1884-2024: The Mystery of Hayes’ Hotel and the Great GAA DNA Journey of John McKay

As the Gaelic Athletic Association has grown ever larger in Irish life, its moment of origin has been stencilled deeper in public consciousness. A change to the centrepiece of All-Ireland medals, about 15 years ago, reflected as much: out went ‘Eire’ in the Cló Gaelach, and in came the letters ‘GAA’ with the numbers 18 and 84 embossed on either side.

The birthdate is all the more memorable for its calendar significance. Once it was the Celtic feast of Samhain, the start of the winter season, and reputedly when portals opened to the otherworld. Then it became All Saints’ Day, a holy day of reflection on the saints and martyrs of Christian history. Michael Cusack, the force of nature who chose that day, knew there could be no better day to launch an organisation that sought to reach into the soul of the Irish nation and came to be an embodiment of the native spirit.

This Friday, November 1st, is the 140th birthday of the GAA. This might have been just another decade milestone. Due to some recent developments, though, the event has taken on more significance. Special events will be held in Thurles and Cork this weekend to mark the occasion, with some new information coming to light and an historic maiden visit by the descendants of a founder member who just happened to write perhaps the most famous article ever in this newspaper.

The Cork Examiner report, published on Monday November 3, 1884, remains the most-read contemporary account of the GAA’s formation.

This status owes to being the longest and most comprehensive description that any daily newspaper provided of transactions in the billiards room of Hayes’ Commercial and Family Hotel, Thurles, two days before. This report achieved a wider circulation a century later, in the 1980s, when the GAA included it in an education pack of historical documents. In more recent years, it has been readily accessed by many researchers using digital newspaper archives.

The detail and reliability of the account derive from the fact that its author, John McKay, was an active participant in the meeting. McKay worked as a reporter for the Examiner, though he was identified as a delegate of Cork Amateur Athletic Club at the meeting.

That Cork and Munster would be to the fore was symbolically crucial. Cusack, the prime mover in the affair, had written to Maurice Davin on August 26, 1884, that ‘The business must be worked from Munster. Suppose we held a meeting of delegates in some central place in Tipperary on the 1st of Nov. next. Don’t bother your head about Dublin. The place couldn’t be worse than it is. We’ll have to look to the provinces for men.’ 

The meeting opened with some words from Davin on the revival of old Irish games, before Cusack proposed a programme of athletic meetings and outlined letters of support that he had received from around the country. Archbishop Thomas Croke, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt were appointed as patrons, and the full name of the ‘Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes’ was formally adopted.

The election of officers began with Cusack nominating Davin for the role of President. In seconding this motion, McKay spoke with admiration for Davin as a renowned sportsman and enthusiasm for ‘the formation of a general athletic association for Ireland’, free from English governance.

Davin’s election was followed by the appointment of Cusack, McKay and John Wyse Power (a Waterford native, then based in Naas) as joint secretaries. No other decisions of note were taken, and the meeting closed.

Three other men were listed present by the Examiner and all other chronicles of the event: J. K. Bracken, a builder and stonemason from Templemore; Thomas St George McCarthy, District Inspector, Royal Irish Constabulary, in Templemore, and Bansha native; and Joseph P. Ryan, solicitor in Callan, originally from Carrick-on-Suir (as was Davin).

For most of 140 years, memorialisation of the founding fathers has focused on the pillars of Cusack and Davin. Their supreme role in initiating the association is recognised in the names of stands at Croke Park, albeit very belatedly for Davin; and they are the only two founder members profiled as such in the GAA Museum. McKay and Wyse Power also get a rare mention on lists of general secretaries and Ardstiúrthóirí, like one that you might see displayed on the wall of the Ardchomhairle foyer in headquarters, if you get a very good ticket. J. K. Bracken, who remained prominent in the GAA until 1894, was not forgotten, later having Templemore GAA club dedicated to his name.

The little fanfare given to the other two known attendees of 1/11/1884 was tacitly accepted as fair enough through the generations. Neither had any further part in the Gaelic association. Ryan emigrated to Canada, immersing himself in the business life of British Columbia, and died in Cranbrook. McCarthy remained an avid sportsman, as a player and official in rugby, cricket and soccer in several counties, but never took an active role in Gaelic games after that first meeting.

