The involvement of such a high-profile Gaelic games personality as Jim Gavin in the race for the Áras underlines how infrequently the GAA has been a significant factor in the careers of past presidents.
Gavin’s life as a public servant in both the armed forces and aviation sector has been combined with civic involvement.
Between chairing Dublin’s North East Inner City programme implementation board and the Citizen’s Assembly on a directly elected mayor for the city, he has decent credentials for a run at elected office.
How he fares in the bear pit of securing the Fianna Fáil nomination is one thing, and if successful, the circumstances of having his life forensically scrutinised will be another matter. But he has clearly prepared for this and will have detailed plans to take it on one step farther.
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At Oireachtas and government level, there has never been any shortage of GAA-gene pool politicians, especially in Fianna Fáil. Current Taoiseach Micheál Martin is a committed Nemo Rangers supporter.
His predecessor Brian Cowen played football for Offaly. The exemplar of the connection is Jack Lynch, winner of six successive All-Ireland medals and a lifelong supporter of Gaelic games.
Given the strength of that connection, the broader question of why the GAA has been so sparsely represented in the Phoenix Park comes into focus in the week of Éamon De Valera’s 50th anniversary.
His assertion that hurling and rugby were the games most suited to the Irish temperament is well known and this newspaper had a role in Dev’s most famous, or notorious, statement about Gaelic games, made just two years before he became president.
Speaking at the southern branch of the Blackrock Past Pupils’ Union annual dinner, held at Shannon Airport in April 1957, he regretted that hurling was no longer played in the school.
There was also a lament that he had felt unable to attend a rugby match since 1913 because he didn’t “want it raised as a political matter and having rows kicked up about it but I will not deny that I am a keen listener to rugby commentaries”.
An Irish Times reporter was on hand to detail the following controversial statement.
“For Irishmen there is no football game that could equal rugby and if all our young men played rugby,” he said, “we would not only beat England and Wales, but France and the whole lot of them together.”
It was hardly surprising that in the one county guaranteed to have a view on what football game was paramount, the then-taoiseach’s views came under scrutiny.
At a meeting in Tralee on May 11th, Kerry county board squabbled over whether De Valera’s comments were or were not “worthy of discussion”. County chair FJ Sheehy said that he was afraid that “the taoiseach was letting too many statements go by the board”.
James Barrett, of the well-known Tralee family, said that the taoiseach was being taken out of context and had issued a denial and clarified his original statement to the effect that “Irishmen in international rugby would have made a name for themselves but that hurling was their game”.
The chair wasn’t convinced, saying that if the original report had been correct, it was “an outlandish statement”.
JJ Sheehy, the 1920s All-Ireland winner and well-known republican, was reported as saying that it was “not the games they were comparing but the things for which they stood. The GAA fighting for the freedom of the country, the language, the games and everything distinctive of Irish nationalism”.
In the end, the board decided against issuing a statement by 13 votes to eight. In a postscript, the editor of The Irish Times said the paper was satisfied that their reporter’s version of the original speech was correct.
De Valera was still a fixture at All-Ireland finals during his presidency.
He was never a member of the GAA, though. This was significant during the association’s most notorious interaction with the presidency during the very first term of office of Douglas Hyde.
In November 1938, Hyde together with taoiseach De Valera, attended an Ireland-Poland soccer match at Dalymount Park. The president was also patron of the GAA and his presence at the international was a breach of the then operative ban on foreign games.
The GAA could do nothing about De Valera’s attendance, as he wasn’t a member but Hyde was removed as patron of the association.
[ Jim Gavin profile: Is the former Dublin GAA manager a good fit for president?Opens in new window ]
It is ironic that the most successful of the movements for cultural independence that took root at the end of the 19th century, was the sporting one – the GAA – but despite its local community base, it has had limited success in providing candidates for the presidency.
Perhaps the underlying exclusiveness of the association for many years – it’s little more than 50 years since the ban was abolished and even less time since the prohibitions on British security force membership and the use of GAA grounds by other sports, followed it – impacted at a broader level.
It is true that a recent president Mary McAleese and her husband Martin, former Antrim player and Sigerson Cup winner with Queen’s, are very much from that background and the former president is currently grappling with the knotty challenge of integrating the women’s and men’s Gaelic games associations. But McAleese’s background was as a lawyer with political connections to Fianna Fáil when initially elected in 1997.
Given that a successful presidential term can make it harder to get out of the Áras than into it, whoever wins in October might well be in office until 2039, taking it beyond the centenary of the presidency, which was originally devised in the 1937 Constitution.
Has the time come for a successful candidate whose primary profile arises from Gaelic games?
sean.moran@irishtimes.com
