Proud history is worth repeating

Seán Moran On Gaelic GamesTradition dies hard in the GAA or so it is often asserted. In fact it's not quite true. Tradition frequently just dies. For an association that has clung on to some fairly objectionable baggage over the years and continues to view much reasonable change with hostility, the attention paid to the past has been perfunctory.

Thankfully that has changed in recent years. To give credit to Croke Park the museum established as part of the redeveloped Cusack Stand has at last addressed the debilitating lack of documented history and archive but it can only preserve what's already survived. A quick flick through the touch-screen data bank of All-Ireland film and video reveals the dearth of adequate recordings.

Beyond the RTÉ archive and the Gael Linn films of the 1950s you're basically relying - in a sharp irony - on British newsreel companies who used dispatch crews to cover All-Ireland finals. Even that was for fairly disposable reasons - to tack the footage onto the local reels for Ireland.

This has left a terrible void at the heart of the GAA's history. A seminal All-Ireland as recent as the 1956 Wexford-Cork final, which together with the counties' previous meeting two years earlier, remains one of only two hurling All-Irelands to exceed 80,000 in attendance, is unrecorded beyond Micheal O'Hehir's incomplete radio commentary.

The Irish Times sponsors the exhibit in the museum commemorating the 1939 hurling All-Ireland, the famous Thunder and Lightning final. The only remaining artefacts are match tickets and programmes, still photographs and a kind of son et lumiere installation, which reproduces thunder and lightning effects in a booth, against the aural backdrop of an faint O'Hehir commentary. Of course it's not the match commentary because that no longer survives.

It's good there is now an official museum just as it was good that some dedicated souls down the years preserved items of great interest and some established local museums or interpretative centres, principally Lar na Pairce in Thurles and the Lory Meagher Centre in Tullaroan. But it's a tragedy so little was preserved for so long.

This particularly struck home when in Adelaide visiting the South Australia state library, which had mounted an exhibition about the life and times of the master batsman Donald Bradman. The memorabilia was interesting but more fascinating were the sound recordings of his most famous innings, going back to Sheffield Shield (interstate matches) in the 1920s.

How were Australians of 80 years ago so much more mindful of posterity's requirements than the GAA, back then still well within living memory of its foundation as a cultural as well as a sporting body.

I once interviewed Tom Gannon, the captain and sole survivor of Leitrim's 1927 Connacht winning side. He was into his 90s by that stage (1994, the next and so far only occasion on which the county would emulate his team's feat) but still lucid and fascinating. His reminiscences spanned a long forgotten world of football, society and environment. He had been at Croke Park on Bloody Sunday but had left before the fateful Dublin-Tipperary match because he was expected at his uncle's for lunch.

Among the insights into the 1920s was that Leitrim had travelled a single-gauge railway from Ballinamore to Tuam for the All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry. In Ballinamore the morning after defeat, on the scoreline of 0-2 to 0-4, the team had retained a local photographer to take a picture of them all. It was the last time they would be together. Several emigrated, never to return.

I've sometimes wondered about that picture. Do prints of it survive? If so do those in possession of them proudly explain the significance and their connection? Or have those lives, now all sadly extinguished after Tom Gannon's passing some years ago, and the importance to them of that moment receded into the sepia-tinged monochrome? It is accordingly a pleasant task to place on the record an event last month in the Lory Meagher centre in Tullaroan. On May 17th friends and family of Martin White, one of the longest surviving All-Ireland medallists, gathered to honour him.

Longevity is only the half of it. Ninety three this year he only recently (2001 but maybe even since then) drove from Dublin to Kilkenny. Three times an All-Ireland medallist in the 1930s, Martin White went on to play a major part in the life of the Blackrock club in Cork after moving there for work-related reasons. Later when work again relocated him, he would be involved with the Crokes club in Dublin, the hurling partner in the 1966 amalgamation that formed Kilmacud Crokes, and was chairman of the Kilkenny Association in Dublin.

A graduate of St Kieran's College famed hurling academy in Kilkenny, Martin White won Leinster medals in 1925 and '26 against Blackrock College and Newbridge College, now better known for rugby.

Provincial medals were school hurling's highest honour in the years before there was an All-Ireland dimension. But it was as an intercounty hurler that he participated most visibly in history. Although replaced for the replays he played as a youngster in the first match of the fabled 1931 All-Ireland final against Cork, a three-match epic that turned hurling into a mass-spectator sport with the series averaging over 30,000 a match.

The legendary Lory Meagher broke two ribs in the second match and had to be ruled out for the decisive second replay. He stood on the sideline and wept as he watched, powerless to prevent Cork steam rolling Kilkenny in his absence. This year is the 30th anniversary of Meagher's death but he lives on in his eponymous centre and in the memory of his surviving team mate.

Martin White features in Hurling Giants, the second of Brendan Fullam's trilogy of books setting down the reminiscences of hurlers. The author recalls: "After Martin had written a piece for me a few gentle tears fell from his eyes. 'Don't mind me, I get a bit sad when I think of all the colleagues who have gone and the memories they bring back'." But they are remembered. And long may Martin White continue to provide a living link with an at-times neglected heritage.