Making a stand for the GAA's founding father

Keith Duggan talks to Brother Seá McNamara, who has often decried the token lip service paid to the GAA's founding father Michael Cusack as shameful

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the death of Michael Cusack, the rambunctious Clare man who founded the GAA and whose memory has only been intermittently honoured by the mighty association since. Cusack's legacy has been handled with care by a precious few who believe the man from Carron should be recognised as one of the great energetic forces of the 19th century, a man whose vision and force of personality helped shape emerging Ireland.

One of those is Brother Seán McNamara, a retired teacher in Ennis CBS, who has often decried the token lip service paid to the GAA's founding father as shameful. His recent publication, The Man from Carron, is a succinct and fascinating insight into a man whose name for many GAA fans brings to mind not the hirsute, dandified nationalist who strode through Dublin in the late 1890s but the hulking, modern stand looming out of Croke Park, a stone's throw from where Cusack once lived and died.

"You can't change it now, but the place should have been named Cusack Park," contends Br McNamara with a small grin of mischief, sitting in his peaceful living-room in that long hour when school has resumed after lunch.

"'Twas Cusack founded the GAA. He was an outstanding church man, but he felt this organisation should be controlled by ordinary men with no leaning towards politics or church. He wanted something that would stand on its own two feet.

"Interestingly, Archbishop Croke encouraged the priests to keep the local branches in their hands and hold the clubs loyal to the parliamentary parties. That grip would be against what Cusack had in mind for the association. Small wonder really that they wanted him out of the executive after two years."

Bright and nimble and intimidating in his sharpness at 78 years of age, Br McNamara talked about a man whose persuasive personality and "stentorian voice" has been stalking his imagination for half a century. His argument for Cusack is clear and will brook no argument. He once gave an historical address in Clare over a local row about the precise location of Cusack's birthplace and, brandishing a hurley in much the same way as his hero flaunted a blackthorn, threatened to "give full value of this hurl" to anyone who argued with him. He was only half-joking.

McNamara stops short of suggesting there was an active conspiracy to allow the decades of forgetfulness to dull the shine of Cusack's place in GAA lore. But he would contend that the neglect has bordered on wilful and it is undeniable that 100 years after he passed away from Bright's Disease (chronic kidney inflammation), he has become a shadowy figure.

"Well, there was no monument over his grave in Glasnevin until 1940. Himself and his wife Imelda Woods and three of his children are buried there but it took over 30 years for an official recognition. This year, above all years, it should be cleaned up, it should be the pride of the GAA. It is very easily found - although there are probably many fellows in the GAA today who might not be able to show it to you.

"I think there was a feeling about Cusack in his own lifetime and afterwards that he was strange and that he was no good. He was practically a pauper when he died and I think it is likely the effort he put into the association and his other Gaelic projects contributed to his death. His wife Imelda died from TB at 37.

"They had six children and two of the lads went to St Vincent's orphanage in Glasnevin and two of the girls to England. None of the children ever had youngsters of their own. It was quite sad, really, and I am not sure how many close friends he had in the end. He was a difficult man and hard to analyse. He didn't suffer fools.

"But at the 1901 convention, there was a vote taken to have him reinstated to the executive and he lost to Luke O'Toole by two votes. And I imagine it hurt him that he never got back in. Because there is a popular perception that Cusack left the GAA. That was never so. He was active right up until the end."

McNamara's fascination with Cusack originates in a chance visit to the wilds of Carron on one of those hazy and hypnotic summer days in 1955, when he was guided to what was locally believed to have been the ruins of Matthew Cusack's cottage.

"The place was like an image from a John Hinde postcard and I was convinced that a great person had come from this place. And I could understand why he was also so adamant and proud of the fact he came from Carron."

In the GAA centenary year of 1984, on the eve of the All-Ireland hurling final, a GAA committee unveiled a plaque in memory of Cusack outside his Dublin residence, what is now the Dergvale hotel on Gardiner Street. The then president Paddy Buggy also travelled to Carron to officially recognise the childhood of Cusack's birthplace. Today, a small local committee is working towards a more handsome and fitting recognition of the famine days homestead, with constant care taking and "not merely a big day every twenty years where the president comes down and then in a few years' time the rats and the crows and the pigeons move back in there".

As with almost every aspect of Cusack's life, controversy has followed the exact location of the Cusack homestead in Poulaphouca. There are conflicting theories. Matthew Cusack was a shepherd and so moved from dwelling to dwelling fairly frequently and there are those who believe what is deemed to be the Cusack house, at the end of a rough road not far from the ruins of the 1858 school, may not be where he resided. In Br McNamara's eyes, such hair-splitting is further evidence that getting a substantial hold on Cusack's life is a tricky business.

He contends that much of what is known about Cusack is frankly misleading and his most controversial assertion lies in his belief that the Clare man did not really found the GAA in Thurles. It is not a contention that will gain many free drinks in Hayes Hotel but he is sticking to his guns.