Another factor in overlooking the rest of the class of ’84 – beyond Cusack and Davin – was the once-popular Fenian tale of origin. This theory can be traced back to 1899, when Cusack, writing in the United Irishman, recalled a conversation with the Mayo athlete and Fenian P. W. Nally in the Phoenix Park some 20 years earlier, which he claimed inspired the idea of the GAA. From 1914, the radical journalist, Séamus Upton’ (or ‘Vigilant’), added to this narrative the claim that in 1883 the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Supreme Council appointed a five-man subcommittee with the aim of establishing a national athletic movement, and thus gave rise to the GAA. 

Cusack’s ambiguous relationship with the IRB, and the fact that two of its members, Bracken and Wyse Power, were at Thurles on 1/11/1884, lent succour to such notions. The naming of the Nally Stand at Croke Park in 1952 reflected the popularity of this theory then. It received a further airing in a biography of Harry Boland’s father Jim (who was Dublin County Board chairman at the time of his death in 1893), written by his grandson, Kevin Boland TD. Official GAA historian Marcus de Búrca was prompted to respond that ‘the further away we move from the 1880s, the more convincing it is becoming’. It warrants another day’s discussion, but for now it helps to explain why a Fenian who was absent from the first meeting was deemed more worthy of remembrance than some who did attend.

After the turn of the millennium, the outworkings of the peace process prompted some reappraisal of the commemorative approach to 1884. The deletion of Rule 21 led to the formation of PSNI Gaelic teams, and their contests against Garda sides for the Thomas St George McCarthy Cup. It became quite commonplace thereafter to hear remarks that McCarthy had been previously ‘airbrushed’ out of GAA histories as a policeman. Such comments were misplaced. ‘Airbrush’ is a loaded word, implying deliberate omission or deletion for political reasons. Yet, no annalist had ever purported to list all of the attendees at Hayes’ Hotel without including the constable.

Come 2009, a 125-years commemorative committee came together under the chairmanship of Jarlath Burns and focused on ensuring that the graves of the founder members were properly marked and maintained. The assiduous John Arnold of Bride Rovers in Cork drove these efforts, to positive effect. 

That was how I came to be contacted to find the mystery man of the seven definites from 1884, John McKay; his origins and burial place were unknown. When we discovered he lay in an unmarked grave at Kensal Green, London, a gravestone was promptly ordered on behalf of the GAA and formally unveiled in November of that year. A gravestone was also erected for Thomas St George McCarthy at Deansgrange Cemetery and presented with much ceremony.

These gestures were not only worthy and noble; they served as the precursor to the GAA’s installation of grave monuments to the Bloody Sunday dead of Croke Park in 1920. That said, the carving in stone of seven attendees of 1/11/1884 as equal before God, tended to create the impression – albeit inadvertent – that all should be commemorated similarly as seven joint founders of the GAA, above and beyond all others.

But were there just seven? Or could there have been as many as 13? And what, if anything, would it matter?

Let’s go back to primary sources from the Premier County.

Cusack’s report of the first meeting, in his United Ireland newspaper column, listed after the aforementioned septet, ‘etc, etc’. Was this an attempt to embellish a poor turnout of just seven men, as some have suggested? 

Against that, McKay, who was not prone to exaggerate, also put in his Examiner article, ‘&c.’ Probing deeper, one finds six more attendees listed in four other organs in the week after 1/11/1884: Charles Culhane, William Delahunty and Michael Cantwell of Thurles; William Foley of Carrick-on-Suir; John Butler of Moycarkey; and T. K. Dwyer of Littleton. All were named in the Tipperary Leader of November 7th, which provided by far the most detailed press report – and apparently the most balanced, quoting the widest range of speakers – of the meeting. 

The Tipperary Advocate of that week recounted essentially the same names, albeit with errata. And the Dublin-based Freeman’s Journal, in its brief news item of Monday November 3, and the Irish Sportsman of 8 November, each numbered a dozen-odd similar names. These are convincing sources, the Freeman being joint first report to print. Why would any have cause to lie or provide fake names? Whoever supplied these details had no inkling that the event would become pivotal in Irish history, and we would care about every last name 140 years later.

