At the start of the 2011 British thriller Blitz, Jason Statham plays an unconventional London police officer who spots some car thieves outside his flat and goes out to confront them. He pauses only to pick up a hurley from his sideboard.
In the process of chastising them by what Rule 5.26 terms striking “either with force or causing injury”, he explains: “This, lads, is a hurley, used in the Irish game of hurling – a cross between hockey and murder.”
The scene closes part one of TG4’s fascinating upcoming two-part series, Iománaíocht Hollywood. The voiceover comments: “With its focus on hurling’s potential for violence, Blitz echoed the international depiction of Gaelic games since the early 1900s.”
The series brings together a wealth of footage and spins its narrative through the contributions of historians and film academics. Based on the 2019 book Gaelic Games on Film, by the University of Galway’s Dr Seán Crosson, it will be broadcast in September. Crosson also wrote and co-produced the series.
RM Block
There are roughly four strands to the subject:
• The earliest footage, which, for the most part, has not survived
• The overseas documentary and British newsreel years, frequently marked by Oirish caricaturing but also containing interesting material
• From the 1940s, when the GAA was anxious to project an image of skilful sports at the heart of national celebration
• A more questioning attitude towards the games, which are viewed as part of the state establishment as well as their use by filmmakers as a reference point.
The GAA is aware of its cultural status and has frequently been touchy about its image. With that in mind, it seems strange that it didn’t try, from an early stage, to take control of something as obvious as film. Here is a medium that provides promotional possibilities and archive potential.
Dr Crosson points out that there were reasons for this beyond negligence on the GAA’s part.
“There were clips that did exist but are no longer with us. The first record we have of the filming goes right back to 1901 that I found in databases. There may have been earlier ones.
“At first, the importance [of film] wasn’t widely realised. Apparently, even Charlie Chaplin referred to it as a fad initially, so nobody thought film would be the international phenomenon it became. On top of that, the film was made of cellulose nitrate, an incredibly unstable material.”
It was also very combustible, leading to the deaths of 48 people in Dromcollogher, Co Limerick, when a candle ignited the reels during the showing of a film.
It is estimated that around 75 per cent of film stock from those early years did not survive. Of the film that did survive, the most significant was footage from the 1914 All-Ireland football final between Kerry and Wexford, unearthed during the GAA’s centenary year in 1984 and first shown in the Louis Marcus documentary, Sunday after Sunday.
Shot by the Irish Animated Picture Company at the 1914 replay, 110 seconds survives. It is mostly footage of the pre-match scenes, including the teams posing for photographs. We see legendary Kerry captain Dick Fitzgerald chatting to the team mascot. It does, however, include a glimpse of match action.
A player flings the ball into play with one hand to execute a sideline restart by the rules of the time. The referee is Harry Boland, later a TD and friend of Michael Collins, who later took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and would die a few weeks before Collins in August, 1922.
Collins also features in newsreels of big matches in Croke Park. It is an abiding irony that much of the GAA’s footage from the 1920s and 1930s is courtesy of British newsreel companies, Pathé, Movietone and Gaumont-British, as there appear to be no surviving native records.
The scripted voiceovers are frequently patronising and pitched for comic effect. Counties are mispronounced. As a native of Drumgoon, Co Cavan, Crosson takes particular umbrage at the 1935 football final coverage of the All-Ireland between Kildare and Cav-in.
He said: “Apart from the kind of jarring, clipped voices we all associate with newsreels trying to describe Gaelic Games, there’s an inability to pronounce the names of counties correctly, or describing counties as clubs, or talking about the kick-off and having limited understanding of the players.
“Part of the commercial motivation, I think, was an awareness of large Irish audiences in London and Liverpool and Manchester and the potential that there’d be an interest in the All-Ireland final there.”
Going hand-in-hand with this coverage was the sports documentaries in the US, which showed ordinary, club matches in Irish communities as well as the tour dates of visiting All-Ireland champions. Crosson reckons that the only existing footage of Mick Mackey hurling is film of the 1934 All-Ireland champions, Limerick, playing an exhibition in America.
Mostly, though the tone of the commentaries is reflected in slapstick observations such as: “A crack player gets his skull cracked – that’s what comes from centuries of practice, wielding the shillelagh."
As Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh says of these blarney-isms, it’s not clear whether they are meant to be “heroic or bizarre or what audiences they are aimed at”.
There is broadly an emphasis on violence for comic effect. In the 1930s feature called Hurling, the game is described as “athletic manslaughter”.
