Lost Gaels: The untold stories of GAA members killed in the Troubles

What is most significant to me, and most obvious, is that this Relatives for Justice GAA legacy project is unique in two ways. Firstly, this book goes some way to filling the gap that exists in works exploring the GAA and the conflict in the north of Ireland, chiefly by recording how many members of the association were lost to the conflict. Whilst there have been many pieces of work exploring the topic, there has been no published work seeking to record the total number of members of the GAA killed in the conflict until now.

Secondly, and of far greater importance as far as I am concerned, is what this project has been able to provide to the families involved. The book is the focal point of a broader project seeking to record the impact of the conflict on the GAA. The chief purpose was to give bereaved families and friends of lost Gaels a space where they could celebrate the lives and stories of their lost loved ones in a way that has not happened before.

When meeting with the families, an almost unanimous feeling has come to light that the lasting legacies and memories of their loved ones have been wholly defined by the causes of their deaths. There could be an entirely different book written on the reasons for this, but chief among those reasons are a shameful legacy of failing to deal with the past and also a tendency in the media to focus on the sensational when examining the conflict, often forgetting that the horrific, shocking and audience-grabbing incidents leave an everlasting legacy of bereavement in their wake that requires care, thought and empathy.

In my experience, bereaved victims of the conflict have been conditioned, to an extent, to accept that the only story they have worth telling, or certainly the only one that they have felt anyone wants to listen to, is the story of their trauma.

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While these experiences are vitally important and must be captured, there also needs to be dedicated space for celebrating the lives lived before traumatic events took place. For most families involved in this project, this is the first time they have been able to share the everyday stories of their loved ones, the memories of growing up, of family and of sporting life. There were many occasions over the course of the interviewing process where the questions asked sparked new conversations amongst family members and where forgotten stories were rediscovered, and I hope that this process of recalling fond and dear memories of loved ones has been a somewhat cathartic experience for those involved.

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As Gaels, the love and passion we have for the GAA goes a long way in making up our own individual identities, and that love most often defines a lot of the ways we decide to live our lives. This book aims to bring those memories to the fore and thereby transform and broaden the lasting memory of those recorded in this book, so that he or she is no longer, solely, defined as ‘victim’, but as ‘person’ and Gael.

The story of the GAA reflects the story of Irish people

Another observation I would like to make is that, as obvious as it may seem from the outset, the GAA is a Goliath in Irish life and I agree with Patrick Kavanagh’s assessment that in any depiction of Irish life it is an organisation that can’t be ignored. I can think of no other institution that has a similar reach into the everyday lives of so many people.

This is no more clearly demonstrated than in the entries to this book, which reflect the powerful reach the GAA has into the many different lives of Irish people, and while it can also be broadly reflective of the power of sport in bringing people together, the entries to this book show that it is the specific, community-driven characteristics of the GAA that give the association such unrivalled status in Irish society.

At an individual level, those characteristics are reflected through the accounts of local clubs rallying around the bereaved family; in the small, local tournaments and cups competed for across the country in memory of lost Gaels; and in the names of clubs affected by the conflict.

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At a broader level, the entries to the book reflect the shared values of passion, service and commitment to club and county espoused by Gaels across the country. These shared, ubiquitous characteristics evident in the entries will allow unaffected Gaels to immediately see themselves and their clubs in these accounts, creating a unique connection between the reader and the person and family they are reading about.

This sense of the parochial in the Irish experience also leads me to an attached, but brief, observation from my interviews – that the Catholic Church was vital in fostering and developing Gaelic games during the conflict. The role of the clergy has always been widely recognised as being crucial in the development of the GAA across Ireland from the very foundation of the association, and in a large number of the entries you will read in this book you will learn that it was the local priest who gave people their first taste of Gaelic games.

Whilst the Catholic Church justly receives its share of criticism for some of the horrendous roles it has played in Irish society over the last century, during that same period there were also incredible persons of faith doing extraordinary work. Those working for the Church, in parishes across the north, were clearly dedicated to the preservation and promotion of our indigenous games, in spite of the very real threat that work presented to them.

Suffering on a large scale

There can be no doubt that the GAA and its membership suffered harm on a very large scale during the conflict. I make this observation as a means of giving, albeit limited, recognition to the many accounts of harm that I have heard during the interviewing process, accounts that I have not been able to record in this book and that are undeniably deserving of an entire book in and of themselves.

If you are a Gael who lived in the north during the conflict, you will undoubtedly relate to the following. In each interview I conducted, without exception, I was told anecdotes and accounts of the intimidation, harassment and violence endured over decades by people seeking to play and take part in the GAA in the north of Ireland.

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Whilst the entries to this book reflect these experiences, I want to draw specific attention to this subject and give some analysis to it. In conflict-related violence discourse, recent attention has been drawn to the different types of harm suffered by those who lived through conflict, and whether our definitions of what experiences constitute harm are appropriate. In other words, are there events and behaviours experienced during the conflict which, upon reflection, we would now regard as incidents of harm? Experiences which, at the time, we might have known deep down were wrong, but which nonetheless went unchecked and unacknowledged.

During the interviewing process for this book, the anecdotes of experiences such as being stopped and searched because a person was carrying a hurl or wearing a GAA jersey, having team buses stopped and kitbags emptied onto roadsides, experiences of routine harassment and intimidation of Gaels, would invariably be followed by a downplaying of the impact of that harassment because ‘it wasn’t as bad everything else that was going on’ or ‘that’s just the way it was’.

What is now most apparent to me, having interviewed members of the GAA across the island, is that Gaels living through the conflict in the north came to live with the expectation of being treated differently, and often violently, because they chose to enjoy the sport they loved

—  Peadar Thompson

At the heart of the issue here is an idea that harm can become normalised and downplayed during conflict, and this often occurs when the harm forms part of a person’s ‘every day’. These experiences are, however, harms, and that they form part of a person’s habitual experience is immaterial to that fact. Moreover, none of these experiences need to be sensationalised in order to constitute a harm.

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What is now most apparent to me, having interviewed members of the GAA across the island, is that Gaels living through the conflict in the north came to live with the expectation of being treated differently, and often violently, because they chose to enjoy the sport they loved. The danger of not recognising and challenging this fact, and the associated everyday harms, is that we risk the perpetuation of past, wrongful behaviour towards Gaels, and the attitudes which facilitated it, into the future.

It is a concern that some of those same attitudes towards the GAA persist within some elements of society today and, whilst no longer mainstream, those attitudes can have deleterious effects on the association. From motivating decisions regarding the allocation of public resources right through to the recent intimidation of clubs by extremists, those actions share the same dangerous attitudes towards Gaels. They are wrong, they lead to harm and they must not be normalised or tolerated in an equal society.

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I hope that the wonderful memories shared in Lost Gaels spark conversations and discussions about just how incredible the GAA can be. By doing that, and by speaking their names and telling their stories, we keep the memories of each lost Gael alive and ensure that they are no longer solely defined by the circumstances of their death, but by who they were as people and as Gaels.

Lost Gaels: Remembering the Members of the GAA Killed During the Conflict in Ireland by Peadar Thompson is published by Merrion Press, RRP £24.99

Relatives for Justice will be hosting the launch of the book in St Mary’s University College, Falls Road Belfast on Saturday November 16 at 11am