A new book looking at the individual histories of the association in all 32 counties shows that when it comes to continued success or constant despair, it all comes down to borderline decisions, writes KEITH DUGGAN

IN 1931, the Tyrone football team was gathered in the Railway Hotel in Cavan for some lunch and to prepare for their Ulster final against Cavan, the prestige team of the era. It would be the first time the modern Tyrone county jersey – a white shirt with the iconic Red Hand symbol – would be seen in an Ulster final and represented the strides the mid-Ulster side had taken over the previous decade.

The Boundary Commission had left Tyrone football in a state of bewilderment, with police searches of players and supporters going to see games in Clones a regular occurrence, deepening the confusion of a county that didn’t quite know where it stood in greater Ireland.

So appearing in an Ulster final was a big deal: it was a chance to reassert a sense of place. But a couple of hours before the throw-in, a row broke out between the Dungannon players and the rest of the side. Before cooler heads could prevail, the Dungannon men walked out and headed for home. They were so incensed by the row they rejected all appeals to return.

So Tyrone had to cobble together a team and go out and face the Cavan men, who duly punished their act of self-sabotage with a 6-13 to 1-2 win. They went on to win the All-Ireland for good measure. It took Tyrone 10 years just to reach an Ulster final again.

The story highlights the fact the GAA thrives upon a glorious contradiction. All 32 counties are based upon simmering town and village rivalries, friendships, courtships, business arrangements and petty jealousies that are most frequently oxygenated by the regular collision of club teams in the leagues and championships for many decades.

But all those local idiosyncrasies are pushed aside for the greater good of the All-Ireland championship. Players who are fierce opponents at club level somehow manage to become equally fierce team-mates when wearing the country colours and from the early days of the GAA, people who came to watch the games displayed an instinctive willingness to celebrate the achievements of their county teams.

There is something miraculous about the depth of feeling the All-Irelands have stirred among generations of Irish people and fact the GAA is so clearly demarcated by 32 republics of stridently independent colour, voice and style is the subject of a The GAA: County by County(Collins Press), which was launched this week.

The book, written by Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse, looks and feels like a companion piece to their acclaimed The GAA: A People’s History and it is another important step on the association’s epic project to record and archive the stories and images that travelled through anecdote and attic box for far too long.

The book is divided into a chapter tracing the evolution of the GAA within each county and those counties appear in alphabetical order rather than reputation for excellence on the field of play.

This is as it should be because one thing becomes clear from the introduction. The county system is wonderful and it has sparked so many of the border stories and rivalries that serve to make the invisible lines pencilled in by the Boundary Commission as real in the minds of Irish people as high-voltage fences. But it is also inherently unfair.

As The Gaelic Athlete newspaper pointed out in 1912, there should be “no historical reason why Irishmen should desire to hold the present division of the country into counties of varied sizes and most irregular and absurd shapes”.

The editors of the newspaper were pushing hard for the GAA to draft a new map which would make more geographical sense. But it was already too late.

All evidence pointed to the fact that the notion of county loyalty was already deeply embedded: by then, the Kilkenny hurlers had already collected six All-Ireland titles. John Henderson, the former Kilkenny hurler, caught the complexity of the county structure during an interview he contributed to the GAA Oral History Project.

“What makes the association great is the line; the border line, the county line. That’s what makes it . . . but you know, it’s that line that keeps the lesser counties down. I was lucky to be born in Johnstown.

“If I was born the other side of Galmoy, in Laois or in Tipperary, and my sons are born in Wicklow, instead of being across the line in Dublin . . . so it’s the border line, everything’s on the border line. And that’s the restriction . . . a good player can’t progress, he’s hemmed in by that same border line.”

Those few sentences contain so much: the acknowledgement that apart from the great organisation and work that has made Kilkenny the jewel in the hurling crown, there is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God element to success within the county structure.

The fact is all counties produce great hurlers and footballers but those with smaller populations or weaker school and club structures do so more rarely and so folklore of the GAA has many examples of great players “hemmed in” or trapped within their county, doomed to give wonderful virtuoso displays on teams that can never be good enough to dominate.

In the chapter on Leitrim, for example, it is noted that in the 1841 census, 155,000 people lived in the county and that just over a century later that number had fallen to 41,000.

The famine-era exodus and the 20th century cycles of emigration meant the Leitrim football team was always going to be up against it when playing its more populous neighbours.

Leitrim could produce high-calibre ball players like Packie McGarty (who wore the colours from 1949, when he made his debut at 16, until 1973) or like Mickey Quinn or John McKeon.

But rarely did players like these emerge at the same time. When they did – the 1927 and 1994 teams which won the Connacht championship – it felt like a mirage.

For if the expectation within Kerry is to win a Munster (and All-Ireland championship) every year, in a county like Leitrim it is, by necessity, the opposite.

The chapter on Leitrim includes a line from That They May Face The Rising Sun, John McGahern’s final novel, that perhaps sums up the fatalistic attitude to the county team more years than not.

“They are not great but it’s a day out. Only for football we might never get out of the house.”