"Obviously a meeting took place there, but I firmly believe that what Cusack was doing was making a declaration of an idea and a decision that had come to pass in the Dergvale Hotel. The Dergvale is where I believe the GAA came into being. Cusack loved Clare, but Dublin made him. He took up hurley, a genteel version of hurling played by the gentry in the late 1870s. And then he founded the Metropolitan hurling club in December 6th, 1882. That was the true beginning of the GAA. It was the first hurling club to win a championship in Dublin.

"When it came to forming the association, Cusack wanted to move the thing out of Dublin. There were more than the seven people reported to have attended the meeting that day in Thurles present. Frank Maloney, an IRB man from Nenagh, was definitely there and five others. Of the seven at the table, only Michael Davin was as immersed in the idea of Cusack's. But what was agreed that day was something that had been conceived of in Cusack's home and academy at the Dergvale. Of that there is no doubt. And for the next two years, the creative drive of the association emanated from the Dergvale."

Cusack managed to hold on to the post of secretary for just two years. He was voted off for failing to deliver a financial report to treasurer John Clancy and for not replying to letters from John McKay (one of the seven men who sat with him in Thurles in November of 1884. But Cusack's personality - confident, loud and ferociously singular - undoubtedly alienated many of his contemporaries. Although gone from the nerve centre, he did not disappear and was virulent in the criticism of his association.

According to McNamara's book, "Saxon dogs", "Orange Catholics", "half baptised idiots" and "unprofessional cup-hunting trotters" featured among his insults of choice. However, he remained active at the coalface, representing Dublin at the congresses of 1901, 1902 and 1905 and he was a highly visibleand charismatic figure around the Gaelic games scene in the city.

As PD Mehigan, the first Gaelic games correspondent of this newspaper, remembered in his book Gaelic Football (Tralee 1941), "This great and strong-minded Clareman had passed out of active participation in GAA councils before I had played my first hurling match. Yet I knew him well from 1900 to 1906. At the hurling grounds in the Phoenix Park he would roar advice at us youth - 'ar an dtalamh', 'tarraing a mhic' - he would shout at us in thunderous tones; this stout, bearded man of middle life in knee breeches and frieze Ulster coat, never without his sturdy blackthorn."

It was this boorish and gloriously eccentric figure that was widely assumed borrowed by James Joyce when he set down the absurdly nationalistic figure of the Citizen in Ulysses in 1916. As McNamara maintains, however, Cusack frequently referred to himself as Citizen Cusack but for all his stridently nationalist views and devotion to Gaelic culture, he was not anti-Protestant nor was he anti-Semitic.

"I am no Joycean scholar but from what those who are have stated, Joyce wanted to use a prototype of an ultra-nationalist. And Cusack was that but the character is not strictly based on him."

CUSACK WAS undoubtedly theatrical, though. One of Br McNamara's most prized possessions is a copy of a diary the Clare man kept on a typically exuberant tour of his homeland in 1902. "I wanted buttermilk for dessert," Cusack writes of an evening meal with relations. "I got some sort of milk but there was so much in it that I could not make it out - there was so much whiskey in it. The evening was too warm for me to remain long indoors. To help digestion and to visit a second cousin of ours at whose wedding at the age of nineteen I frolicked thirty-six and a half years ago, Michael and myself sallied forth for a stroll of a mile.

"I got more of the mysterious milk, diluted and flavoured in the same way. When we reached home, I tried more of it and when I was shown my bedroom I found on the table a jug of milk and a decanter. I resisted the temptation, said my prayers and went to bed. I slept. Are you surprised?"

Elsewhere, he flatters himself that, at a Gaelic League meeting, he addressed the crowd in a "voice that was as sweet as an Irish tune and its intonations as graceful as the curl of a reel".

Over a century later, nobody is making claims for the melodious qualities of Cusack's voice, only for its importance. Br McNamara's great fear is that what is known of Michael Cusack will become as desolate and, to all intents, as lost as the remote Carron cottage, instead of becoming a definitive, treasured landmark.

He believes Cusack should have been championed long ago as one of the epic figures who dragged the cultural gems of earlier centuries safely through the turmoil of the early twentieth century. He would love to see a major athletic meeting held in Croke Park some time this year, one of the sprawling, cultural and uniquely Gaelic celebrations that Cusack had intended.

"This man gave everything to the foundation of the GAA," the holy man praised. "He was not perfect. He was hot-tempered and he was blunt. But he had a great brain and a vision to match it and he was ruthless when his mind was made up. He was an educationalist and was immersed in everything that would raise up the head of the ordinary Irish man against the mighty and wealthy. He had a huge influence on many people, even Douglas Hyde, the first president. And he stayed loyal all his life to the association even though it must have killed him in the end that it was gone from him. His past record stood against him.

"The Gaelic emphasis of the association was very important to him. The GAA is different now. Would he be happy today? Doubtful. And I know that times change and must move on. But it would be a shame if they let this year pass and do nothing."