The GAA and the Civil War

By Richard McElligott

On the 11 September, 1921 the Dublin and Kilkenny hurlers meet in that year’s Leinster final. It was a match more notable for the iconic photographs of a beaming Michael Collins being introduced to the players than Dublin’s eight points victory. Accompanied by his old friend and comrade Harry Boland, Collins basked in the adulation of the 17,000 strong crowd and told them: ‘the GAA was the pioneer body in the defence of the national interest. Now that we are coming into our own again the GAA must be a more serviceable factor than ever in upbuilding the muscular prowess and consolidating the national spirit.’

The principal architect of the IRA’s military success in bringing the British Empire to the negotiating table, Collins had by now stepped out of the revolutionary shadows to become arguably the most publicly recognisable face in the country. Yet the Treaty he soon negotiated with the British Government would bring civil war to Ireland. The impact and legacy of that squalid and bitter conflict would shadow the independent Irish state for decades to come. Even as we approach the centenary of its formal ending on 24 May, it remains hard to quantify the trauma the struggle inflicted on Irish society.

The tragedy of the Irish Civil War is encapsulated by the fate of Collins and Boland. Less than a year later both lay dead, killed in highly controversial circumstances while fighting on opposite sides. Their acrimonious fallout over the Treaty would be replicated throughout this island. Likewise, the GAA, an organisation which had given its active support to the independence struggle, could not help but be convulsed by the intense political fissures now erupting.

Collins was the highest profile casualty of the conflict with GAA connections, having been a player and secretary of the London Geraldines club while working for nearly a decade in the city. Boland, meanwhile, was the personification of the often-intimate connections between membership of the Association and nationalist politics in this era. A former inter-county hurler, All-Ireland final referee and Dublin GAA chairman, Boland had also been in the IRB for nearly 20 years and now served as Vice-President of Sinn Féin. In his impassioned denunciation of the Treaty during the subsequent Dáil debates, Boland declared: ‘I object because this Treaty denies the sovereignty of the Irish nation and I stand by the principles I have always held – that the Irish people are by right a free people. I object to this Treaty because it is the very negation of all that for which we have fought.’

Many others in the Association were just as virulent in their rejection of the Treaty and in their support of the IRA in the Civil War that erupted over its terms in June 1922. They included Austin Stack, the former All-Ireland winning captain and Kerry GAA Chairman, who had served as Minister for Home Affairs in the Dáil government that oversaw the political struggle against British rule. Stack condemned the settlement as a betrayal of the principles of someone ‘nurtured in the traditions of Fenianism’. Yet like the population at large, a majority of the leadership of the GAA backed the Treaty with J.J. Walsh and Eoin O’Duffy, both members of the Central Council, becoming prominent within Collins’ Pro-Treaty regime.

Throughout the spring of 1922 the Association did its best to ignore the ominous gathering of war clouds and concentrated on its sporting responsibilities - particularly the completion of competitions at county and national level, which were heavily in arrears owing to the wartime disruption of the previous two years. Its annual congress was dominated by deliberations over the GAA’s central role in the proposed Tailteann Games project (originally due to be held in the summer of 1922). Delegates also debated the ongoing negotiations with the Irish Amateur Athletic Association to create a new independent national body for the governance of Irish athletics (leading in 1923 to the formation of the National Athletic and Cycling Association of Ireland or NACAI). The last Central Council meeting before the conflict’s outbreak was taken up with a discussion over the final bill for a memorial to be unveiled in Thurles in honour of Archbishop Thomas Croke, the first patron of the Association. The meeting also considered upcoming plans for an extensive redevelopment of Croke Park for the Tailteann Games which included the construction of a new stand at an estimated cost of £13,200.

Yet increasingly conscious of the internal divisions festering over the Treaty, the GAA became determined to adopt a neutral, apolitical stance. And this is the position they maintained, albeit with difficulty, throughout the course of the subsequent Civil War. As part of this strategy the GAA took steps to ban the distribution of any political material at its games. It also put a stop to collections for political purposes taking place on match days. This tightrope of impartiality saw the Association give their consent to the hosting of GAA competitions among teams affiliated to IRA battalions across Munster in February. Meanwhile in May, the GAA allowed County Boards to accept affiliation from teams connected with the new National Army. In early June, they also supported the formation of an Army Athletic Association created, in the words of O’Duffy, ‘to foster and cater for all forms of Gaelic sport’.

Once armed combat began between the Anti-Treaty IRA and the Provisional Government’s National Army on 26 June, the Association was forced to immediately postpone its national and local competitions. It also quickly ended its previously vocal support of IRA prisoners. The IRA’s re-adoption of guerrilla warfare from August 1922 devastated transport and communications infrastructure across large parts of the country and compounded the War’s impact on GAA events. While less affected areas of the country were able to recommence local and some inter-county activity from the Autumn of 1922, in Munster, where the fighting was heaviest, GAA events remained suspended well into 1923.

