A debate in the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) flared up and spilled over onto the national airwaves in early March. The prospect of a Hard Border as a result of Brexit was its backdrop but as arguments have flown from both sides the discussion has prompted deeper questions pertaining to national identity and the isolated position of Northern nationalists.

The exchanges started when former Armagh captain and current Armagh delegate to the Association’s Ulster Council Jarlath Burns was interviewed by Justin McCarthy on This Week on RTE radio. Burns expressed a private opinion that in the event of a Border Poll his hope would be that the GAA nationally would not be neutral but would support a United Ireland. On the following day, in the course of a lively interview on Sean O’Rourke’s RTE radio show, GAA pundit and Derry all-Ireland medallist Joe Brolly upped the ante by vigorously endorsing the stance taken by Burns.

The case against has so far come mainly from sports columnists and GAA specialists in the Southern newspapers. Of particular note was a piece by Declan Bogue in the Irish Independent (Bogue normally writes in the Belfast Telegraph) in which he invoked the pluralist stance taken by then GAA president Aogan O’Fearghail in 2016. Another sports journalist at the Independent, Ewan MacKenna, rowed in against the Northerners with an article headed, “Using the GAA to bring about a United Ireland would be self-defeating” (Irish Independent, 10 March).

In a more cautious article Irish Times columnist Sean Moran argued that Burns was shoring up support in Ulster for his candidacy for the GAA Presidency in 2020 and that it would be difficult for the Association to take up an overtly political position for a range of reasons. This more cautious criticism drew a cautious reply from a reader. Aonghus Mac Domhnaill from Tipperary ended a letter by stating: “It is not unreasonable, though we may not like it, for the Northern nationalist to expect the GAA to rally to their cause. This is what Joe Brolly and Jarlath Burns are asking for.” (IT, 8 March).

The subject of the debate merits more attention than it has so far received. As a result of Brexit there has been a notable shift of emphasis in the opinions being expressed by members of the Northern nationalist community. The message they are conveying deserves to be heard.

Jarlath Burns on a Border Poll

It is clear from what has been written about him that Jarlath Burns is a serious contender for high office in the GAA. Equally clear is that he is far from being a dogmatic nationalist oblivious to the sensitivities of politics on the island as a whole. As Principal of a large secondary school in Bessbrook, South Armagh, he has encouraged students to visit Orange Halls and to march for gay rights. He is also known as a supporter of Sinn Fein. In the past he has been publicly supportive of the GAA’s outreach programme, to the point where he stated in an interview with Eamon Mallie some years ago that he would have no issue with dispensing with the flag and anthem at matches if it would attract unionists. On that issue he attracted a predictable share of criticism.

In the This Week interview on Sunday 3 March Burns explained what a Hard Border would mean for the Ulster GAA. He said that of 12 National League matches being played in Ulster on that weekend 5 would involve cross Border travel and there were also matches in Croke Park in Dublin between clubs like Sleacht Néill and Clonduff Camogues. At this time in March every year there would be between 15,000 and 20,000 people moving across the Border for GAA activity alone. In explaining what the GAA means to the nationalist community in the North he said that it was an isolated community which is allowed to pursue its Irishness and its national identity in a non-violent manner through the GAA.

Asked about a Border Poll he referred to the 36 referenda that had been held since the foundation of the State in all of which the GAA had remained steadfastly neutral. But a Border Poll would be different. Quoting from point 2.1 of the Association’s Official Guide (constitution) he described the GAA as:

“a National Organisation which has as its basic aim the strengthening of the National Identity in a 32 County Ireland through the preservation and promotion of Gaelic Games and pastimes.”

Burns’ point was that rejecting neutrality in such a referendum would be “logical as well as ideological” for the Association.

Joe Brolly spells it out

Like Jarlath Burns Joe Brolly is not someone who can be easily pigeonholed. Coming from a republican family in Dungiven, County Derry he refuses to identify as a republican. Interviewed by Miriam O’Callaghan some months ago he was robust in disagreeing with her about the superiority of Ireland’s Call as compared to the National Anthem. For Brolly Ireland’s Call is a pious song devoid of culture but in the same interview he described how at a school debate he had applauded young people for not attaching undue importance to flags and anthems. A regular panellist on the popular TV show “The Sunday Game” he believes sport should be discussed on TV in as lively a fashion as it is discussed in pubs; he brings the same attitude to debates about the politics of the GAA.

From the start of the interview with Sean O’Rourke on 4 March Brolly was at pains to support the stance taken by Jarlath Burns. The next few paragraphs are a rough summary of what he said:

‘I was cheered to hear the statement from Jarlath Burns, a budding GAA leader. Through the years of the Troubles it was the GAA that sustained us Northern Gaels. Right from the start of it in 1969 we focused on Gaelic games and it was no accident that the Ulster teams began to win all-Ireland titles in the 1990s, 21 years after that year.

