ABSTRACT
In an increasingly globalized sporting world, indigenous sports have become ever more marginalized as they fail to compete successfully with international codes for both players and spectators. The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) stands apart as one of a small number of exceptions, which has maintained and even increased in popularity and reach. The oftcited explanation for this success is that the GAA is, and always has been, more than simply a sporting organization. Established in 1884, both as part of the nineteenth century cultural nationalism movement and the Victorian sporting revolution, the GAA was initially founded to preserve and cultivate Irish national pastimes. The Association spread rapidly across Ireland and today is widely reckoned as the largest amateur sporting organization in the world with 1,616 clubs in Ireland and another 398 across the globe (Duffy 2015: 78-9). From these local clubs the GAA expands upwards and outwards to a sporting body with an increasingly international profile, and yet, it remains a grassroots-driven, volunteer-led sporting organization. The association’s two main sports are the men’s sports of hurling and Gaelic football. Ladies Gaelic football and camogie (an adapted form of hurling for women) have their own separate organizations, but fall under the broad umbrella of Gaelic games, as do handball and rounders. The GAA has carved the island of Ireland into a network of club territories, based largely around the Roman Catholic parish network, ensuring the presence of the GAA in every community. The resultant clubs form the grassroots base unit of the GAA, grounded in specific geographic territories. Each club is affiliated with a county board, which is answerable to a provincial council, and the overall structure is managed at an all-Ireland level by a central council and a management committee. The administrative and sporting home of the GAA is Croke Park in Dublin, the largest sports stadium in Ireland and the third largest in Europe. The association’s competitions pit territories against territories at club, county, and provincial
levels. Spectator interest in the games is high with over 1.5 million supporters attending inter-county games in 2014. In addition to capacity attendance in Croke Park (82,300), the 2015 All-Ireland football and hurling finals recorded peak viewership figures on Irish television channel RTÉ with 1.08 million and 919,000 respectively (Duffy 2015: 3; RTÉ Press Centre 2015). In his seminal work, John Bale (2003: 14) discusses the ability of sport to “bind people to place through ascription,” noting that it can become a medium for collective identification. Throughout its history, the GAA’s commitment to preserving and promoting Irish culture and strengthening national identity has remained a strong facet of the association, as indicated by its explicitly nationalist purpose statement: “The Association is 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” (GAA 2015: 5). However, unlike many other sporting organizations that promote national ideals through international competition, the GAA’s commitment to identity construction has been internally focused. From its inception the GAA promoted participation in the organization as an expression of nationalism, a way for members to participate in a tangible national community. Furthermore, as both a sporting and nationalist organization, the GAA has been closely entwined with Irish politics since the association’s inception as an anti-colonial force. Despite the relatively recent emergence of academic research on sports organizations in Ireland, a number of studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives from history to political science, sociology to sports science, have examined the political elements of the GAA. These can be loosely categorized as having a focus variously on the role of the GAA in the late nineteenth century cultural nationalism movement (e.g., Garnham 2004; Rouse 1993), the fight for Irish freedom (e.g., Mandle 1987; Murphy 2009), in the contested spaces of Northern Ireland (e.g., Bairner 2003; Hassan 2003, 2005a, 2005b; Sugden and Bairner 1993), and as a nationalist identity marker in the aftermath of independence (e.g., Cronin 1998; Moore 2012). While much of this work covers core geographic themes, geographers have been almost entirely absent from these studies (for exceptions, see Nolan 2005; Storey 2012; Whelan 1993). Another significant absence from the extant work has been any sustained critical engagement with the nonpolitical, cultural, and social aspects of the GAA in modern Ireland (but see Conner, Chapter 13 this volume; Cronin et al. 2009, 2011; Ó Tuathaigh 2009). This chapter addresses some of these gaps by critically interrogating the role of the GAA in identity creation and evolution in modern Ireland from a geographical perspective. In doing so, I intend to expand debates over the GAA’s role in identity formation beyond straightforward historical narratives of national identity to how the modern GAA
has actively sought to foster a variety of socially and culturally based Irish identities. An expanded approach, I argue, requires us to examine the contested and conflicted geographies of power that emerge as attempts are made to maintain a nationalist identity in the context of a post-conflict, modern, politically divided Ireland. This chapter offers just one of a myriad ways that the GAA might be critically engaged by sport geographers, but hopefully lays the groundwork for others to follow different trajectories – both in Ireland and globally – to provide a fuller picture of the geographies that emerge when sporting associations combine the organization of their games with explicitly stated cultural and political aspirations.
