Growing up in a house with a strong tradition of Gaelic games, being brought to matches was a regular feature of my childhood.
As was the customary practice at the time, I was lifted over the turnstile and given the programme to mind.
It was my good fortune that some of those matches were the great battles between Dublin and Kerry in the All-Ireland finals of the late 1970s. In the era before the internet and when sports magazines were mainly confined to English soccer, the match programme was my only source of photographs, statistics and team profiles.
The programme was important to me, an object to be retained and cherished forever.
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My favourite programme from those childhood years is the 1982 All-Ireland football final between Kerry and Offaly. Kerry were the overwhelming favourites to become the first team to win the title for the fifth year in a row. Of course Offaly’s Seamus Darby shattered those aspirations in one of the biggest shocks in an All-Ireland final.
The bright yellow cover of the programme is still attractive now, even if a little torn, with the smiling faces of the two team captains, not imagining the impact the match would have on the national sporting landscape.
At the top of the cover is Noel Skehan’s autograph. The Kilkenny goalkeeper had just won his eighth All-Ireland hurling medal two weeks previously and was then seated just a couple of rows in front of me and my father in the Hogan Stand.
However, his is not the most significant autograph on my programme. Many years later my brother, a garda, spent some time working with Matt Connor, himself a garda and full-forward on the Offaly team that day, scoring seven points. My brother got the great man to sign the programme for me, adding greatly to its value in my opinion.
Like most programme collectors, I didn’t set out with the intention of building a collection. As the years passed, the programmes just seemed to accumulate until I had reached a critical mass.
From there I set about filling in the gaps or missing years in my All-Ireland finals’ collection. Firstly, I tried to complete the set back to 1970. When that was achieved, I moved onto the 1960s and so on.
As I got further back in time, the programmes became more difficult to acquire and increasingly more expensive.
One of the programmes that eluded me for many years was the 1947 All-Ireland football final played between Cavan and Kerry. To commemorate the centenary of the worst year of the Great Famine, the final was played in the Polo Grounds in New York, still to date the only time an All-Ireland final has been played outside of the country.
A few years ago the programme became available on eBay and even though it was pricey, I took the plunge and bought it. For a programme that survived the match, the journey back to Ireland and the passage of almost 80 years, it is in near mint condition.
It is unlike any other All-Ireland final programme of that era being larger in size and volume, and there is a wonderful, evocative, musty smell from the pages that stands testament to its longevity.
Without a central archive of all the GAA’s programmes, I set out to compile as many of the All-Ireland and provincial final programme covers as possible in my book The GAA Covered. This involved visiting several private collections held in various parts of the country by dedicated collectors.
In the book, the transition of the programmes from old to new, black and white to colour, single page to souvenir booklet is detailed, dating back to the first All-Ireland finals played in the GAA’s newly-purchased Croke Park in 1913.
For collectors, the search goes on. Each season brings a new batch of programmes to be collected while still trying to capture that elusive programme from years past.
The GAA Covered: The History of the GAA in Match Programmes by John Kelly is published by Gill
