By John Harrington

Quite often, the further you are from your family the deeper a connection you feel to them.

GAA clubs dotted around the globe, many of them tens of thousands of miles from Ireland, will empathise with that sentiment.

For Irish-born migrants, playing Gaelic Games in far flung fields is a way of holding onto something from home.

And for the increasing number of non-Irish who have taken up Gaelic Football and Hurling in recent years the attraction is often as much about feeling part of a community as it is playing an enjoyable sport.

There has been a phenomenal growth in the number of GAA clubs outside of Ireland, and invariably there’s a great yarn or two behind all of them.

We've told some of those stories here on GAA.ie and there’s always a very positive reaction when people learn for the first time about the all-German hurling team in Darmstadt, the New York born orchestra conductor developing handball in Europe, or the irrepressible Justin Parks.

The club-members themselves get a great buzz from being acknowledged, for having the opportunity to put their hand up in the air and tell everyone that the GAA means as much to them as it does to club-members in Ireland.

And there seems to be a great fascination among people here with the growth of the game around the world. A real sense of pride and wonder in the pioneering spirit that is bringing the games we’ve loved for so long to an international audience.

Jason Keelan certainly shares that fascination and is now bringing many of those great success stories of GAA clubs abroad to a wider audience through his excellent ‘Loaf of Bread’ GAA Podcast.

Keelan is a Westmeath man, a member of The Downs GAA club, and the title of the Podcast comes from a famous Páidi Ó Sé quote in the documentary 'Marooned' which told the story of Westmeath’s 2004 Leinster Senior Football Championship success.

The first season of ‘Loaf of Bread’ focused on more local matters, but for the second season Keelan has combined his love of GAA and travel by telling the stories of GAA clubs around the world.

“My interest in the global GAA scene comes from travelling,” he told GAA.ie. “I've been to about 100 or so countries around the world just travelling in general.

“I'm a primary school teacher, my wife is a primary school teacher and our holidays are so set in stone that she's good at booking stuff well in advance and I just turn up at the airport.

“Yeah, it kind of came from the love of travel. I get to see a lot of sports and stuff when I'm abroad. I get to meet a lot of people. I was on the bus coming from Chernobyl on a long journey across Ukraine and I was reading an article about the World Games that were were down in Waterford.

“I had always thought of doing a podcast because I had done it with the kids in school and I thought I'd like to do my own one just to see what it was like.”

Keelan is also the author of two primary school history books and his love of history as well as sport is a big feature of the podcast.

So not only are you introduced to the people who have planted the seed of Gaelic Games in far flung corners of the world, you’re given a flavour of their homeplace which draws you into their story all the more.

Good ideas quickly gather momentum, and that has certainly been true of Keelan’s mission to shine a light on how Gaelic Games is growing rapidly around the globe.

“It started out with a message to basically a club on every continent to see how it would work,” he says.

“I had met the South African Gaels when they were here in 2016. I went to see them play against Ballyboden and bought the jersey and the whole lot.

“I just sent a message out on the Instagram page and it just mentioned that this was happening and they said yeah, they were delighted. They were saying no-one ever contacts us. So then I chanced my arm with a few more.

“In the space of five weeks it was 55 clubs and now it's at 71.”

A pure love of the game is the common thread throughout the series of podcasts, but no two are the same. Every club has overcome their own set of challenges to establish themselves and has their own colourful story to tell.

“The stories have been unbelievable,” says Keelan. “One of my favourites was the lads in Argentina GAA. Three of them came on and two of them are from Argentina themselves, Stevie Tomás Cartledge and Santiago O’Reilly, and are just obsessed with links between Ireland and Argentina.

“The first thing I asked them was had they been to Ireland yet or had any links here. Stevie said he said was that, yeah, he had met his relatives in Ireland. He said he'd met a Maurice O'Callaghan and and that his sons might be fairly good at GAA. They turned out to be Con and Cian O'Callaghan! I said, they're not bad, yeah!

“He said his other relatives were Wallaces from Multyfarnham which is five minutes down the road from me. It turns out Ronan Wallace on the Westmeath team is another relative of his, which I don't think Ronan himself even knows.

“You get every kind of story. Luyanda from South Africa who is an Afrikaan himself was talking about trying to resurrect jersies, shoes, and socks just to get people to play Gaelic Football out there.

“The girls out in Mulholland in Los Angeles talking about how they got together and not one of them knew the rules of the game but they just figured it out as they went along.

“The stories are mental, some of them, and the feedback I've gotten from people on the interviews has been very positive because people love those stories.”

If you’re setting up a GAA club where none has ever existed before, then spreading the word is the first priority. The games themselves are so good that once people try them, they quite often tend to stick with them.

The clubs that Keelan has featured on his podcast have all got a welcome boost in terms of their public profile which is the best recruitment tool of all.

“They're all just very appreciative of being given the chance to speak and let people know they exist because a lot of messages I've gotten from randomers on Instagram have been like I had no idea they even existed as a GAA club,” says Keelan.

“Someone got on saying they had no idea they played GAA in China and I was like, well, yeah, they kind of have a whole League out there. That's been the main thing. All the clubs have been really delighted just to get some air-time back in Ireland.

“They get the odd bit in their local newspapers but it's only a line here or there, but the podcast episodes are anywhere between 50 minutes and an hour and a half and they're just delighted to let the Irish people know they exist.

“A lot of them would have friends and family here that they haven't seen with Covid in the last couple of years so it was also a chance for them to say to their mother, 'Listen into this, you might hear my voice'.

“Now the small clubs around the world are having a bit of craic and between them are trying to organise different things. It's kind of brought together clubs by sharing contacts. A lot of them wouldn't have been brave enough previously to say, 'we exist, would you like a game?' kind of a thing.

“I probably now have the best vantage point of the GAA globally than anyone else at the moment because I've so many contacts built up now. Things like that have been great.

“It's good craic on Instagram. It took off between Bermuda, Gibraltar, Lulea Gaels from the North Pole were all having a bit of craic about who was the smallest and most remote club in the world and trying to organise a game in Gibraltar between the three of them. Just a bit of craic like that and it's nice for them.”

The good vibes are real, and Keelan has taken a huge degree of satisfaction from the project himself on a personal level.

“It's been amazing,” he says. “Especially because I haven't been able to travel for so long, it's a lovely way to connect to the clubs and they feel like they're getting a bit of a link to home in some ways because I'm sitting in Mullingar and they're a million miles away and then I'm getting the bug to go travelling to go to all these places again.

“You feel very good about chatting to them as well because they're all very positive about where they're going and it lets people know the GAA is not just about the counties in Ireland and New York and London.”

• You can access the Loaf of Bread GAA Podcast through multiple platforms HERE.