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Celebrate, the party's not over til the camogie keeper sings!

Yes, it’s just over two weeks now until the actual anniversary of the founding of the GAA in Lizzie Hayes Hotel 125 years ago. At three o’clock. In the afternoon. In the billiard room. 1 November 1884. We’ve had to live with the consequences ever since.

Well let’s just put it this way, imagine life in ireland today if there was no GAA? Imagine how all those fellas that could have been referees would feel without that extra wee bit of flak they get. Imagine the saving on brown paper bads for bungin’ club managers. Imagine the swathes of land that could be used for herding cows or sheep or playing foreign games. Imagine no Sunday Game. Imagine no Pat Spillane (God just imagine it. . .). Imagine no Joe Brolly. No Underdogs. No trips to Croker every summer. Imagine no Croker at all. No Clones, no Thurles. No Hill 16. No Puke football. No DJ Carey. No Donal Óg Cusack (we hear the Late Late Show in the next week or two will be worth the watching. . .). No Sean Óg, no Frank Murphy. No GPA, no One True Belief, no pay for play, no DRA.

Just imagine. . . what would you do on a summer’s evening. What would the children do. Imagine not pacing up and down the sideline, imagine no shite talking in the pub. Imagine no All Stars, no Camogie, no ladies football, no shirt tugging. No replica jerseys, not hats, flags and headbands and definitely no last few choc ices. No tay and sandwiches, no dodgy burgers and warm coke.

No Paddy Heaney, no Tom Humphries, no Kieran Shannon, no Enday McEvoy. No Des Cahill, no Evanne Ní Chuilinn, no Joanne Cantwell, no Marty Morrissey (every cloud has a silver lining!!). No Ger Loughnane for chrissakes. Do you think Cusack and the lads had any idea what they started?

“At a well attended meeting which was held in Miss Hayes’s Commercial Hotel in Thurles last Saturday, a Gaelic Association for the preservation and cultivation of National pastimes was formed”.

“The proceedings in Hayes Hotel were brief. Davin took the chair, and in a brief speech called for a body to draft rules to help revise Irish games and to open athletics to the man in the street. Cusack’s long speech criticised the national press for boycotting Irish sports, put forward the idea of a national athletic festival on the lines of the old Tailteann Games, and referred to over sixty letters of support he had received.”

So wherever you are, mark the day with a free t-shirt, courtesy of Squareball,on all orders over €25. Cusack would have expected no less.