The War could not but intrude on the routine administration of Gaelic games activity in other ways. On 9 August, a meeting of the Dublin County Board passed a solemn vote of condolence to Boland’s family on the ‘tragic death’ of their honorary president. Two weeks later a meeting of the same body opened by acknowledging the ‘calamity that had taken place in the death of General Michael Collins, which was so deeply deplored’. Despite the ongoing conflict the GAA’s leadership was, however, anxious to be seen to uphold its nationalist credentials and ensure its foreign games ban was still being respected. In November, the Association’s Secretary, Luke O’Toole, was sent to meet O’Duffy to ascertain why soccer competitions were being run by the Army in certain districts. A similar accusation that Army units in Limerick were indulging in rugby games was also investigated.

The GAA not only had to contend with internecine warfare in the embryonic Irish Free State but also the sectarian violence that marked the formation of Northern Ireland in this era. Notably on 14 January 1922, ten members of the Monaghan team were arrested by a unit of B-Specials in Dromore, Tyrone, on their way to contest the delayed 1921 Ulster final. The men were identified by the Northern authorities as being active IRA members and they included Tipperary’s Dan Hogan, the O/C of the 5th Northern Division and brother of Michael Hogan shot in the Bloody Sunday killings in Croke Park eighteen months before. In retaliation, local IRA units kidnapped over forty loyalists in the region, kickstarting a wave of attacks that left thirty people dead in Belfast alone. Eventually the Northern Government was pressured by London to release the Monaghan players but over the next two years the unionist state’s security forces continued to actively target GAA members as part of their operations. Many were interned and as a result GAA activity was severely disrupted across the six counties at this time.

While it is impossible to calculate the exact number of GAA members directly involved in the Civil War throughout Southern Ireland, there are multiple examples on both sides. This was especially true of Kerry where the struggle was most brutally fought and left its bitterest aftertaste. The prominence of GAA figures in the leadership of Republican forces there was a legacy of the arguably unique link between the Association and radical nationalism in Kerry. The ex-Kerry player Humphrey Murphy commanded the Kerry No. 1 IRA Brigade while his Dr Crokes teammate, John Joe Rice, took command of the Kerry No. 2 Brigade. Meanwhile John Joe Sheehy, Kerry’s star-forward, was O/C of the IRA battalion in his native Tralee. All three represented a younger, more aggressive generation of Kerry IRA leaders, with notable GAA backgrounds, who directed the Republican struggle there. Yet while the majority of active Kerry IRA members had rejected the Treaty, there were exceptions. Con Brosnan, who became an icon of Kerry football, enlisted in the National Army and was stationed in Tarbert for most of its duration.

Today the most widely accepted figure for the number of Civil War fatalities is around 1,600. How many of those were actual GAA members is unclear. Donal McAnallen’s brilliant research into the question of GAA fatalities during the War of Independence uncovered at least seventy-four examples: https://www.gaa.ie/news/the-war-of-independence-and-gaa-members-deaths/

Given the more localised aspect of the Civil War and its significantly shorter duration, the logical implication is that this conflict also resulted in dozens rather than hundreds of GAA deaths. For example the Cork Fatality Register for the Civil War, recently compiled by historians Dr Andy Bielenberg and Professor James S. Donnelly, lists the 236 individuals killed in the fighting there: https://www.ucc.ie/en/theirishrevolution/collections/cork-fatality-register/register-index/1922-140/

Yet only three of them have any noted links with the Association including Seán O’Donoghue, an IRA battalion commander and member of the Lee football club, who was apprehended by the National Army in Cork city on 28 September, beaten and then summarily executed. Another was George McGlynn, a soldier and footballer with Naas GAA, who was mortally wounded repelling an IRA attack at Ballyvourney in December 1922. In Kerry there is a GAA connection to the most infamous deaths in the struggle. One of the victims of the Ballyseedy mine explosion was George O’Shea, who twinned his captaincy of the Kilflynn IRA Company with that of the parish hurlers. His friend and teammate was Stephen Fuller who played for another local combination, the Tullig Gamecocks, that won the county hurling championship of 1916. Fuller was the only survivor of the atrocity. Blown clear by the explosion, he managed to ‘scramble away somehow’. Hiding in a nearby dugout when he heard the detonation, Sheehy helped rescue Fuller and quickly published his eyewitness account, exposing the lies the National Army concocted about the explosion being an accident. Despite suffering ‘severe shock’ and extensive burns, Fuller made a sufficient physical recovery to resume his hurling career, captaining Kilflynn to the North Kerry Hurling League title of 1927. GAA members were also innocent bystanders caught in the maelstrom of violence. In February 1923 the Offaly footballer, Jack Finlay, was shot dead outside Tullamore while resisting an attempt by IRA raiders to seize the goods he was transporting.

