Keith Dugganfinds the GAA in celebratory mood as the association's founding father gets a permanent salute
The Cusack house was never as busy. With a pleasant turf fire burning and camera bulbs lighting the clean, sparsely furnished Famine-era stone cottage, the home of the original GAA man looked downright cosy.
For well over a century, this plainest of Co Clare dwellings, built in a secluded hollow in the remote, epic sweep of the Burren, has served as a spiritual home of Ireland's dominant sporting and cultural organisation.
Yesterday, on the 100th anniversary of his death, the GAA's founding father Michael Cusack was given the full brass and unveiling treatment by the association. Throughout that century, the famous full-length photograph of Cusack showing a forceful, physical man with a luxuriant beard and a fine stick of hawthorn was forbidding and radical enough to perhaps warn people off celebrating him too much.
Although his place in the GAA pantheon was secure, for many people Cusack remained a shadowy, even strange figure and not many people knew that much about him.
The opening of the Michael Cusack Centre, at a cost of €1 million, changes all that. Through the years when Cusack's childhood home fell into serious disrepair, the man from Carron had his devotees and yesterday's gathering on a bitterly cold and showery morning was the fruition of many years of work and campaigning.
Martin O'Loghlen, chairman of the local development company, spearheaded the project and Cusack's influence and importance was highlighted and repeated by men like Br SeáMcNamara over years when not many were interested in hearing.
Pat O'Donnell, one of those "doers" who drives the association in Clare, threw his weight behind the project. And from June of this year, when GAA president Nickey Brennan performed the "turning of the sod" ceremony and yesterday, there was a burst of Cusack-like industry and energy to ensure that the visitor centre, dug into the Burren rock and presiding over the low-lying cottage, would be polished and open in time to mark the centenary of Cusack's death.
"I think it is probably true that we didn't know an awful lot about Cusack down the years," reflected Brennan as he stood outside the front door of the cottage. "I suppose I have taken an interest in learning about him since this project began. And this centre is a great addition to Clare and a fitting tribute to a man who had this fantastic vision. And when you look at the movement of the GAA, regardless of what you think about it, it is so much part of Irish life that it cannot be ignored."
Perhaps the rebirth of this lonesome cottage in the Burren best represents the vast strides the GAA has taken in recent years. In his address, Brennan noted that director general Liam Mulvihill, had recently celebrated 25 years of service to the GAA and rightly said that his "imprints were on everything good that had happened in the association in that time".
Mulvihill was in Carron for the association's centenary celebration in 1984, when a group of schoolboys ran a torch from Ennis.
"And I picked it up and crossed the doorway here with it," recalled then president Paddy Buggy, standing with Dr Mick Loftus, who succeeded him as president in the mid 1980s. "But I cannot believe the change here, from the stonework on the road up to this magnificent centre. We planted those ash trees there, one for each of the 32 counties."
As Mulvihill remarked, humble as that 1984 commemoration seems now, it was thought of as ambitious at the time. Back then, the notion of a million-pound centre would have been regarded as fantastical. "To put it in context, we redeveloped the Hill 16 at a cost of around one million punt then. And it took the association five years to repay it."
It was a slower, smaller and less confident GAA then. As Ger Loughnane put it, Michael Cusack was probably "an eccentric" and perhaps it has taken 100 years for the GAA to become bold enough to fully honour and embrace the personality as well as the visionary.
"What impressed me most was his tactical approach," said Loughnane. "It was not ad hoc, it was a calculated approach. He brought in the three biggest forces as patrons. So he had Parnell, Davitt and Dr Croke onside. And how could it fail? It went on really well for two years. And then in typical GAA fashion, there was a split. He was a hero for one year and then he was demonised after a few years. And a lot of us can identify with that," he said to howls of approval.
It was, in tone, a celebratory day, with recitations and a haunting rendition of the Lament for Tommy Daly performed by local singer Emer Arkins. But as he spoke, Loughnane gestured to the cottage below: "Picture it. Picture this landscape in 1847."
And, of course, it is hard for the human mind to cast itself that far back in time. But in the Burren, 150 years is nothing and apart from the long line of sleek, powerful cars parked on the corkscrew lane, the place could not have changed at all from Cusack's boyhood. If, as Br McDermott declared, Cusack was "the busiest man in Dublin" in the late 19th century, then Nickey Brennan can't be far behind him in terms of industry.
As he walked away from the Cusack house, Brennan said that his last engagement of the day would involve the enjoyable spectacle of a Kilkenny inter-firms hurling match played under lights. In a way, that was all we needed to know about the journey Gaelic games have taken from Cusack's darkling country home to the bright electric hot spots of today.
