Name game

The agreement temporarily ended hostilities between the two countries but did make the Irish leader kind of subservient to the king in London. Despite his role in that drama, Laurence O’Toole was later beatified as a saint and has a prominent Dublin GAA club named in his honor. Pity poor old Michael Collins then. More than seven hundred years after O’Toole produced the 1175 Treaty of Windsor, Collins did something similar himself, paid for it with his life and hasn’t even a hurling pitch bearing his name today.
Eleven years ago, Peter Quinn, a former president of the GAA, spoke eloquently at the annual commemoration at Beal na Blath about Collins’s involvement with the association and talked about Ireland’s need to recognize and acknowledge the greatness of the man. His comments were briefly reported the following day and then quickly forgotten. When the outgoing GAA president, Sean Kelly, reiterated the views of his predecessor in an interview with the Irish Examiner earlier this week, he thankfully reopened the debate about what he described as an “historical omission.”
Said Kelly: “It has struck me opening pitches, clubhouses and launching new competitions that we are honoring everyone from presidents of Ireland to patriots, players and administrators.
“Reading a recent biography of Sam Maguire and his friendship with Collins, it is clear there is a glaring omission in our association. I find that ironic. Collins was a great GAA man: he played hurling and was a leading administrator in England. Indeed he’s probably regarded internationally as our greatest patriot.”
How ironic that Kelly whose presidency will be remembered historically for the opening of Croke Park should be taking up the cudgels on behalf of the West Corkman. From the time he joined the Geraldines’ club in London as a teenager – one of his hurleys from that time is in the National Museum in Collins Barracks in Dublin – Collins took a less than ecumenical line on the sports with which the GAA were in competition.
“There’ll be no garrison games for Ireland,” said Collins. “These only aid the peaceful penetration of Ireland by the British and there should be no soccer for Gaels.”
The Irish in England were so divided over the issue that during Collins’s tenure as club treasurer, Geraldines often struggled to field a full team. In his 1909 annual report, he urged members “to act more harmoniously together and more self-sacrificingly generally” or risk having to disband altogether. What put-upon club official anywhere in the country wouldn’t sympathize with that plight? Of course some might argue if he hadn’t refused to allow anybody who represented England in the Olympic Games join Geraldines, numbers mightn’t have been so paltry. In that era, Irish athletes couldn’t compete internationally for anybody else but Britain.
However out of step with contemporary thinking those positions may seem today, Collins’s GAA pedigree is beyond reproach and surely worthy of recognition. In every county in Ireland, clubs revere obscure saints and freedom fighters in various ways. West Belfast hosts the Mairead Farrell camogie tournament every summer, the participants honoring a woman who served 10 years for bombing the Conway Hotel before being killed by the SAS in Gibraltar while on active service for the IRA in 1988.
Against that background, the argument in favor of naming something like the Munster hurling championship trophy after Collins appears pretty straightforward. He served his country like few others and deserves to be acknowledged by an association of which he was a prominent member. It said much for the state of discourse in Ireland though that Kelly (mooted as a future Fine Gael election candidate) felt the need to declare he wasn’t being political in raising the issue. Not to mention also having to point out it’s up to other sporting bodies whether or not they wish to commemorate prominent historical figures with which they have unique associations.
One of the great Cork pub quiz questions asks: “Which president of Ireland scored a penalty in Turner’s Cross?” The unlikely rugby answer is Eamon de Valera. While working as a teacher at Rockwell College, he played center and often filled in as kicker on a Munster Senior Cup team bulwarked by Irish internationals Jack and Mike Ryan. As Kelly correctly maintained the other day, de Valera was unquestionably a rugby man and the IRFU can remember him as they see fit. If they don’t, the MFA can do their bit for ecumenism and, much to the consternation of Cork City fans, perhaps name the reconstructed Shed End of the ground after Dev.
The Collins debate has brought the nomenclature policy of the GAA to the fore for the second time in recent months. Last October, the Sunday Independent erroneously reported that camogie’s All-Ireland trophy – the O’Duffy Cup – honored General Eoin O’Duffy, the former Garda Commissioner and founder of the quasi-fascist Blueshirts. It didn’t (Mayo’s Sean O’Duffy is the guy who donated the original trophy) but there is a stand in Clones that bears the ex-policeman’s name. Before moving extremely far to the right, he was secretary of the Monaghan County Board, a leading sports administrator nationwide and a key player in the preparation of Bob Tisdall and Dr. Pat O’Callaghan before their success at the 1932 Olympic Games.
Cases like O’Duffy’s also highlight the association’s bizarre tendency to honor administrators and officials ahead of legendary players. Pairc Ui Chaoimh is named after Padraig O Caoimh, the former general-secretary and the acknowledged architect of the modern GAA. A major figure of course but as the 30th anniversary of its opening looms this summer, wouldn’t it behove the Cork county board to consider naming some section of that crumbling edifice after Jack Lynch or some other on-field icon? By the same token, the Gaelic Grounds has a Mackey Stand but shouldn’t the denizens of Limerick have long since changed the dull stadium name to Mick Mackey Park.
“The Gaelic Athletic Association is the one body which has never failed to draw the line between the Gael and the Gall,” said Collins, speaking in Croke Park (named for the Cork-born Archbishop who was the association’s first patron) on the first anniversary of Bloody Sunday.
In the resolution of this argument, we shall see if he was right.