These other six men have been mentioned in some historical texts, but hardly at all by any writers outside Tipperary. Indeed the Tipp-centric nature of the discussion, albeit well conducted, has allowed these essential facts to evade the attention of general historians of the GAA. That should no longer be the case from hereon.

Liam Ó Donnchú’s authoritative tome on Thurles Sarsfield’s analyses the various sources, augments them with oral tradition, and leaves no doubt that this sextet were indeed present. Past president Séamus Ó Riain, in his biography of Maurice Davin, agrees that they were in Hayes’ Hotel on that famous day. His text makes a significant caveat, however. He claims that they were not in the meeting room, and thus there only seven founder members proper. He quotes from T. F. O’Sullivan’s book, Story of the GAA (1916), and states that this first historian of the association was surely correct as he knew several of the early officials well and researched his book thoroughly.

As arguments go, it’s scarcely the strongest. O’Sullivan was only 9 years old when the GAA was founded, and he wrote this book some thirty years later – a long time, during which memories faded and died. His chronological text clearly relies heavily on national newspapers; and he may not have had access to the Tipperary papers of 1884.

In trying to solve this puzzle, we should look at it anew through the lens of patronage and prestige. Might these explain why McCarthy and Ryan, despite doing seemingly nothing of note that day, were reported more prominently than Cantwell, Culhane et al? Positive publicity was a chief aim of Cusack and colleagues, and the class of one’s patrons and supporters really mattered then. The seven frontmen signified a spread of professions and geographical locations. Davin was an iconic sportsman of national repute. Cusack was a leading educator in Dublin, and he, McKay (in Cork) and Wyse Power (in Kildare) were journalists and members of what was then esteemed as a profession. Ryan was a solicitor, listed in reports as ‘Callan’, where he had an office; but tellingly, his Thurles office was not mentioned. J. K. Bracken was known as the owner of an established, thriving business.

McCarthy, as a district inspector for the RIC, might seem like an odd figure to boast about, against a backdrop of police-peasant tensions during the recent Land War. But Cusack, who had taught McCarthy at his academy, had another potential motive to put a ‘peeler’ in his front line. He had personally argued (with success) for the removal of the elitist English-origin ‘gentleman amateur’ rules that had barred policemen and others from Dublin athletics in the early 1880s. The very presence of a policemen could convey clearly to Cusack’s metropolitan nemeses that the GAA was going to be governed under Irish laws.

If we can see that Cusack & Co had a clear propaganda mission to show their strength, we can appreciate why the six ‘etc, etc’ men were not named in some reports. Each was from County Tipperary, and all but one from near Thurles. They were broadly from the tenant-farming class and none stood out as organisers who would take the association forward. 

That is not to demean them. T. K. Dwyer was the one-mile champion of Ireland in 1878, a huge laurel on his CV; but as his great-grandson Tadgh Dwyer – a sports historian himself – told me this week, family lore always had it that T. K. was there ‘as a courtesy to Davin’, a friend. He did not come to Hayes’ Hotel with thoughts of starting a recreational revolution. Of course, four of the seven frontmen were also from Tipperary, but their various business interests made them known beyond county and provincial boundaries; and they looked like go-ahead personalities on paper. It was for the same reason that Cusack highlighted nationwide letters of support. He did not want to have Dublin athletics grandees mocking – as they were prone to do – his new machine as a gather-up of loafers from about the Square in Thurles. Had these other six come from further afield, like Galway, the midlands or further north, it’s harder to imagine that Cusack and McKay would have glossed over them in their reports.

OVER THE YEARS, several other names have been thrown into the mix as attendees on that fabled day. Foremost of these has been Frank Maloney. Local folklore, once supported by Marcus be Búrca, posited that Maloney had been left out of the legion, perhaps with others, due to his IRB rank. Also, writing to the Nenagh News in April 1906, Cusack claimed boldly: ‘Four of the nine Irishmen who founded the GAA in Thurles were from Nenagh and Frank R. Maloney was one of them.’ 