The peace process here has been a spectacular success, rightly praised across the world. The Brexit stance of the DUP has caused a major change. The notion of a pluralist Northern Ireland has entirely evaporated. The DUP have shown themselves to be nut jobs—homophobic, creationist deniers of climate change and supporters of the death penalty, who oppose the use of “gay blood” in the blood transfusion service. They never miss an opportunity to rub our noses in their contempt.

O’Rourke: They are the largest party in the North and I’m sure they would disagree with everything you are saying.

Brolly: There has been no political representation in Northern Ireland for two years. All we get is scorn for the Irish language despite the large numbers of children being educated through Irish. In Derry alone 400 children are now in all-Irish schools. But providing State funding to this movement is described by the leader of the DUP as “feeding the crocodile”. Northern Ireland is politically dysfunctional and the minority community feel isolated. Of course the GAA was founded on politics. It was only in 2004 that the ban on members playing foreign games was lifted.

O’Rourke: But the GAA stayed out of politics during the Troubles.

Brolly: They did and they didn’t. The GAA is described in its constitution as a National organisation. The organisation now needs to support its members in the North. The DUP has always regarded the GAA as “the IRA at play”, a fantastical generalisation with no basis in truth. We need the GAA all the more since the Church has collapsed.

O’Rourke: What about the inclusion of members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in the GAA?

Brolly: I have been an outspoken defender of GAA members who have joined the PSNI. I defended Peadar Heffron, an Irish speaker who was frozen out by his club and who eventually lost a leg as a result of a bomb attack by dissident republicans. I recently attended a celebration of the PSNI branch of the GAA and it was a hell of a night. But there is a different point here. Who are we pleasing? The DUP makes UKIP look like charmers. Protestant working class areas are being desecrated by neglect because of the DUP.

[Sean O’Rourke then read out a text from a listener saying that any respect for Joe Brolly he ever had, had now evaporated. The point was ignored by Brolly]

Brolly: The GAA has a state of the art outreach programme for non-members and successfully opposes sectarianism.

O’Rourke: Should you not just leave politics to the politicians?

Brolly: There are times when it is necessary to take a stance. Spiritual support from the rest of the Association is what the Northern Gaels are asking for. Parties like Sinn Fein have their own agendas. Many in the Northern GAA take a different position. Northern nationalists are feeling isolated as a result of Brexit. It is all very well for people in the liberal pluralist South to proclaim such values but they don’t have to contend with scorn on a daily basis from a political party that is homophobic and anti-science, a party that habitually makes a laughing stock of the Irish language. We are not prepared to be cut adrift.’

From reading the above it may seem that Sean O’Rourke showed bias but given the force of the case being made, O’Rourke’s questioning was standard journalistic practice. Key points made by Brolly were: the concept of a pluralist Northern Ireland has evaporated as a result of Brexit; the GAA constitutes a basic defence against the isolation of the nationalist community; the Church has collapsed as a focal point for the community; many in the Ulster GAA take a different view to that of Sinn Fein while holding a commitment to a United Ireland; he is an active defender of the across-the-communal-divide GAA outreach programme and of welcoming members of the PSNI.

Criticism from Bogue and MacKenna

Before examining the substance of the criticisms of Declan Bogue and Ewan MacKenna it should be noted that many of their points are representative of current strands of opinion in the South. Account should also be taken that as sports writers they are at something of a disadvantage in commenting on political and historical matters.

Bogue begins his article by asserting that Jarlath Burns has dramatically scaled back his GAA involvement and is “miles away from inhabiting the present inner sanctum” of the Association. He then tackles Burns on the question of ethos which he describes as a “tricky thing”. Referring to point 1.2 he states:

“Now 99% of those involved in the GAA would be largely unaware of such a mission statement.”

Bogue clearly admires the leadership style of former GAA President Aogan O’Fearghail and approvingly cites O’Fearghail’s belief in an “agreed Ireland”. The present writer had occasion to dispute the ethos of the GAA with O’Fearghail in 2016. Having attended with family and extended family a fixture in Croke Park followed by a commemorative pageant to mark the 1916 centenary, I was disappointed to see John Redmond’s contribution highlighted on a giant screen. I complained to GAA head quarters and O’Fearghail replied defending the presentation on the grounds that by including Redmond and Carson the Association was acknowledging the unionist perspective. In the context of that exchange I would consider Joe Brolly’s question—who are we pleasing?—to be well chosen.