Meanwhile the State’s execution of two Clare GAA figures now saw the Association’s neutral façade crumble in the face of local rage and resentment. On 20 January 1923 Con MacMahon and Patrick Hennessy were put in front of a firing squad charged with the possession of ammunition and for their suspected part in the destruction of a local railway line. Both were hurlers while Hennessy was also secretary of the Clare GAA. Recent research by Dr Tomás Mac Conmara has detailed that at a subsequent county convention several delegates resigned in protest when the meeting refused to pass a motion of sympathy to the Hennessy family. In the aftermath a rival county board, known as the ‘Group of Old Gaels’, was formed by Republicans in Clare under Sean MacNamara. For months the Clare GAA was effectively riven in two with twenty-five clubs affiliating to the new body while twenty-six remained loyal to the County Board. Although the split was officially ended in late 1924, Mac Conmara notes the divisions of the Civil War would endure, beneath the surface, for years after in the Clare GAA.

Paradoxically the killing of two other GAA members was the catalyst for the Association’s only direct attempt to intercede in the conflict. On 7 December the Cork Pro-Treaty TD, Sean Hales, was assassinated in reprisal for supporting the introduction of the Government’s Public Safety Act, which had authorised executions for those convicted of IRA activity. Hales, the only Cork IRA Brigade commander who had endorsed the Treaty, was also a renowned former athlete and hurler with the Valley Rovers GAA club. Outraged by his death, within twenty-four hours the Government selected four IRA prisoners for immediate execution: Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey and Richard Barrett. Barrett was a fellow Corkman and the secretary of the Knockvilla GAA club. At the next meeting of the Cork County Board its chairman, James Mende, decried that ‘a chapter of most tragic events had occurred in their country’. He bemoaned that Hales’ ‘loss was irreparable [being] the pioneer of the Irish Ireland movement in West Cork’, while Barrett was ‘one of the finest types of young fellows … who was the life of the GAA in West Cork.’ The meeting ended with the Board unanimously voting to request the Central Council to convene an All-Ireland convention of the GAA ‘for the purpose of discussing ways and means by which the present conflict could be bridged over.’

A week later the Central Council agreed that it would ‘work with anybody or Committee likely to bring about peace and unity amongst the people.’ On 7 January 1923 a deputation of Central Council members was appointed ‘to ascertain the views of prominent members of the Association on both sides as to peace and report to a further meeting of the Central Council to be held on the 21 January with a view of calling a special All Ireland convention for 4 February.’ Yet any hope this intervention would have the desired impact was quickly dashed. Two weeks later, the deputation reported back that neither the Republican leadership nor the Government had any appetite for the GAA’s diplomatic foray. Fearing that a convention on the issue would only give public airing to the deep divisions within its membership over the War, the Association decided ‘no useful purpose would be served in calling a National Convention’ and abandoned its plans so as to preserve its appearance of neutrality.

Given that the lingering animosity of the Civil War would take decades to evaporate, apoliticism now became a governing tenet of the Association. But though the conflict soon petered out to its inevitable conclusion, the legacies it bequeathed to the GAA were complex. Historians of the Association like W.F. Mandle have argued that the heated debates around retaining or removing the foreign games ban in the 1920s was one proxy war that continued to be fought between the republican and Free State factions of the Association.

Yet a more immediate and potentially incendiary issue, according to the historian William Murphy, was the fate of the 12,000 Republicans held in State internment camps by the War’s end. In the words of one detainee, Billy Mullins, ‘football took pride of place’ in the camps, helping to while away the hours while also keeping up fitness and morale. Inter-county contests were often arranged with the Kildare Observer reporting on ‘Kildare’s’ decisive defeat of ‘Dublin’ at the Newbridge camp in October 1922. A year later a mass hunger strike was orchestrated within the camps to force the Government into releasing thousands of Republicans. In some counties the GAA was now put under pressure to suspend activity to support the protest. In Cork this led to goal posts being torn down at venues like Turner’s Cross. In Waterford, local branches of Sinn Féin intervened to prevent matches being staged. Although the strike broke down in confusion in early November, at the end of the month Republicans in Kilkenny formally called on the County Board to ‘postpone all future fixtures until the prisoners were released’. Refusing the request, the Kilkenny Chairman declared: ‘The GAA has never allowed itself to be dragged into any political party, no matter what that party … our policy is broad enough for every creed … It embraces all parties, and we cannot attach ourselves to any particular one.’ Not everyone agreed with the sentiment. The Callan GAA delegates stated that they would take no further part in the county championship, while members of Clomantagh club now left the meeting in protest.

