EUROPE GOES GAA GAA
Travel and language prove no barriers as clubs set up on the continent at a rate of one per month
EVERY AUGUST, thousands of rock music fans descend on Oulu for the annual world air guitar championship. It’s a noteworthy claim to fame for Finland’s sixth largest city, which lies 150km south of the Arctic Circle. Now, they have another. Last month, Donegal native Cathaoir Sona chaired the first meeting of Europe’s latest GAA club, , the most northerly club in the e world.
During Oulu’s traditional Irish music festival last October, a short t film about Gaelic games was screened. It generated - such interest that it was decided to set up a GAA club, even if they y will need to travel more e than 500km for their local l derby against Helsinki.
The recent Gaelic football - exhibition game at t half-time in Seville’s La a Liga clash with Granada a provided an illustration as s to how Gaelic games are thriving throughout Europe. From northern Scandinavia to southern Spain, it has spread into every corner of the continent.
‘There are great stories coming out of Europe all the time,’ says Brian Clerkin, a member of St Gallen GAA club l bi in Switzerland, and PRO of the European county board, the fastest-growing board within the Association.
In December 1999, when then-GAA president Joe McDonagh convened their first meeting in Amsterdam, only four clubs were present: Guernsey, The Hague, Paris and Brussels (while Luxembourg are the oldest GAA club on continental Europe, founded in 1978, they weren’t present until the second meeting).
By 2004, there were 18 clubs. However, there are now upwards of 70 and growing. ‘If the rate of exponential growth continues, we will be looking at a situation where we will have over 100 clubs within three years,’ says Clerkin. ‘Last year, we had a club a month setting up.’
While the GAA has now touched places like Oulu and Seville, the biggest clubs remain in areas which have always attracted Irish emigrants. ‘The biggest clubs are in Brussels, where 14,000 Irish people live, and Paris, with 9,000 Irish people. There are 16,000 Irish in the Netherlands, so clubs here are quite big,’ says Tony Bass, secretary of European GAA and member of The Hague club.
HOWEVER, it’s becoming increasingly common for GAA clubs to pop up in places with little or no connection to Ireland. Wenceslao García Zapata was on holiday in Dublin with his girlfriend in June 2010 when they decided to go to Croke Park for the Leinster SFC semi-final between Dublin and Meath.
‘I even bought a Dublin polo shirt,’ Zapata remembers. ‘Unfortunately, Meath scored five goals. But we didn’t care – the whole experience of watching the game in the stadium was amazing.’
When Zapata returned to his native A Coruna in Galicia, he wanted to play Gaelic football. ‘The closest team was Madrid Harps, which is over 600km away. So I decided to start a new club.’
With the help of a Wexford man living in the area, Seánie McEvoy, he set up A Coruna Fíllos de Breogán that autumn. Their first match was the following February against Madrid Harps. The club has been the launching pad for the sport in Galicia. A Coruna now include an Armenian, Chilean, American and Canadian within their playing ranks and compete against four other clubs in the region – all played, largely, by native Galicians. There are plans to develop another two.
‘The big thing in Galicia is the Celtic connection,’ Bass explains. ‘It’s the same in Brittany. They have started playing Gaelic games as a way to connect to their Celtic roots and establishing their Celtic identity.’
Last year, Galicia met Brittany in the first Gaelic football match played between two national representative sides. In the French region, the sport is included in the BAC curriculum as part of Physical Education and, last September, in the Breton seaside town of Dinard, over 1,800 children from 45 different schools took part in a GAA youth camp.
It was run in conjunction with the Leinster council (the links between Europe and Leinster are to be consolidated further with the European Gaelic football champions likely to enter the Leinster junior club championship from next season).
In Spain, like France, Gaelic games are being used in education. ‘Spanish parents use it to develop their children’s language skills,’ Clerkin explains. ‘Last year in Valencia, their club had an under-age blitz with 80 kids involved, and only two were native English speakers – but the rest of the players all communicated through English during the game.’
Siret Surva, a native of Tallin, Estonia, took up Gaelic football when she worked in Pamplona. When she returned home from Spain in 2011, she decided to establish the Baltic’s first GAA club.
‘It started off as an email and an ad on university noticeboards, asking people to try a new sport. We had about 12 interested within a few months,’ Surva recalls. ‘And they were all girls – so we were the first GAA club to set up firstly as a ladies football team.’
Within 18 months, the club has grown to include 40 members – with both male and female teams, and they even play in the Scandinavian league. It may be becoming a trend for non-Irish people to establish GAA clubs on the continent but they now have a support structure to tap into. When three Swiss students – Timo Powling, Matthias Plattner and Ken Tschudin – founded their own hurling club in Zurich in 2002, they did it almost on their own.
The trio had spent a year in Ireland as part of a European exchange programme and fell in love with hurling. When they went home, they established a hurling team in Zurich, with the help of John White, a Laois man who was resident in the city. They have subsequently become the most successful hurling team on the continent – winning three European titles.
Franz Hoeritzaeur’s story illustrates how the game of hurling has developed in Switzerland. When work took the Zurich native to Newry, he went on to play for Ballycran in Down.
With a number of hurling clubs in Switzerland, allied to the growing number in Italy, the two countries have joined in one of a number of regional leagues around Europe. Poznan are keen to set up a GAA club to bank the goodwill generated by Ireland supporters at Euro 2012 and they will join Warsaw, Prague and Budapest in an Eastern European league.
With the number of matches – and leagues – growing each year, the European board has also started training its own referees and coaches. In terms of being self sufficient, it is an important next step to take, according to Bass. ‘There were a few occasions when we had
Natives in Galicia and Brittany are playing as a way to connect with their Celtic roots
to bring match officials from Ireland, which is good too because it helped us to evaluate how our referees were doing,’ says the secreatry who has held the position since 2004.
‘But, over Christmas, four of our officers took a referee mentoring course, so we will now be able to train our own referees.’
They have other problems that no county board in Ireland has to contend with. ‘There are over 20 languages within our county board, if you include regional languages,’ Bass explains. ‘The playing rules have been translated into seven different languages, at present.’
The problems of geographical distance are countered by conducting official business – county board meetings and CCCC hearings – over Skype. Their annual convention will be held at Croke Park later this month and it may be time for Europe to draw up a strategic plan to mark the occasion.
‘We have to sit down, strategize and develop a five to 10-year plan of where we want to go forward,’ says Bass. One of the key developments for the GAA in Europe is to get Olympic recognition for the sport as it will open a whole raft of funding and facilities for the games on the continent.
‘A sporting organisation needs to be in 70 countries before there is IOC recognition, the GAA is already in about 45, so that’s the next step,’ says Bass. Given the GAA’s reach is now from northern Scandinavia to the Canary Islands, it only seems logical that the Association be recognised on a global basis.