Players Or Patriots? the GAA and the 1916 Rising’
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‘Players or Patriots? The GAA and the 1916 Rising’ Dr Richard McElligott I Shortly after midday on Easter Monday 1916, the Argentinean born Eamon Bulfin climbed onto the roof of the GPO and unfurled the Irish Republican tri-colour. Bulfin, the commander of the UCD battalion of the Irish Volunteers, was also a promising hurler having captained the University’s Fitzgibbon Cup winning team in 1915.1 Bulfin was one of 302 players from fifty-two separate Dublin GAA clubs who numbered among the Easter rebel’s combined force of 1,500. There is evidence of a large degree of participation by individual Dublin GAA clubs with sixty-nine members of the St Laurence O’Toole club alone taking part in the fighting.2 In the GPO, Bulfin was joined by the likes of J.J. Walsh (the ex-Chairman of the Cork GAA and later Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the Irish Free State Government), Domhnall Ó Buachalla, (the captain of the Kildare footballers and Ireland’s first Governor General), Harry Boland (the president of the Dublin GAA) and a young Michael Collins who had been active in the London GAA before returning home to take part in the rebellion. Other notable figures in the rebellion with GAA connections included Frank Burke (a UCD student and native of Kildare who would become the greatest dual player of his generation, winning five All- Ireland titles as a hurler and footballer with Dublin), Sean T. O’Kelly (the future Irish President who was a member of the Confederate hurling club), William T. Cosgrave (the Free State’s first leader who had served as chairman of the Lord Edward’s GAA) and Peadar Kearney (the writer of Amhrán na bhFiann and a hurler with the Oliver Bond’s club). In total eighteen GAA members were killed fighting with the Volunteers and the Irish Citizens Army during Easter week.3 Among them was Michael Mulvihill of Ballyduff. Mulvihill, a talented hurler, was active in the London GAA before he returned to Ireland in January 1916. Having been stationed in the GPO, Mulvihill was gunned down alongside the O’Rahilly while attempting to charge a barricade on Moore lane on Thursday 28 April. GAA men were to be found stationed in all major rebel outposts in the city. Among Eamon de Valera’s force centred on Boland’s Mills were several players from the city’s Fontenoy, Sandymount and St Andrews GAA clubs. Ironically in what would be one of the first actions of the Rising, some of these men would soon attack a unit of the Irish Association of the Volunteer Training Corps, recruited from members of the Irish Rugby Football Union who had been deemed too old to enlist for active service in the Great War. They had been on a field exercise in Wicklow and were making their way back through Dublin when a detachment under the command of the IRFU’s president, Francis Browning, was ambushed by the Volunteers on Haddington Road. Browning and four other IRFU members were killed.4 In all, five of the fifteen men executed for their part in the Rising, Patrick Pearse, Sean McDermott, Con Colbert, Michael O’Hanrahan and Eamonn Ceantt, had GAA connections. Pearse was one of the prime organisers of school’s football and hurling in Dublin and was the chairman of the Dublin Colleges Council in 1910 when his Scoil Éanna hurling team took part in competitions. As a student Con Colbert had played hurling in his native Limerick and 1 in the years before 1916, Colbert often worked in Scoil Éanna as head of the student’s physical education programme. Sean McDermott became an active non-playing member of the Dublin GAA once he moved to the city while Michael O’Hanrahan played hurling for both the St Laurence O’Toole and Ard Craobh clubs after he came to Dublin. Finally, Eamonn Ceantt was a keen hurler during his time studying at O'Connell's CBS in North Richmond Street. Outside of the city itself, GAA men were also active in the other rebel actions which took place during Easter week. For example, the commander of the Dublin Volunteer’s Fifth Battalion, stationed in north county, Dublin, was Thomas Ashe; the former captain and chairman of the Lispole GAA club in West Kerry who had founded the Lusk GAA club when he moved to Dublin, playing in goal with the hurlers. With a force of around forty men, Ashe commanded one of the most successful actions of Easter week. On Friday 28 April, he attacked a large convoy of over fifty RIC officers in Ashbourne, County Meath, killing seven officers, wounding a further fifteen and capturing the rest with the loss of only two Volunteers.5 In Wexford, a cohort of prominent GAA officials played a leading role in the actions of the Volunteers there during the Rising. Among them were Seamus Doyle