Bogue concludes by asking: what is the GAA? He answers that there are thousands of different versions of what it is perceived to be. Accepting that there are 2,200 clubs in Ireland and 400 more in different parts of the world encompassing religions, beliefs, prejudices and sexual orientations, his final question is: “How can any one man speak for all of that?”

Ewan MacKenna approaches the debate from an openly partitionist angle and is less than sympathetic to the Northern viewpoint. He says:

“If those north of the border think those south of it have a view that it’s a place of illogical hate and fringe lunacy dominating their society, they’d be right.”

Lest there be any doubt on the role he sees Northern GAA members playing he states:

“Those in the north must realise there are large numbers in the Republic that don’t see it the way they do, and therefore the tail cannot wag the dog.”

In subsequent paragraphs acknowledging that Brexit has revived hopes of a United Ireland, MacKenna cuts his Northern antagonists some slack. The experience of Northern members, he says, “was never close to experienced by the rest” and should not be dismissed. Then he gets to another punch line. He bluntly questions the relevance of the GAA’s history in the light of its present existence as:

“a multi-million pound organisation that has had the airlines of gulf states, French beer companies, and German supermarkets pump money into it, that sell their big events to a British satellite TV company that lies behind a paywall, and that rents out their world-class arena for everything from country-and-western concerts, to American college football, to those very same “foreign and fantastic games”?”

In the context of what Burns and Brolly are arguing he sees references to history as an unjustifiable throw back to aspects of the GAA’s legacy that are gone never to return. As he puts it:

“To use the past for present means is cheaply opportunistic. It’s true that for major tracts of its existence and growth, the GAA has been quite naked about being intertwined with Irish nationalism and that made sense. To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose, under heaven. But now it’s largely a sporting business, with proceeds helping it fund the positives like togetherness and activity in community life. It now must stay that way.”

The wider political context

The issues raised in this debate are clearly important and weighty, for observers of the evolving Irish discourse on Brexit as much as for members of the GAA. I will comment on the issues under two headings: Changing views of Irish history; and National sentiment and tolerance.

Changing views of Irish history: It is not surprising that the legacies of history are no longer taken seriously in Irish popular discourse. For over forty years clear signals have issued from the highest level of State indicating that the nationalist historical narrative needs to be abandoned. Elaborate alternative narratives often focussed on social history have been concocted, historical truth has been declared to be impossible to establish and, as a school subject, history has been made optional on the second level curriculum.

While all of this has borne fruit in certain quarters of the academic and media worlds, a counter movement has also appeared. In the public mind that alternative movement has become associated with President Michael D Higgins.

In a speech given shortly before the main centenary commemorations in Easter 2016 the President commented on the revisionist practice of questioning everything in the nationalist tradition. His main point was that such questioning had not been matched by a similar questioning of the triumphalism of the British Imperial tradition. The speech was publicly criticised by DUP Leader Arlene Foster. To avoid political controversy the President cancelled his participation in a planned commemorative event in Belfast. Higgins’s very public dissenting from the official narrative in matters historical did him no harm in the Presidential Election in November 2018 which he won with the largest majority in Irish electoral history.

As described in a recent book by Kevin O’Rourke, the 2016 centenary did not go to plan for the Government. Referring to the 75^th commemoration of the 1916 Rising in 1991, O’Rourke describes how very few people turned up because of fears that the event might be seen as an endorsement of the Republican War. But the 2016 centenary was different.

“Peace changed all that. To be sure the government announced rather solemnly that the centenary of the Rising would be commemorated rather than celebrated, but many Irish people decided that they would go ahead and celebrate it anyway. Hundreds of thousands of spectators crowded Dublin city centre to watch the largest military parade in the country’s history, and many others watched on TV.” (A Short History of Brexit, p. 150)

O’Rourke concludes by pointing out that neither the American nor French revolutions were non-violent and that the 1916 Rising was an event that eventually led to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic. In other words it is something to be proud of. These points are relevant to the GAA debate because they indicate how even before Brexit Irish public opinion was starting to swing away from the anti-nationalist agenda promoted so assiduously in previous decades.

But Brexit has been a game changer in terms of the Irish relationship with history. The anti-nationalist case was often presented as a growing up process in which the nation was shedding childish notions of its own ‘exceptionalism’, but in practice it was a movement towards a closer relationship with Britain, towards making Ireland a region of the UK in all but name. The thinkers leading anti-nationalism were unashamedly Anglophile to a man and woman. We were being asked to break the connection with our actual history in favour of a contrived British-Irish identity.

As the Brexit negotiations have progressed and previously hidden depths of the English commitment to its Imperial tradition have come to the surface, the mat has been pulled from under the Irish Anglophile position. In small ways we are being reminded in the daily unfolding of the Brexit story why Ireland separated from Britain in the first place.

