A chara, - Kieran Fagan's Irishman's Diary of February 24th misrepresents Michael Cusack even more than the apparent depiction of him as "The Citizen" in Ulysses. In the 22 years from the GAA's foundation to his death, there is no evidence to suggest that Cusack retained any sympathy for rugby, let alone that he would have been "roaring" in support at Croke Park.
The fact that Cusack played rugby for a brief period is significant only insofar as it was something he turned away from. It was largely out of revulsion for the elitist and anglophile atmosphere of organised sport in Dublin, particularly in athletics - "I soon realised that my colleagues were viciously West British," he wrote - that Cusack was inspired to form the GAA to provide a sporting outlet for the nationalist working classes. He identified the main opponents to his founding the GAA as "the Pharisees and Anglomaniacs whose incorrigible idiocy constantly manifests itself in an insane desire to show that they owe some sort of allegiance to England".
After his unceremonious ousting as GAA secretary in 1886, Cusack was very resentful of what he alleged was a take-over of the central council. Given the snub he received from the association he founded, many other men might have walked away altogether or even, out of vengeance, become an official of a rival sporting organisation. Yet throughout the last 20 years of his life, Cusack remained utterly loyal to "Gaelic" sports and athletics. While holding no senior rank in the association, he continued to promote hurling relentlessly in Dublin, and on visits to Scotland, Belfast and various other towns.
Cusack's main issue with regard to the use of sports grounds was that sections of the Phoenix Park were specially enclosed for polo and cricket - another sport from which he had turned away. In 1887 he declared that the increasing numbers of players in the park on Sundays represented a victory for "democratic Christian socialism".
His attitude towards sports of English origin appeared only to harden, meanwhile. He condemned the IRFU's "insufferably offensive" policies towards the labouring classes, pointing to its refusal to accept the affiliation cheque of the Cork drapers' assistants. He later accused the MPs who acted as patrons of London Irish Rugby Club of "further anglicising the Irish in that city". He also referred to the "Orange Catholics" involved in soccer in Dublin (1896).
Moreover, pace your columnist's insinuation that Cusack "saw no boundaries" in sport and opposed the GAA's ban on certain named sports, he was actually a vocal supporter of the reintroduction and strengthening of this ban in the early 1900s. Practically all leading sports organisations at that time had bans of one form or another, in order to gain the primary sporting allegiance of their members. Hence it was quite natural that Cusack, having experienced the restrictions on membership in other sports, including rugby, supported similar rules in the GAA for its advancement.
This does not mean, however, that he was the bigot that later commentators have tried to suggest. He was not an advocate of the ban on RIC members, and he seemed virtually alone in his efforts to attract northern Protestants into the GAA. He was undoubtedly a man of many faults, as seen in his frequent use of invective and constant entrenchment in arguments, but he cannot be pigeonholed, and the historical facts of his life should not be rewritten.- Is mise,
DÓNAL MAC AN AILÍN, Roinn na Stáire, Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh.
Madam, - Kieran Fagan's Irishman's Diary paid well-deserved tribute to the sporting breadth of vision of GAA founder Michael Cusack (February 24). His column has only one small, but not unimportant, blemish. He writes: "James Joyce makes him [ Cusack] a figure of fun as "The Citizen" in Ulysses. . . Bloom remarked that Christ was a Jew and this made The Citizen apoplectic. . . ".
In Micheál Cíosóig (1982), Cusack's Irish-language biographer Liam P. Ó Caithnia insisted that there was nothing anti-Semitic to be found in Cusack's make-up. Furthermore, in a most impressive scholarly article in the Crane Bag, written to mark the Joyce centenary in 1982, the late Gerald Y. Goldberg, Cork's only Jewish Lord Mayor, argued no less trenchantly: "Those who regard Michael Cusack as the prototype of the character travel a road that leads to nowhere: 'The Citizen' is a composite reconstruction by Joyce of thoughts and sentiments expressed from time to time by Griffith and Gogarty, through their respective writings. The voice may be the voice of Cusack, but the hands and the heads and the thoughts are those of Griffith and Gogarty."
If I may sum up in Joyce-speak: Citizen Cusack was no Blooming anti-Semite. - Yours, etc,
MANUS O'RIORDAN, Finglas Road, Glasnevin, Dublin 11.