“I believe you’re playing soccer also” were the only words spoken by John “Tull” Dunne, long-time secretary of the Galway GAA football board, when he called Austin Molloy off the pitch and banished him from the county’s minor team during a match against Leitrim in summer 1965.
A star of the St Michael’s GAA club in Galway city, 16-year-old Molloy was placing the ball to take a free for the Galway under-18s in Pearse Stadium when he was substituted. He had been reported for playing soccer for his local Claddagh club, Galway Rovers, and for a Galway FA under-18 XI. “Someone told him. He couldn’t take any chances because of ‘The Ban’”, Molloy recalls. “I was a far better Gaelic footballer than soccer player, but I never kicked a ball in a GAA match after that”.
The GAA “ban on foreign games”, as it was commonly known, dated back almost to the association’s founding on November 1st, 1884, in Hayes’s Hotel, Thurles, Co Tipperary.
Rule 12, adopted at the GAA’s second annual convention in November 1886, in the same hotel, said: “Any member of a club in Ireland playing hurling, handball or football under other rules than those of the GAA cannot be a member of the Association and neither can members of any other athletic club in Ireland be members of the GAA.”
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A linked ban, adopted 13 months later at a special convention in January 1888, stated: “That no member of the [Royal Irish] Constabulary, including the Dublin Metropolitan Police, be eligible for membership of any affiliated club, or be allowed to compete in any Gaelic sports.”
These rules replaced a ban that from March 1885 to February 1886 had prohibited GAA members from competing in events organised by the British Amateur Athletic Association, whose 104-member executive council contained only two Irish delegates, both representing Belfast Cricket Club.
Maurice Davin, a founder and first president of the GAA, told its first annual convention, on October 31st, 1885, that before the establishment of the GAA all athletic meetings in Ireland were held under the laws of the British Amateur Athletic Association (AAA). Clubs affiliated to the AAA restricted entry in their competitions to “gentlemen”, thereby excluding “labourers, tradesmen and artisans”, according to Brendan Mac Lua in his 1967 book The Steadfast Rule: A history of the GAA ban. AAA clubs also prohibited games on Sunday, the traditional day of rest and recreation for most people.
In 1886 the GAA spurned an attempt to amalgamate it into a newly-established Irish AAA, allowing another founder, Michael Cusack, to declare: “Ireland now enjoys Home Rule in athletics”.
The 1886 and 1888 bans were removed at annual conventions in 1893 and 1896 when the association struggled over the Parnell split and emigration, but they were restored in 1902 when the annual convention resolved that: “Any member of the Association who plays or encouraged in any way rugby or Association Football [soccer], hockey or any other imported game which is calculated to injuriously affect our national pastimes, be suspended from the Association and that this resolution apply to all counties in Ireland and England.” Another motion added Rule 28A, which stated: “That police, soldiers, militiamen and sailors on active service be prevented from playing hurling or football under GAA laws.”
The ban survived the Civil War and it was rarely challenged at annual conventions, enabling the GAA to avoid the post-independence splits that sundered Ireland’s athletic and soccer associations. Members of the new State’s Defence Forces were also in effect banned from playing any foreign games until 1943 when the minister for defence, Easter Rising veteran Oscar Traynor, instructed that all games be facilitated. He was president of the Football Association of Ireland at the time.
The writer and later government minister Conor Cruise-O’Brien described the GAA ban in 1965 as a successor to the successful 19th-century Land League boycotts. He wrote that it was “of considerable social and even political importance”. Attempts to amend the ban were defeated overwhelmingly at the 1962 and 1965 annual GAA congresses, but it was removed at the April 1971 congress in Belfast with “no acrimony or furore”, as The Irish Times headlined its report.
Austin Molloy had by then won three All-Ireland football medals, starring on the University College Galway soccer teams that won the 32-county intervarsity Collingwood Cup in 1968, 1970 and 1971. He captained the 1970 team and he scored the only goal in the 1971 final, six weeks before the GAA congress.
