GAA has big role in peace process

Colm McCartney and John Farmer must have had a lot to talk about as they drove back home from Croke Park on the night of August 24th 1975. They had been to Dublin to watch Derry's All-Ireland semi-final against Dublin earlier that afternoon and the five-point defeat for the Ulster champions would have been top of the agenda on the journey North.

But as the two GAA fans were travelling through Armagh just before midnight their car was stopped at a checkpoint manned by members of the UVF in military uniform. McCartney, from Bellaghy, Co Derry, and Farmer from Moy, Co Tyrone, were each shot in the back of the head.

Those chilling deaths are just two of the 3637 recounted in Lost Lives, a study which details all those killed here in the political violence of the last 30 years. One horrific story follows another in a book that is essential reading for anyone who purports to have any interest in either the past or the future of this country. Lost Lives is compelling, often for the utter ordinariness and sheer banality of the events it details.

As well as the breadth of detail in the book itself, Lost Lives is supplemented by an extensive index in which there are 36 separate references to the Gaelic Athletic Association. The murders of Colm McCartney and John Farmer comprise just one of those.

But elsewhere the inter-meshing of the GAA and almost 4000 deaths provides startling evidence of the way in which the history of the Association here over the past three decades has been inextricably linked to the violence that has occurred within local society.

The litany of GAA deaths stretches back to the UDA/UFF murder of Frank Corr, secretary of the South Antrim GAA Board, in July 1972 and right through to the deaths of Brenda Logue, Gareth Conway and Jolene Marlow, all members of their local GAA clubs, in the Omagh bomb of August 15th last year

Some of the entries are heartbreakingly poignant. Emma Donnelly, from Benburb, Co Tyrone, was 13 when she was killed on November 23rd 1988. Her camogie talents had been recognised with an award for local player of the year the previous season and she was in line to repeat that at a presentation ceremony the following week.

But as Emma and her 67-year-old grandfather were driving past the RUC station in Benburb an IRA van bomb exploded without warning and killed both of them. Emma had been a pupil at St Catherine's College in Armagh and an ash tree was planted in her memory at the school gates.

Jim Devlin had a proud football career with Tyrone. On May 7th 1974 he had stopped with his wife and teenage daughter to buy chips on his way home from work in Coalisland. On a country road near their house, the Devlin's car was stopped by a uniformed man who opened fire. Gertrude Devlin was killed in the first burst of gunfire and as Jim got out of the car to get help he too was shot dead. GAA clubs in Tyrone now play every spring for a trophy named in his memory.

One of the many triumphs of Lost Lives is the way it cross-references many of the deaths thus enabling them to be put in some sort of context. Francie McCaughey was a prominent member of the Aghaloo GAA club in the Tyrone village of Aughnacloy. After a long period of negotiations he had just helped complete the purchase of some land which would be used as a new pitch by the club. But he died on November 8th 1973 from injuries he received when a UVF boobytrap bomb exploded in a shed to which he had gone to milk some cows.

Aghaloo never took possession of the land Francie had helped buy and continued to play their games at playing fields just beyond Aughnacloy on the other side of an army border checkpoint. On the Sunday afternoon of February 21st 1988 Aidan McAnespie was on his way to an Aghaloo game when he was shot by a soldier as he walked through the checkpoint. The first people on the scene were players and spectators from the match which was just about to start a few hundred yards away.

But in all of the troubles the GAA did its best to stay detached from the politics of the killings and the harassment. It's avowedly non-political and non-sectarian policy positions became security blankets to which it clung during the darkest days. The hunger strikes of 1981 were particularly difficult as the clubs became inevitable focal points for the street protests and demonstrations that surrounded the deaths of that spring and summer.

The secondment of Casement Park by the British Army in the early years of the Troubles, the recently-ended occupation of the Crossmaglen Rangers grounds in South Armagh and the seemingly interminable debate which continues to rumble on over Rule 21 have all been events which, whether it liked it or not, politicised the GAA in Ulster.

As the largest sporting organisation in the North and one which was intimately associated with the Catholic tradition here, it would have been naive for anyone to think that it could have escaped the political debates that surrounded it.

But until very recently the GAA's response to all the events that enveloped it has been at best equivocal. Of course there was the once yearly lip service of a motion calling for the return of the Crossmaglen land at annual Congress but that gradually became something of a ritual. Two events, though, have jolted the Association out of that creeping paralysis.

The first was the Belfast Agreement which was followed by the attempts of GAA president Joe McDonagh to surf the new wave of optimism and prompt some movement on the Rule 21 issue. The second was the Omagh bomb and the shock that was felt in GAA circles at the deaths of so many of its members and activists. The huge financial donation made by the Association to the fund for victims and their families was tangible evidence of its new engagement with the wider society here. Inevitably, the gradual shuffling of the GAA into the mainstream of political activity has produced some disquiet. The decision not to make a submission to the recent Patten Commission on reform of the RUC would seem to indicate a degree of nervousness about the Association's future role. After more than a century of political disengagement this is clearly difficult and uncharted territory.

But any repeat of that lack of involvement with the ongoing debate here in the months and years to come would be a retrograde step. The GAA will be an integral part of the future life of this place and so it must play its part in shaping it. The message of Lost Lives is undoubtedly that we can never go back.