Cusack's court success a good omen for GAA

ON GAELIC GAMES:A successful libel action by its founding member earned the GAA its first mention in these pages, writes Sean Moran

A FORTNIGHT into the great national depression that 2009 promises to be, the GAA’s 125th anniversary celebrations are up and running. The first flagged event came last Friday although it has been hard to find many members too enamoured of last Friday’s Late Late Show vaudevillian take on the association.

Then again the programme presumably wasn’t just aimed at the association’s membership and there is some anecdotal evidence that it – better say ”allegedly” – went down better with non-GAA people; that’s for them to ponder. One of the complaints was that hurling featured hardly at all although followers of the game could hardly fail to be impressed at the tactical game plan that kept Henry Shefflin as quiet as he’s ever been on a big occasion in recent years.

Media coverage of the anniversary – or “125” as it’s to be known – has yet to get into top gear but at the end of the month the opening event of the year, the floodlit National Football League clash of Dublin and Tyrone, will crank up the celebratory mood and off we’ll go. There is already an apprehension among the organisational hierarchy that the year, for all its potential to stiffen sinews and rededicate Gaels to their sundry tasks, should not degenerate into a meaningless round of self-congratulation.

In a time of growing national unease and increasingly arduous challenges that is commendable but there is also a synchronicity about the anniversary. There are, however, echoes in today’s grim environment of the low national morale that GAA founder Michael Cusack sought to address through the agency of the association.

Cusack’s newspaper, The Celtic Times, of 19th February, 1887, maintained in a piece titled “The Future of the Irish Race”: “Ireland, in future times as it has so often been in the past, may be the arena of deadly struggles – let us hope, if such an emergency arises, that Irish manhood will display the courage which their kinsmen did at Fontenoy and Fredericksburgh, and their ancestors at the glorious triumph at Oulart.

“If we see that the rising generation receives that athletic exercise and training which should co-exist with a bold and spirited people, and if we impress on them the great necessity for vigorous and manly practices, we shall be doing giant work for the preservation of the Irish nation race and the future glory of the Irish nation.”

Cusack may not have had in mind the vicissitudes of a global financial system in freefall but fortitude is fortitude whatever the adversity.

Part of the build-up to the Croke Park match will be a commemorative magazine with this newspaper, which celebrates its own significant anniversary, the 150th, this year having been founded 25 years before the GAA, on June 8th, 1859. The paths of the two organisations took a while to cross with any degree of comfort, given their distinct political and cultural perspectives for much of the GAA’s history, and it is interesting to note the first reference to the GAA in the pages of this newspaper comes on June 5th, 1885, within seven months of the foundation in Thurles.

It concerns a libel action taken by the GAA founder against the Irish Sportsman newspaper. According to Cusack’s biographer and GAA historian Marcus de Búrca, the successful action marked a turning point in Cusack’s dealings with his adversaries, supporters of the athletics establishment that the GAA so directly challenged. Yet in The Irish Times report of the case, titled “Amusing action for libel”, it’s hard to avoid the sense of editorial struggle to keep a straight face.

Cusack ran a successful academy for those wanting to pass examinations for the public service in a premises now occupied by that other great institute of learning (pre- and post-match) the Dergvale Hotel and its bar.

In the court report he is referred to as “the well known Civil Service grinder” and the cause of action is a “satirical” poem in the Irish Sportsman. As the text is, even by the standards of 19th-century humour, mind-bendingly tedious there’s no need to reproduce anything but the offending lines: “If he ever gets a pass from his much neglected class What an awful fluke ‘twill be.” (Still, you never know with the Victorians. According to the report, “Witness then read the whole poem. It created considerable laughter.”) Cusack, described as wearing “knee breaches and a slouched hat”, was represented by Tim Healy, the MP and future Governor General, who, ironically, would be to the forefront of the anti-Parnell faction in the Irish Parliamentary Party during the 1890s when the GAA took the opposite view.

The defence line on the action can be roughly reduced to “only slagging”, an argument they sought to stand up by pointing out some of Cusack’s own virulent writings on the activities of rival sports organisations, relayed in court as “condemned as being patronised by pot-hunting mashers (laughter) who pawned the prizes they won”.

Under questioning from a QC named Monroe, Cusack admitted he had written the un-bylined piece. “Now I thought you did,” continued Monroe trying to pursue the theme of satire. “You are a funny fellow?” And about the only time the courtroom didn’t rock with laughter was when the funniest line was delivered. “No,” replied Cusack. “I was three years in the North and all the fun was knocked out of me.” In summary the defence dismissed the action as both trivial and opportunistic.

“The whole thing was a storm in a tea-cup and it was a most monstrous and ridiculous thing that this not-very-clever squib should be made the subject of an action for libel. The action is a most trivial one and it was brought simply to advertise Mr Cusack and his grinding establishment. The real sting of the poem was in the description given of the plaintiff as an ‘obese academician’”. (Laughter). When the laughter faded Cusack won, however, and was awarded £12 in damages. And after that initial intersection the paths of the GAA and The Irish Times continue to cross.

smoran@irishtimes.com