On Gaelic Games:That priceless footage of great GAA occasions still rests in private collections points to the the overwhelming need for a central archive

THERE WAS a neat coincidence last week when the GAA announced its principal media rights allocation within a day of the Irish Film Institute releasing a DVD featuring highlights of All-Ireland hurling finals from the 1950s.

A world of communications evolution separates the pioneering footage of distant matches from the battery of rights the GAA negotiates these days, from straightforward television to mobile phone and internet. Back then it was suggested to the National Film Institute (now the IFI) it might be an idea to film highlights of the All-Irelands.

When RTÉ began to broadcast, the price of access to an admittedly limited selection of fixtures was nominal. Now it costs the various interested parties millions to acquire the rights for three years.

One vital further distinction between then and now is the GAA retain copyright on any material to which they have assigned coverage rights, a move which will simplify their archive requirements in the years ahead.

Even coverage to which rights are not specifically assigned has been clarified in that club matches, outside of those major fixtures which TG4 broadcasts, are available to be covered for free as long as they are shown on GAA websites, mostly those belonging to clubs.

The GAA woke up to its cultural or heritage possibilities around the time of centenary year in 1984 when the volume of historical material unearthed strongly suggested the need for an archive and when the new stadium was planned the following decade provision for a museum was included in the blueprint.

Since then the project has become more than a simple presentation of exhibits and also functions as a learning resource. For instance, this weekend sees the 90th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and there will be lectures and special guided tours.

Last year’s 125th anniversary celebrations were marked by the GAA launching an oral history project, being conducted by Boston College, and there has been an upsurge in the activity of sports historians, which has greatly enhanced the previously threadbare range of literature placing the association into some sort of context.

It is ironic that as interest in the GAA and that historical context grows, in tandem with modern archiving, and is better serviced the question of older historical material arises too late to meet the developing appetite.

Leaving aside the whole formal arena of the duty to posterity there is the indisputable fact that nostalgia and heritage are a huge aspect of Gaelic games. Grounds and stadiums are named after great players of the past and photographs line clubhouse walls, preserving in an instant teams and individuals who as young men gave a sense of self-esteem to communities.

The past is preserved in oral expression through conversations and debates. Only yesterday at Croke Park, a promotional event to mark the centenary of one of Gaelic games’ most venerable competitions the Sigerson Cup, for football in third-level colleges, announced nominations for a Sigerson team of the century.

Frustratingly, the impetus to preserve the past never seemed to impinge on the GAA for decades. One illustration of this is that when this newspaper sponsored a sound booth in the museum to commemorate the Thunder and Lightning final there was nothing apart from a few stills photographs and a match programme extant.

The 1939 hurling final between Cork and Kilkenny was an extraordinary event, taking place under portentously black skies and in torrential rain on the day the second World War began but it exists now only in the imagination.

At the time British newsreel companies shot a few minutes’ footage of All-Ireland finals, from a cheerily uninformed perspective, and that constitutes the record for nearly all that survives of big matches prior to 1948.

In the absence of any film from 1939 and the fact sound recordings of Micheál O’Hehir’s commentaries were not comprehensively preserved meant the museum exhibit on the 1939 final was just a son et lumiere rendering of a thunderstorm and in the background, the low hum of a generic O’Hehir commentary.

GAA Gold, the collection launched by the IFI last week, gives an idea of what was lost to the GAA in those early years. The camera work is a bit chaotic, as one person struggles to keep up with play and at the same time load new film reels every two minutes but the films are fascinating portals into the past.

The IFI archive hasn’t a great deal of GAA-related footage beyond these specially commissioned highlights packages of All-Ireland finals but there are also a couple of fascinating items uncovered by sports and film historian Dr Seán Crosson of NUI Galway.

Hurling, a 1936 film made in the US and subtitled Ireland's Athletic Assault and Battery, was found in Wisconsin and shown with other hurling-related material at this summer's Kilkenny Arts Week.

This underlines the need for a central archive. There has been some discussion between the GAA and the IFI with a view to launching a project that would identify material held in overseas collections and gather all such footage together with the abundance of recent decades in the one location.

Although the rights to Gaelic games material throughout history is hopelessly fractured and divided between production companies and film studios, there is generally no bar to providing copies for cultural purposes as distinct from commercial applications.

In the current environment it’s not easy to find funding for such projects but assembling a comprehensive library of all moving images would be a monumental work for posterity.

Maybe the GAA was too busy in its earliest existence putting together the organisation that survives and thrives today but it would be a great service to hand over to future generations not only a vibrant present but also a living record of the past.

• THERE are still tickets available for Saturday's lecture on Bloody Sunday (adults €12, seniors and students €10) by historian and author Tim Pat Coogan and Dr William Murphy of DCU as well as for the early commemorative tour on Sunday at 12.30 (adults €12, seniors and students €10 and children €8). Both events are at Croke Park. Contact www.crokepark.ie/gaa-museum.

e-mail: smoran@irishtimes.com