Critics of Irish nationalism, inside the GAA and elsewhere, argue that the unionist viewpoint needs to be accommodated and that one way of doing that is to re-discover aspects of Irish history where Irish and British interests were united: for that purpose John Redmond’s mobilisation of Irish nationalists behind the British war effort in 1914 is highlighted. But what effect does such spinning have on unionist opinion? Will it undermine unionist opposition to a United Ireland? In modern life a community is what it says it is. The Ulster unionist community describes itself as having a British culture, and so it does. No amount of clever reconfiguring of the facts of history will alter that reality.

Another purpose behind the attempted revival of Redmondism is to make out that 1916 was an aberration and that the underlying wish of the Irish people was to remain within the British orbit. The problem there is that too much distortion of the historical record is required. The alternative tactic (still Government policy) of downgrading the study of history and de-politicising the story of the State’s foundation creates problems in other areas. If history is rendered incoherent, incoherence can infect the national mind in all sorts of unintended ways. Ultimately, commemorating 1916 by including positive references to Redmond’s leadership is akin to celebrating the Resistance to Nazi rule by lauding Hitler; it discredits the very idea of belief in a political cause.

It would be unfortunate if the GAA were to jettison its historical legacy at exactly the time when informed opinion in Ireland is rapidly moving towards a new appreciation of the importance of historical continuity and of ethos, in the philosophical sense that Aristotle used the word—a sense of security, of understanding where we have come from.

National sentiment and tolerance: a common misconception is that nationalism and tolerance occupy opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Historically that is not true in Ireland.

Looking at the development of the national movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth century it can be seen that it was marked by important divisions at different times. One such was a fierce and prolonged dispute in the years between the passing of the Act of Union in 1800 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 regarding the manner by which Catholic bishops should be appointed. On one side were liberal Catholics like the Rev Charles O’Connor and the poet and song writer, Thomas Moore, and on the other were polemicists like James Bernard Clinch and Dr Dromgoole who wanted the Irish bishops to be appointed directly by Rome. Without siding with either camp it can be said that the liberals in that instance had a more national orientation.

This identification between liberalism and nationalism was even more pronounced in the dispute between Daniel O’Connell and the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s. For Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy the important principle was that a national movement needed to be developed having as its overriding characteristic a bridging of the divide between Catholics and Protestants. For O’Connell the main aim was to defend Catholic interests in the most pragmatic and effective way possible.

A similar division is to be found in the electoral conflicts between the supporters of William O’Brien and Redmond’s Home Rule party in the two General Elections of 1910. In the first instance the O’Brienites stood as independents and in the second as a political party, the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL); in both contests they defeated the Home Rule Party in eight of the nine Parliamentary seats in Cork city and county. The AFIL was liberal in the sense that it opposed a tendency towards Catholic ascendency in the Home Rule Party and advocated Conciliation and Consent in dealings between nationalists and diverse Protestant interests (including Northern unionists) regarding Land Purchase and various schemes for administration devolution. Through its daily newspaper, the Cork Free Press, it identified strongly with the Thomas Davis strand of national politics.

A striking difference between the AFIL and its Redmondite opponents was that its representatives had greater confidence in the national cause. Leaders like Redmond and John Dillon vehemently opposed Land Purchase and administrative devolution on the grounds that achieving such reforms would weaken the demand for national independence. But the AFIL contended that allowing the tenants to become land owning farmers, and co-operating successfully in a conciliatory manner with the diverse elements of all-Ireland society would build confidence in the national ideal. Subsequent history showed this to have been a correct judgement. The counties where the AFIL had influence—Cork, Kerry, Tipperary, Limerick and Waterford—were all areas where the ethos of Irish nationality has deep roots, areas which are to this day strongholds of the GAA.

The opinion expressed here is biased in the sense that it is based on the writings of Brendan Clifford (of whom I am a long term associate) in books like The Veto Controversy (Athol Books 1985), the Cork Free Press in the Context of the Parnell Split (Aubane Historical Society, 1997) and Spotlights on Irish History (Aubane Historical Society, 1997). My thesis is that in Ireland a tendency to greater tolerance and generosity of spirit goes hand in hand with a secure sense of national identity. I am confident that it would withstand rigorous scholarly assessment.

But to return to the matter in hand, I don’t find it surprising that the individuals currently defending the national ethos of the GAA have both, in different circumstances, risked their reputations in defence of social tolerance. Despite the confusion of recent decades when everything traditional has been subjected to relentless questioning and criticism, I believe that Irish society continues to have a core. What is at issue in the debate started by Burns and Brolly is whether the GAA knows itself well enough to remain part of that core.

Dave Alvey