The GAA’s journey through US politics

The city at the heart of the GAA’s presence in the US will shortly have its first president since the era of FDR.

Whereas there aren’t any log cabin to White House stories within the association – unsurprisingly given the constitutional requirement to have been born in the country, American politics and presidential politics have frequently crossed paths with Gaelic games throughout history.

Along the way, tableaux: footage of Christy Ring chatting away to Robert Kennedy in May 1965 just after the latter had become a senator for New York, from which political base he would launch his traumatically terminated bid for the presidency three years later.

Decades of famous teams made their way across the Atlantic for exhibition matches and fund-raisers; inter-county players, often incognito, lining out for local teams before the GAA found an effective way to limit the celebrity migrations.

The tightening security of the past 15 years has had its own impact on casual emigration – and casual quips, as Leitrim’s Ciarán Murray discovered in 2003 en route to the traditional start of the football championship, the Connacht preliminary round against New York.

As his bag toppled off the security counter he cautioned the unsmiling airport police to be careful – “there’s a bomb in there”. Seventy hours of community service later…..

“You have to realise that it is a completely different climate over here and things like that are not tolerated by security officials,” said an agitated local GAA official.

New York has always been the epicentre of the GAA in America.

It was in the city in 1914 that the Gaelic Athletic Association of the United States was founded – an event written about by historian Paul Darby, citing the description that it had been “what the Thurles meeting was to Ireland”.

According to Darby's essay 'Gaelic Games and the Irish Diaspora in the USA' (from The Gaelic Athletic Association 1884-20009, edited by Cronin, Murphy and Rouse), the games were well established in Irish America by the end of the 19th century with matches attracting attendances of up to 10,000.

The city was host to the biggest GAA undertaking outside of Ireland when the 1947 All-Ireland football final was staged at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan.

The games’ prestige at the time was sufficient to attract the highest political attention and a civic reception for 2,000 people was held in City Hall Plaza.

League fixture

There they and the Cavan an Kerry teams were addressed by Bill O'Dwyer, from Bohola – "the man who added the 'r' to Mayo," according the New York Times – who had succeeded Fiorello La Guardia two years previously.

The Polo Grounds final has in its own tortuous way a connection to the current presidential election.

Fifty years later, the GAA arranged for a jubilee match between Kerry and Cavan to be played in New York in Downing’s Stadium (the Polo Grounds having long been demolished).

Serendipitously the counties, who hadn’t played in the championship for the best part of 30 years, that very year, 1997, contested an All-Ireland semi-final and arrived in New York with four of football’s most important titles: Ulster and Munster championships plus Kerry’s league and All-Ireland.

Cavan had also been promoted to Division One of the NFL so the match could now be designated a league fixture.

The ball was thrown in by one pf O’Dwyer’s successors Rudy Giuliani who had made quite an informed speech of welcome.

He was a popular official given the successful ‘zero tolerance’ policy on petty crime and would gain even more kudos after the events of 11th September four year later.

He left Cavan and Kerry to it before half-time. This was longer than he had been expected to stay – an assessment of his staying power that proved eerily prescient later in his political career when he became the man who added the ‘may not’ to mayor.

Despite party backing, he withdrew from a Senate contest with Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2000 and then from the Republican presidential primary eight years later when she also was a candidate before losing the Democratic primary to Barack Obama.

Campaign advisors

This year he has been one of Donald Trump’s top campaign advisors.

The Clintons’ connection with Ireland is well established.

When Bill, as president, came to College Green in 1995 to accept the Freedom of Dublin, he alluded in his speech – with a good grasp of local patois – that he heard the city had a ‘handy football team’.

Later that evening the president enjoyed a pint of stout in Cassidy’s, the pub owned by Dublin selector and former 1970s All-Ireland winner Fran Ryder.

Coincidentally the foundation of the GAA in Hayes’s Hotel in Thurles 132 years ago took place within days of the 1884 US presidential election.

Grover Cleveland was elected and to this day holds the distinction of being the only president to have served two non-consecutive terms, having lost the race for re-election and regained office in 1892.

Although he had genuine Irish connections as the maternal grandchild of a merchant Abner Neal from Antrim (the county that has produced the greatest number of US presidential antecedents if not a commensurate haul of All-Irelands), Cleveland’s dealings with the GAA were not extensive but they were unhelpful.

One of the reasons the ‘American Invasion’ of 1888 (a tour of the US by top Gaelic athletes intended to raise profile and cash) ended in financial calamity was that bad weather combined with Cleveland’s re-election battle, which was seriously distracting the Irish-American community, to thin the crowds.

None of the subsequent US presidential elections proved as catastrophic for the GAA.

Let’s hope it has stayed that way.

email: smoran@irishtimes.com