and Sean Etchingham. Etchingham, a member of the Wexford GAA and a prominent local GAA journalist, was also a radical nationalist and Sinn Féin supporter. On Easter Sunday, the Volunteers there used the pretext of a series of GAA matches in Wexford Park to cover their turn out for the Rising. But on receiving word that the insurrection had been postponed, they dispersed. However following confirmation that the rebels had begun operations in Dublin the next day, Doyle ordered a general mobilisation of the Enniscorthy Volunteers. A force of 300 men under Doyle and Etchingham’s command occupied the town, besieged the local police barracks and commandeered the Post Office and rail station. The Volunteers held the town until the following Saturday when, refusing to believe the Dublin leaders had surrendered, Doyle and Etchingham were allowed safe passage to meet with Pearse in Arbour Hill prison to confirm the order.6 After the surrender Etchingham was sentenced to death by court martial but this was subsequently commuted to five years imprisonment and he was interned in Lewes jail in Sussex with the other surviving ringleaders. Meanwhile in Galway, 500 Volunteers assembled on Easter Tuesday in villages around Athenry and carried out some limited attacks on local police barracks. A large proportion of these men were hurlers and members of local GAA clubs.7 II It was no surprise that so many members of the Association took part in the rebellion. By 1916, the Gaelic Athletic Association was one of the largest organisations on the island of Ireland, numbering over 500 affiliated clubs. Since its inception in 1884, the Association had always displayed a strong affiliation with Irish nationalism. Perhaps this is unsurprising given its stated mission to both preserve and promote Gaelic games and culture and to act as a bulwark against the encroaching Anglicisation of Irish sports and society. So throughout its early history, the GAA was deeply politicised. In fact, given our modern concepts of sporting bodies, the degree of politicisation was remarkable. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the GAA was also a willing bedfellow of the broader Irish nationalist movement. 2 That is not to endorse the claim of many early historians of the GAA that the Association was some underground rebel army and active nest of sedition against British rule in Ireland. Rather, then as now, the GAA reflected Irish life. Its membership formed a broad church of Irish nationalist opinion. Yet since its establishment, the Association had always been viewed with suspicion by British authorities in Ireland. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) reports were awash with hysterical and often fanciful claims of the GAA’s close like with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and the sinister implications of this alliance. It was certainly true that many prominent IRB members did take an active role within the Association at both local and national level. At the turn of the twentieth century, the reenergised Brotherhood looked to the GAA as a valuable source of recruitment for its underground society. In the years before 1916, many of those that ran the Association began to align it with the more radical nationalist movement which was now emerging on the back of the Gaelic Revival of the 1890s. Padraig O’Kelly, an IRB veteran of 1916, noted that many of his generation experienced what he called ‘a kind of natural graduation’ from involvement in the cultural nationalism espoused by the GAA on to separatist violence. O’Kelly, in his Bureau of Military History Statement stated: One usually began by playing Gaelic Footba11 or Hurling; from that the next step was to the Gaelic League; from that again to the Sinn Féin movement and later to the Irish Volunteer Movement. For relaxation we attended céilithe and the Abbey Theatre. With that background it was rather a natural progression to participation in the Rising ... In Jacobs I met many G.A.A. players Whom I knew. The G.A.A. played a big part in the Rising and in the subsequent Black-and-Tan war.8 Research conducted over the past decade, driven by the opening up of the Bureau of Military History Statements, has increasingly shed light on the motivations of the rebels of 1916 and what caused their radicalisation. The influence of family ties, education, trade unionism, language activism etc., have all been discussed and dissected. In this context this paper would argue that the role of sporting organisations like the GAA and the atmosphere and ethos they promoted must also be examined. The decade before the Rising saw many high-profile GAA officials giving public speeches which implied that the Association supported political violence to secure Irish independence.