Putting James Nowlan back on the Croke Park map

The site of the first ever All-Ireland hurling final is now a supermarket. Football’s first final is on a site now dominated by a bus depot. The fact that both matches took place on April Fool’s Day 1888 adds a dark humour to the sense of loss.

This is why a small ceremony held this week to dedicate a room at Croke Park in honour of James Nowlan was significant.

In this, the 125^th anniversary of the founding of the Leinster Council of the GAA, there is now a place in Croke Park that honours Nowlan - the Kilkenny Alderman, founder and first ever Chair of Comhairle Laighean in 1900 and who from 1901-1921 was the longest-ever Uachtarán in the history of Chumann Lúthchleas Gael.

Since 1927 Nowlan Park in his native Kilkenny bears his name and in 2016 it was decided to dedicate the new All-Ireland U21/U20 hurling cup in his honour.

But as the man who presided over the purchase of Jones’s Road sportsground from Frank Dineen and the naming of it as Croke Park in 1913, and in recognition of a two-decade stewardship at a time of unprecedented turmoil in Irish life, having a suite in Croke Park isn’t too much to ask.

For all our pride in our place in Irish culture and heritage there is an onus on all of us in the GAA to ensure that the protection and preservation of this rich history – just like the games – is never taken for granted.

Fantastic work has taken place locally by clubs and counties to take up this challenge with plaques and monuments and statues being erected to reflect the pride in which these people were held and to honour key moments in GAA history.

Since the first hurling decider in Birr and football final in Donnybrook/Clonskeagh there have been 16 sites to have held an All-Ireland senior hurling or football final. Only half of them bear a marker to reflect this significance – something that the GAA’s own History Committee is in the process of addressing, and something that is time sensitive as the 140^th anniversary of the first ever Championships of 1887 looms into view.

The health and success of the GAA today is very different to the fraught times in which James Nowlan operated.

At a time when there were open debates about whether the GAA should stick solely to focusing on Irish athletics, there were a handful of figures who stepped into the breach and assured that the GAA managed somehow to survive the worst of times and keep a pulse.

Some, like Meath’s Dick Blake, were crucial in bringing order and certainty to the playing rules. Others, like James Nowlan and Wicklow-born Ard Stiúrthóir Luke O’Toole, who served 28 years, were of crucial importance off the field in steering the GAA into the 20^th century.

A son of a Kilkenny cooper who himself would enter the brewery business, Nowlan was raised initially in Kildare before returning to the Marble city. He was already a public figure through his involvement in the Gaelic League and the GAA and in 1899 his election as an independent Labour councilor to the city council made him an alderman – a position he’d hold for 20 years.

His interest in the GAA and the Irish language was in keeping with the character of someone who was said to have been a close ally of James Stephens and was himself a member of the IRB. After the Easter Rising, Nowlan, a member of the Confederation GAA Club, was arrested under heavy escort and would be interned in Frongoch in Wales where 1,800 prisoners were kept and there were enough GAA players to run their own football and athletics Championships that summer, on a farmer’s field that is called Croke Park to this day.

His influence on the city council was vital in assisting the GAA in Kilkenny and beyond as a push for new clubs was made – so too the access to adequate playing facilities. For an insight into the struggles that the GAA faced, this period is brilliantly researched and captured by Paul Rouse in his acclaimed book The Hurlers (Penguin, 2018).

Organisationally, the GAA was being rebuilt and effectively restarted in the mid to late 1890s. Nowlan was a part of this restructuring which would among other things recommend the establishment of provincial bodies with Leinster being the first to be established in 1900 and with Nowlan serving as its first Chair, 1900-1904.

To consider how his 20 years as GAA President intersected with such enormous upheavals in Irish life as the 1913 Lockout, eruption of the Great War in 1914, the Rising and then the War of Independence give an indication of the challenges which Nowlan and his fellow administrators faced.

The Gaelic Sunday national act of disobedience in August 1918 and the Bloody Sunday atrocity at Croke Park in November 1920 were just two events which would have stretched and stressed the leadership of the Association to an extraordinary level.

This was at a time when, in a country at war, playing off a championship in a calendar year was regularly impossible. We can assume that having two stewady hands at the helm in Nowlan and O’Toole was greatly desired.

Ever since the failed fundraising trip to America in 1888, the GAA had been saddled with crippling debts, bailed out by a £450 loan from land league champion Michael Davitt. O’Toole and Nowlan were part of a GAA leadership who knew that to grow the Association, its finances had to be put in order.

Venues were inadequate to cater for crowds that attended big matches. Proper crowd management would enable the Association to grow financially. Croke Park stands as a monument to the vision of Nowlan and O'Toole and their contemporaries to create a national stadium for Gaelic games in Dublin – a venue that in 1920 they declared would be the home for all senior All-Ireland finals.

Nowlan left GAA politics in 1921 and after ill health passed away in 1924. In that year Ireland was emerging from a decade of upheaval and conflict and a war weary Irish public were ravenous for entertainment and latched onto the GAA Championships with crowds thronging to big games. In many ways the Association has never looked back.

The level 6 boardroom in honour of James Nowlan is the venue for the GAA’s pre event meetings and it is fitting that where the stewardship of the biggest sporting days in the Irish calendar take place, James Nowlan again watches over them.