Review: The GAA, a People’s History

Contributed by Ida Milne

Some of my strongest childhood memories derive from the GAA.  Playing in family groups on the beach in Courtown,  when a radio was switched on and the Dads were collectively lured away to the hypnotic sound of GAA commentator extraordinaire Micheal O’Hehir,  or watching my father and the neighbours hurl on the pitch on our farm as I struggled with a downsized camán, or going to Ferns to welcome the team home from Croke Park with the traditional mountain of burning tyres, the column of black smoke drawing people from miles around to the reception, as Wexford celebrated yet another All-Ireland hurling championship win.  In the 60s the Rackard brothers were legends; when Nicky came into the yard to dose the cattle we hung around, starstruck.

The GAA was and is part of my cultural background. The fact that we went to a different church on a Sunday in no way impinged on that.  But in recent years, I have noticed that historians writing about the involvement of Protestants in the GAA have tended to focus on their otherness, rather than their sharing in the same culture. For me, the GAA was and is part of the ordinariness of life, not the difference.

When The GAA, A People’s History, was published recently, I eagerly anticipated that at last here was a bottom-up history of the association ideally positioned to chronicle  the everyday involvement of members of the Church of Ireland and other non-Catholic denominations or belief systems.

Here follows the book’s entire discussion of Protestant involvement in the organisation as it appears in the chapter ‘Religion’