The example of Leitrim illuminates the best and worst of the county system. Until the qualifier system was introduced in 2000, what did the GAA’s All-Ireland championship promise Leitrim? Nothing more than the likelihood of “a day out” – a visit to Carrick-on-Shannon or Salthill in the hope that the county team might cause an upset.

But for all that, the GAA continued to thrive within the county and the exceptional players who were born within its borders accepted that their role was to use their gifts on a team that was destined to lose more often than it won.

As it was, many of the best footballers were “lost” to emigration – a pattern that has returned with shocking force in recent years. The authors quote from McGahern’s Memoir to chronicle the high jinks occasioned by the annual Christmas visit home from England of Ballinamore’s star free-taker Eddie McIniff.

“After the handshakes, the slaps, the embraces, the jokes, the laughter, he was carried shoulder high from the platform. The band would lead the crowd through the town to whatever bar had been decided upon.”

It is unlikely that even the most decorated Kerry footballer or Kilkenny hurler was singled out for that kind of adoration. But then, those counties are so dense with accomplished GAA stars, why would they be?

In Leitrim, lone brilliance appears all the more dazzling against a backdrop of oppression caused not because other counties were naturally better at football but because the county system was inordinately stacked against them.

And yet, Leitrim never lost faith in it and believed as fiercely in their “county” cause as did their more illustrious neighbours.

The fact that Dublin-born Declan Darcy decided to play with his father’s county in the early 1990s indicated the psychic and illogical “pull” that the idea of county allegiance could have on people.

It worked out romantically for Darcy, who was one of the star turns on the famous 1994 side which played Dublin in the All-Ireland semi-final. But he could hardly have guessed at that outcome when he committed himself to the Leitrim cause.

Disappointment and frustration was his more likely lot.

The strangest phenomenon lies in the power of these “absurd lines” that make up the 32 counties to travel along with Irish people who have made lives in various corners of the world.

Somehow, the significance of the border lines between Kerry and Cork or Cavan and Meath have been transported and perpetuated in the multi-ethnic cities of America and England and were even transplanted to Buenos Aires.

The first game played under official GAA rules outside Ireland was between Galway and Kerry on Boston Common in 1886.

In the early years of the 1900s, London was one of the powerhouse “counties” in the All-Ireland championship. Overseas clubs are the fail-safe barometer of Irish economic activity: if the membership in GAA teams in New York or Chicago is teeming, then the economy at home is ailing.

And the frequent tours of the Irish-American cities which the glamorous home teams frequently embarked upon was vital: for lifelong inhabits of Woodlawn in the Bronx or Dorchester in Southie, the chance to get to see Christy Ring or Mick O’Connell out there, in the flesh, was as close as many would get to being back in Ireland again.

On page 331, there is a photograph at the beginning of the Roscommon chapter of five or six schoolboys gathered around a television: the 1962 final between Kerry and Roscommon was the first to be televised.

The picture is snowy and the players little more than blurs: you could probably count the pixels. But the awe on the faces of these kids is the story.

As in A People’s History, the photographs compiled here are like self-contained chapters.

The GAA and television is probably worth a book in its own right and that image is a portent of the stormy beginnings to a relationship that is now central to the success of the All-Ireland championship: it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the championship is the focal point of Ireland’s television summer schedule.

The photograph is one of the many taken from the Kennelly Archive.

The GAA was blessed there were so many sharp-eyed photographers roaming the country over the last century. From the 1992 “Inpho” black and white of two men literally diving into the Sam Maguire in some tavern in Donegal to the 1939 image from the Brown collection of young Evelyn McCloskey examining the newspaper headlines exclaiming Offaly’s surprise win over Laois through to the Wicklow footballers taking to the river in Shillelagh after a 2007 training session, the selection of pictures here are fantastic.

Whether by accident or design, the rapid rise of the county system into the basis for the GAA’s epic summer competitions has shaped Ireland. Regional newspapers champion their county and songs and beauty spots enhance the feelings that people have for their locality but it is through supporting their county team that Irish people have the opportunity to literally shout out where they are from and to glory in it.

The All-Ireland system is, apart from the habitual winners of the Sam Maguire and Liam McCarthy Cups, an expression of absolute faith. Even the very good teams know that they most likely won’t win the All-Ireland. But the possibility – or even the dream – is enough to mobilise the intense voluntary effort at club and then county level year after year.

It took Tyrone just over 70 years to go from the fiasco of that forgotten Ulster final to arriving in that fantastic, impossible position of being champions of Ireland.

Joe Martin, who wrote the definitive history of the GAA in the county, is quoted as he reflects on the evolution of the GAA within the county. “A difficult beginning, near collapse, consolidation, breakthrough, setback, more breakthroughs, more setbacks, false dawns, small and big steps forwards and backwards – and one very long wait. Then, the ultimate achievement . . .”

“And so say all of us” could well be the reply of many counties, even though who are still waiting – and may always wait – for the ultimate achievement. The county system is here to stay, imperfect as it may be.

Those 32 irregular and absurd shapes now contain entire worlds.

Written by Mike Cronin, Mark Duncan and Paul Rouse, The GAA – County by Countyis published by Collins Press and priced €29.99.