By now, the GAA was so enraged that it asked the film censor to cut the snide remarks. It had to settle for the cinemas removing what they could of the offending voiceovers.
During the next decade, the association got proactive. General secretary at the time, Pádraig Ó Caoimh, had become interested in the power of the medium and was one of the original directors of the National Film Institute of Ireland (NFI) (the forerunner of the IFI) when it was established in 1945.
The 1947 All-Ireland football final ended up being played in the USA to commemorate the centenary of the Famine, but it led to a realisation that there was a big audience for Gaelic games highlights – the only way Irish audiences could watch any of the match.
Ó Caoimh saw this for himself back home. The 10-minute highlights package filmed by a New York production company played to huge crowds in cinemas around the country. This prompted him to facilitate access to All-Irelands so that the NFI could produce similar highlights films each year.
Later in the 1950s, taken over by Gael Linn, these All-Ireland highlights packages are fascinating pictures of contemporary Ireland and assisted by some serious expertise, according to Crossan.
He said: “Georg Fleischmann, the Austrian cinematographer, who was with the German Luftwaffe during the war, was shot down and interned, but decided to stay in Ireland after the war. He had also worked with Leni Riefenstahl on Olympia, so he brought that kind of knowledge of filming sport into those initial films.”
Hollywood Hurling focuses in on how church and state set down their respective pillars in these All-Ireland films. There are the same shots every year of political and episcopal leaders sitting in the Hogan Stand and the captains kneeling to kiss the ring of whatever bishop comes down to start the match.
“One of the most important aspects, for me, of looking back at film as a source is that. And the National Film Institute films, in particular, worked to normalise, to naturalise the prevailing power structures.”
Throughout all of this, Hollywood hadn’t lost interest – or its specific focus. John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon in 1957 caused familiar uproar when members of the local hurling team are seen being carried aloft on stretchers to the train after a match.
Closer to home, the 1958 British production, Rooney, featured then well-known film actor John Gregson as a Dublin binman, lining out for the county’s hurlers. It is the first feature film to have an All-Ireland final as a central part of its story.
The only thing less convincing than Gregson’s accent is his stickwork. Despite Trojan efforts by actual Dublin hurler Snitchy Ferguson to tutor the actor, they had little success. Remarkably, he did manage to include himself in the Kilkenny line-up for the pre-match parade in 1957.
Waterford had turned down the request, leaving Kilkenny to save the day and march with 16 players.
The postscript is even more remarkable. The players returned the next day and had to hang around for six hours until Gregson finally managed to score the winning point.
A couple of years previously, Three Kisses, an Oscar nominated short film centred on a young hurler called up to the Cork team who leveraged his celebrity for the eponymous embraces with a local camogie player. The film featured the great Cork team of earlier that decade and their trainer Jim Barry.
The backlash began in the 1960s with Peter Lennon’s fierce polemic The Rocky Road to Dublin. A journalist based in France, Lennon intended it to be provocative, a riposte to the comfortable assertions of his friends that Ireland had changed radically by the late 1960s.
The GAA appears in the twin imagery of Croke Park official Brendan Mac Lua defending the Ban with a kind of preposterous lucidity and a club match on the field. The monochrome film pans a meagre attendance against the backdrop of grey walls and barbed wire with some ugly pitch scuffles competing for attention.
His underlying question was: had Ireland become a lesson in what not to do with your independence once it had been achieved. In that context, the GAA is depicted as a pillar of the failed state.
The film was scandalously ignored apart from a lengthy screening in the IFC on Stephen’s Green, but re-released in 2005. It was the first Irish entry in the Cannes festival, selected as a Critics’ Choice.
More would follow in that vein, such as 1987’s Clash of the Ash, critiquing the GAA as the sporting wing of a conservative society.
There are also discussions of the GAA in historical films like Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) and Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006).
They apparently had great difficulty keeping it all to two episodes. No surprise, as the series is most rewarding viewing for all interested in the GAA, Irish film and society in general.
• Iománaíocht Hollywood: Cluichí Gaelacha ar Scannán (Hollywood Hurling: Gaelic Games on Film) is on TG4 on Thursday, September 4th and 11th, at 9.30pm. There will be two repeat showings of each, on September 5th and 7th as well as Seotember 12th and 14th.
• ‘Gaelic Games on Film: From silent films to Hollywood hurling, horror and the emergence of Irish cinema’ by Seán Crosson, has been reissued in a new paperback edition by Cork University Press for €25.