By the summer of 1924 the prisoners issue had still not been resolved and hundreds of prominent Republicans remained incarcerated. They included the likes of Austin Stack and in Kerry Sinn Féin TDs now called on the county team to withdraw from the upcoming All-Ireland against Dublin until their release was secured. Aware that a significant number of the Kerry team were themselves recent Republican internees, the IRA’s leadership recognised this as a perfect opportunity to resurrect the issue among the media and general public. On 10 June a meeting of the Kerry players announced that they would boycott the final. As a result, the Central Council awarded the title to Dublin which set off a chain reaction of protests. Limerick announced they would not meet Galway in the hurling decider while Cork, Offaly, Laois and Louth all declared their intention to withdraw from upcoming championship games. When Croke Park threatened to suspend all counties taking part in the protest, the Munster Council stated they would refuse to participate in any preparations for the forthcoming Tailteann Games. The tense standoff was, however, resolved by the Government’s decision to release all remaining prisoners in July. When a special GAA congress was convened a month later the proceedings were described as ‘temperate and mainly conciliatory’ with the boycotted fixtures being re-arranged and Kerry contesting their final on 28 September.

Of course the official cessation of hostilities in May 1923, did not end the Civil War’s physical, psychological, or material impacts. A still under researched legacy is the number of participants whose physical as well as mental health was severely affected by their activity. Stack died in 1929, aged forty-nine, having never fully recovered from the October 1923 hunger strike he participated in. Similarly Giles Cooper of the Glenflesk GAA would die in February 1925 as a direct result of the hardships endured while living on the run during the conflict’s final months. His comrade Cornelius O’Leary resumed his GAA career, playing for Dr Crokes and the Kerry junior footballers. Yet having long suffered from depression connected to his war service, in July 1930 O’Leary had a complete mental breakdown. Barricading himself into his room in the nursing home he had just been admitted to, O’Leary committed suicide by slitting his throat with a piece of broken china. For Republicans, post-Civil War Ireland was also a society in which they faced frequent discrimination. Many had already lost their livelihoods due to their active involvement in the anti-Treatyite struggle. The future Kerry star Joe Barrett was released from internment only to find his family business in ruins forcing him to rebuild it from scratch.

In the years which followed much would be made of how the GAA provided a potent and popular platform for reconciliation. In 1946 a new history of the Association entitled 60 Glorious Years noted: ‘In the lure of their native games Irishmen … standing side by side on the sportsfield, soon learned to look again on their brothers as brothers, not as enemies.’ While such arguments have often been exaggerated, they are not without some foundation. One of the first major GAA events in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War was the formal opening on 22 July of the Cavan ‘Athletic Grounds’, soon to be rechristened Breffni Park. It represented the first of a whole host of county grounds that would be developed across Ireland in the decade to come. The fact the stage was shared by both O’Duffy and Frank Fahy, secretary of the Gaelic League and an Anti-Treaty TD for Galway, was hailed by Cavan GAA President, B.C. Fay, as ‘the first occasion since the trouble started that a Republican TD and a Free State TD had stood on the same platform, an achievement that no other organisation had accomplished. It was something they were proud of and trusted it was an augury of what was coming in the near future’.

Meanwhile in Kerry a team would emerge out of the conflict composed of players from across its ideological divide like Sheehy, Barrett and Brosnan. Their unprecedented national success over the next ten years made them one of the most iconic and influential sides in GAA history. But their status lay not simply in their footballing brilliance. Many celebrated them as the embodiment of the role Gaelic games could play in helping to heal the societal wounds left behind by the bitterness of Ireland’s Cogadh na gCarad - ‘war of friends’.

(Composed of IRA members, Republican activists, Free State supporters, and serving Army and Garda personal, the post-Civil War Kerry team became one of the most successful in GAA history. Between 1925 and 1933 they won ten Munster titles, six All-Irelands - including Kerry’s first four in a row - and four National Leagues. They conducted three high-profile tours of the United States in 1927, 1931 and 1933 and captured two Railway Cups for Munster in 1927 and 1931. They went on to set a record of thirty-four consecutive competitive games unbeaten in all competitions between October 1928 and March 1933)

Dr Richard McElligott is Lecturer in Modern and Irish History at Dundalk Institute of Technology. He is a member of the GAA’s History and Commemorations Committee and author of Forging a Kingdom: The GAA in Kerry, 1884-1834.