IT IS ONE of the early curiosities of the GAA that it became a pillar of Irish life without commanding a larger place in Irish poetry.
WB Yeats spent a lot of time invoking the mythic, muscular figure of Cu Chulainn as an avatar for an independent, traditional Irish heroism, but didn’t dwell on his hurl-twirling and his hound-choking.
James Joyce, meanwhile, had no time for heroes and so hated Yeats and others’ invoking of Cu Chulainn and ancient Irish myth, along with contemporary nationalism and its ardours, seeing it as far too narrow a world-view and largely still expressed in terms dictated by the Empire.
He did pay the GAA unfortunate attention though, by casting Michael Cusack as “the citizen” in Ulysses, who sits at a bar with his dog, growing cantankerous to the point of hurling anti-semitic abuse and a biscuit tin at Leopold Bloom.
In his book Over the Bar, Brendán O hEithir would later lament the lack of writing on Cusack that had survived into the 1980s, and by including Cusack in Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and twice in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce had paid the GAA’s founder more attention than the GAA ever did.
O hEithir’s book also records a fabulously incongruous meeting involving noted cricket fan, Samuel Beckett, who was walking around Paris with Brendan Behan.
A couple of Irish priests recognised Beckett on the street, and one rushed up and asked him if he went home often.
“‘Rarely, but I have been invited to Dublin in September.
‘”September? What time in September?’
“The middle of the month.
“Ah, not so bad. You’ll miss the hurling, but you’ll be there for the football.”
By the stage that Beckett was being hassled by priests on Parisien streets, however, the GAA was finding its way into the work of Irish poets.
Patrick Kavanagh was, like Albert Camus before him, a goalkeeper, although of less glory and mystique: the story goes that he was in goals for Inniskeen Rovers against Latton in Carrickmacross in the 1931 Monaghan County final, when the pitch was invaded by a few zealous supporters.
In the 15 minutes or so it took them to clear off, Kavanagh ditched his post for an ice-cream, and by the time he returned Latton had scored a goal.
Kavanagh didn’t just make his Iliad from such local rows: he made a short essay too, “Gut Yer Man.” It spoke of his time as his club’s captain, secretary, and treasurer.
In the end they got rid of me, but it was a job. The man responsible for my deposition was a huge fellow, a blacksmith, a sort of Hindenburg, whose word carried weight. He was a great master of the cliche, but sometimes he broke into originality, as the time we were going for the county final and he wouldn’t let us touch a ball for a week previous as he wanted us to be ‘ball hungry’.
“Ball hungry as we may have been, we lost the match, and I was blamed, for I was ‘in the sticks’ and let the ball roll through my legs. The crowd roared in anguish. ‘Go home and put an apron on you’. And various other unfriendly remarks were made such as ‘Me oul’ mother would make a better goalie.’
“Somebody has said that no man can adequately describe Irish life who ignores the Gaelic Athletic Association, which is true in a way, for football runs women a hard race as a topic of conversation.”
Kavanagh also wrote a poem titled “Camogie Match”, featuring the line, “A shout from the sideline: Mark your man, Kathleen Cody.”
That poem can be found in a glorious collection titled Everything To Play For, a collection of 99 poems about sport edited by John McAuliffe.
Reading through them, it was perhaps over-eager to expect the GAA to instantly emerge in Irish poetry: it needed time to become an emblem of a warm past.
Consider Enda Wyley’s memories in “On My Father’s Birthday”, and the “chase after the sliotar your hurley gives to those holiday waves”, or “The One-Armed Crucifixion”, by Paul Durcan:
…How many thousands of times, old man,
Did you strike a high ball for your young son
To crouch, to dart, to leap,
To pluck the ball one-handed out of the climbing air?
Or “The Point”, by Seamus Heaney.
Those were the days-
booting a leather football
truer and farther
than you ever expected!
It went rattling
hard and fast
over daisies and benweeds,
it thumped
but it sang too,
a kind of dry, ringing
foreclosure of sound.
Football is not solely dealt with as a signifier of innocent days. Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s “Munster Football Final 1924″ recalls a game that led to a brief cessation in the ugly hostilities of the Civil War.
“The Munster Final in the Gaelic Grounds:/ There’s something more important here than war./ John Joe Sheehy, centre forward, republican/ Con Brosnan, Free State captain, centre-field; For what they love, they both put down a gun.”
In “The Madness of Football”, meanwhile, Brendan Kennelly is much more ambivalent about the sport, the country, and the intersection therein.
Beautiful country, driven-out people -
Yakuntya, yahoorya, yabollocksya,
And the boys and girls studying
For jobs in another country:
Beautiful country, driven-out people -
I remember Mad Sweeney,
District Inspector Mad Sweeney, to be exact
Issuing guns in the Phoenix Park,
And telling the RIC men
To open fire on the crowds in Croke Park.
The GAA also needed its time to develop its own mythic figure: Christy Ring.
Bryan McMahon writes “A Song for Christy Ring”, while Theo Dorgan remembers his powers fading as “he fought each autumn match through a fog of glories already legend”; doing what Yeats didn’t have the chance to do by likening him to Cu Chulainn.
Billy Ramsell, meanwhile, dedicates “Lament for Christy Ring” to his father, and writes evocatively.
Improbable balance
of ball on broad bas,
on his stick of ashy liquidity
that’s rippling, eel-flexible, alive.
And now his body it is liquid too,
an impressionist version of itself
as he slights the wall of three defenders,
pours himself through some improbable gap
and on the other side re-solidifies.
He swerves, ducks his shoulder, elegantly jerks.
And what gap now between thought and act,
his spirit and firmware fusing?
History might only be written by the winners, but happily, everyone eventually gets a claim to the poetry.
This piece was written to mark National Poetry Day. For more details, head to poetryday.ie.
