Cusack's legacy will be properly remembered

On Gaelic Games: It will slip by in a couple of weeks - not unnoticed, but neither will it be the subject of widespread recognition, commensurate with its importance. In just under two weeks, November 28th, the centenary of the death of Michael Cusack will be marked.

Some dedicated souls in Cusack's home county of Clare have drawn on funding both public and from within the GAA - Croke Park and the Munster Council - to establish a interpretative centre and museum to honour the founder of the association.

It will house lecture facilities, which it is hoped can be used for seminars and symposiums, and is to be located in Carron on the site of a cottage that is believed (and by some not believed) to have been home to the Cusacks, albeit not necessarily where he was born, as his family were shepherds and moved around the area.

It's noticeable 100 years on how insistent but subdued Cusack's presence is within the GAA and the country at large. The eponymous stand in Croke Park and the county grounds in Clare and Westmeath keep the name alive, but in terms of recognising the scale of his achievement, in the 10 decades since his passing the waters have largely closed over the reputation of the man who drove the foundation of the GAA and did more than anyone in the initial phase to keep it alive and growing.

It has been recognised that of the major cultural movements to have emerged during the Celtic revival of the late 19th century - language, theatre and sport - the GAA has been incomparably the most successful. The widespread participation in football and hurling and the place of clubs at the heart of communities have developed and copper-fastened the significance of that global rarity - thriving indigenous sport.

Like most of the forces that shaped Ireland's separatist movements, the motivation for Cusack in his promotion of national games was to distinguish Ireland from Britain and so reduce imperial influence.

The vastness of the project never seemed to deter Cusack from its inception to his death at the relatively young age of 59. Yet, the problem is at least partly tied up in his personality - a driven, choleric temperament and the force-field of energy that so busily promoted the early GAA but swept aside anything or anyone perceived as in the way.

Like many difficult individuals, Michael Cusack got things done, but despite that he was ousted as secretary of the GAA less than two years after founding the association.

Although removed from the front line of the organisation, Cusack continued to be involved in the affairs of the GAA, attending congresses and spearheading the introduction of hurling to Dublin.

By the end of his days a rapprochement of sorts had been reached with the association, and he was moved by the sympathies expressed on the premature death of his son Michael Dominic, also in 1906, and the gesture of £50 voted to him by congress in recognition of all the unpaid work he had done for the GAA.

Among the keepers of the flame in Clare are Br Seán McNamara, whose publication earlier this year, The Man from Carron, includes fascinating new material, including an original Cusack diary. The author holds provocative but not unreasonable views on two of the GAA's most iconic features.

He believes Croke Park should have been named Cusack Park in recognition of the founder - even if he accepts that history has passed the point of no return on that issue - and that the birthplace of the GAA was not Hayes' Hotel in Thurles, but the site of another hotel, the Dergvale in Dublin's Gardiner Place, the site of Cusack's hugely successful academy, a grind school for civil service exams in the late 19th century.

Here, Br McNamara argues, was where the GAA was conceived and planned - the famous meeting in Thurles being simply where the founder outlined his plans to those in attendance rather than the location where the association was co-operatively formed.

Last night the Clare County Board were finalising their arrangements to mark the centenary and the opening of the Cusack centre. It has been a long process, going back to the mid-1970s when, with help from then-GAA president Con Murphy and Donie Nealon of the Munster Council, the derelict cottage in Carron was acquired.

Current PRO Des Crowe was county secretary at that time and retained a big commitment to the project, in his words, "digging holes, spreading mortar and nearly sleeping up there because I believed in the project and I believed in Cusack".

The next staging post was the GAA's Centenary year in 1984, in preparation for which £9,000 was made available to refurbish the cottage under a community grant scheme.

Progress remained slow until the establishment of the Michael Cusack Development Committee by Clare County Council's senior environmental officer, Martin O'Loughlin.

Funding of €1,000,000 was assembled from the GAA nationally, Enterprise Ireland, Fás and the provincial councils, and Enterprise Ireland have agreed to fund full-time personnel for three years.

Clare county librarian Noel Crowley, who two years ago put together the major project of reproducing, in hardback, facsimile issues of Cusack's newspaper the Celtic Times, has been holding material that will find an obvious home in the Cusack centre museum.

For instance, one of the more off-beat exhibits is the match sliotar from the 1914 All-Ireland final.

Des Crowe obtained it through his friendship with the family of the late broadcaster Micheál O'Hehir, whose father trained the Clare side which won that All-Ireland 92 years ago.

In his biography Michael Cusack and the GAA, Marcus de Búrca recorded of the funeral on December 2nd: "On the coffin, it was observed in the pale sunlight as it was lowered into the earth beside that of Cusack's wife, was the inscription. 'Micheál Cusack - Tuismitheoir Chumann na nCleas Luith Gaedheal; 1847-1906'."

Cusack grew old and cantankerous, but he should be remembered for all he did at his most active when, like any parent, he was motivated by fierce and unconditional love as well as anxious hope for the future. It is fitting that, in its rude health and modern affluence, his only surviving offspring should commemorate him fondly.