (1879–1943) was the first great hero of Tipperary hurling. A railway worker, he was the talisman of one the greatest of all club teams, the Thurles Blues (later Thurles Sarsfields), who dominated the game in Tipperary in the first decade of the twentieth century. Prior to the emergence of the Blues, hurling in the county had been very much the property of rural parishes like Moycarkey, Tubberadora and Dungourney. Since the rise of the Blues to eminence, the club has consistently been the dominant force in the county game, having won more county championships than any other.
One contemporary writer rhapsodised about Semple as follows:
Few men playing the game in Ireland today have achieved the fame that the Thurles captain — Tom Semple — has known. As an organiser and a player he deserves a high place in any story of the progress of hurling during the infancy of the twentieth century. Tom is a conspicuous man — there is no chance of mistaking another player for Semple ... in build, Semple is one of the tall, sinewy type, more of a thoroughbred than a hunter, if I may so express myself. He is well over six feet in his ‘vamps’ and, like most Tipperary men, square cut and hard as nails.
A various man, Semple became a referee, trainer and a respected administrator. He also used his role as a guard on the Dublin–Cork railway line to act as an IRA courier during the war of independence. He was the trainer of the winning Tipperary championship side in 1930 and was a key figure in securing and developing the Thurles Sportsfield. This ground quickly established itself as everyone’s favourite hurling venue in the country. It is the spiritual home of the Munster hurling championship and second-biggest GAA ground in the country by capacity. The final of the All-Ireland championship — normally played in Croke Park in Dublin — was staged in Thurles in 1934 and 1984 to mark the golden jubilee and centenary of the GAA.
The Sportsfield was re-developed in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. In 1971, it was renamed Semple Stadium, in honour of the great hurler who was twenty-eight years dead at the time and whose last championship season as a player had been sixty years earlier. It is the best place of all to watch the national game.
