HISTORY NOTES
The Gaelic League and the GAA
Towards the end of the 19th
century the Irish people had become tired of constitutional nationalism as it
seemed impossible – particularly after the defeat of the first Home Rule Bill
in 1886 – that Home Rule would ever be achieved. Irish-Americans withdrew their financial support. Irish people began to turn to new cultural
nationalist groups, such as the GAA and the Gaelic League, which were to become
a new force in Irish history, restoring national pride in a way that the Home
Rule movement couldn’t.
The GAA was set up on the first of
November 1884 in Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles.
Cusack was its secretary and Davin its president. Mc Kay and Wyse-Power were vice-presidents. To enhance the image of the organisation
Archbishop Croke, Parnell and Davitt were invited to be patrons of it.
The GAA’s main aims were to
organise Gaelic games, to draw up standard rules for them and to encourage
recreation and sport among the Irish people.
It concerned itself at first with athletics and afterwards with hurling
and football. By organising matches at
parish and county level it awakened a new sense of pride and belonging in Irish
people. Its success can be seen in the
fact that 15,000 people attended an athletics meeting that was followed by a
hurling match in June 1885. The first
all-Ireland finals were held on the 1st April 1888.
Part of the rules of the GAA was
the ban on its members playing foreign sports.
This ban, which remained in place until the 1970s, created a feeling of
separateness from Britain.
Like many organisations of the
time, the GAA was infiltrated by the IRB, who tried to have its member,
Bennett, elected president in November 1887.
Within a year, however, Davin was again president. While the GAA did split at the fall of
Parnell, it remained neutral during the civil war, servicing as an apolitical
organisation.
At the end of the 19th
century Irish was in danger of dying as a language. By 1891 only 14.5% of the people claimed to be able to speak
it. This was mainly due to
modernisation and the utilarian outlook of the Irish people. Various organisations, such as the Royal
Irish Academy, the Ossiannic Society and the Society of the Preservation of the
Irish language had been set up to encourage study of the language but none of
these owned to encourage its everyday use.
The Gaelic League however was set
up with the aims of preserving and extending use of the Irish language and
promoting old and new Irish literature.
At first it was a kind of talking shop and wasn’t particularly popular. By 1897 it had only 43 branches. By 1908 this had jumped to 600. This was
helped mainly by Fr. Eugene O’ Growney’s
‘Simple Lessons in Irish’ which were published in the League’s journal. The League’s popularity was helped also by
Timirí, who travelled around the country on the newly invented bicycle, setting
up clubs. Around this time it became
fashionable for city people to travel to the League-run summer schools in the
Gaeltacht.
The League, as with the GAA, had a
significant social impact on Ireland.
They organised Feiseanna and an annual Oireachtas from 1898
onwards. As well as this they had a
political impact and managed to have Irish made part of the curriculum in 1903;
to have St. Patrick’s Day declared a national holiday in 1903’ and in 1905 won
the ‘Battle of the GPO’ whereby the post office would deliver all mail
addressed in Irish. They also had the
law banning shopkeepers from writing their names in Irish on their shop fronts
removed.
The biggest problem facing the
League was a lack of teachers of Irish.
To solve this a teacher-training college was set up in Ballingeary in
1903. By 1915 there were 19 such
colleges with 2,000 students. In 1909
Irish became a matriculation subject in the new National University.
In keeping with its aims the League
encouraged Irish literature and encouraged many new plays were staged including
‘Tadg Saor’ by Athair Peadar Ua Laoghaire and ‘Casadh an tSúgáin’ by Douglas
Hyde.
Although Hyde and Mac Neill had
founded the League as a non-political group, it was soon infiltrated by the
IRB. It encouraged a feeling of
separate national identity. Being able
to speak Irish became the mark of an Irish patriot. This further deepened the divide between the South and Unionists
who wished to be neither Irish nor patriotic. The Gaelic League was also a ‘school of Rebellion” with most of
its members graduating to the IRB or the Volunteers.
Towards the end of the 19th
century a new force came into Irish history with the foundation of the GAA and
the Gaelic League. These carried out a
social revolution in Ireland, stemming rural stagnation and restoring national
pride. It did this by reorganising
Gaelic games and the Irish language and by encouraging ordinary people to
participate. These organisations also
became training grounds for rebellion, fostering a national spirit among those
who wanted to be “ not Gaelic merely, but free as well, not free merely, but
Gaelic as well”.