The assertion was too emphatic. If no other account claims one of 7 (or 13) came from Nenagh, how could we suddenly get 4 of 9? Cusack’s epistle followed a letter from Maloney in November 1905, claiming that he was one of three Nenagh delegates at Thurles in November 1884. Upon closer scrutiny, both memories appear to have melded past events together. The late Nancy Murphy, author of a raft of excellent biographical articles about Tipperary pioneers, demonstrated that Maloney and three other Nenagh men attended the GAA’s third meeting, at Thurles on January 17, 1885, concluding that he ‘confused the date of the foundation meeting with the one 10 weeks later which he did attend’. Yet, none of this detracts from Maloney’s eminent role in the early GAA years, including a term as a vice-president.

The more one studies the question of who attended on 1/11/1884, several points become clear. First, there has to be a hierarchy of significance. A recent tendency to suggest that all attendees should be accorded full and equal recognition flies in the face of human experience and wisdom: that in every sizeable organisation, there are leaders who do the bulk of work, and others who turn up when it suits and contribute much less. In the case of the GAA founders, as defined by 1/11/1884 attendees, the logical hierarchy of commemoration has either two or three tiers. The first should herald just Cusack and Davin as before; and the second tier ought to comprise McKay, Wyse Power and Bracken; or else band this quintet together, as all committed to the growth of the association for its two years. Either way, we should talk less of the ‘seven founders’, and bracket McCarthy and Ryan together with the ‘etc, etc’ crew who are clearly identified in contemporary evidence.

Second, while this lower tier should be acknowledged by name in the GAA annals, especially as they have been overlooked for so long, there is no need to redress the balance beyond that. Some commentary about November 1st 1884 has overblown the significance of attendance or otherwise. At the time of writing, the Wikipedia entry for J. K. Bracken states that he was one of ‘the original seven signatories’ of the GAA. Unlike the Proclamation of the Republic in 1916, however, there were no signatories per se, and no one was signing his life away to the GAA. The quirks of time and geography shaped attendance. The GAA’s second meeting, held in Cork City in December 1884, attracted a swathe of attendees from that county, but a mere handful from Tipperary. The third meeting at Thurles swung the pendulum back towards Tipperary attendees. Etc, etc.

So while the matter of who else could have been at the initial meeting will continue to excite those close to the scene, for the GAA world to obsess over the fringe figures much more would be about as useful as watching two fifty-somethings arguing over who first saw the Manic Street Preachers riffing a gig in a dive before they ‘sold out’.

What is important is the legacy of that day. It is being marked on this anniversary by the national GAA History Committee hosting a lunch and meeting at Hayes’ Hotel, with a couple of very special guests in attendance.

Patrick and Simon McKay from Kent, great-grandson and great-grandson respectively of John McKay, will be there on their first-ever trip to Munster. For two men who hadn’t even heard of their ancestor a year ago, it’s an extraordinary kind of homecoming.

Last December, a centenary memorial ceremony for John McKay took place at his graveside in London. On that occasion, and in an article on McKay’s colourful career for the Irish Examiner, I outlined my unsuccessful attempts to track down his two great-grandsons in time for that occasion. Ever since the McKay gravestone was erected in 2009, I had kept searching for direct descendants – if they existed – in the hope of letting someone claim it for their own. But the hunt ‘must go on’, I concluded.

In truth, I was hoping against hope. Back in 2018 I had first learned of the birth of these two great-grandsons, at Fulham in 1950 and 1951. After their baptisms, however, they seemed to disappear from view altogether. I suspected they had died or their names had been changed due to parents remarrying. If still living, they would be in their seventies now. Time was running out. And locating a living person in London can be harder than finding a dead person.

My main line of pursuit last November was the estate of their father (and John McKay’s grandson), Denis Paul McKay, who died intestate at Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, in 2008. The revocation of his probate in 2011 suggested that a legitimate heir had been still living then. Several four-hour phone-calls were made to the Treasury Solicitor’s Department in London, in the hope of being told who received this estate; but upon finally getting through, the department would not share such information, even to a solicitor.

When in London last December, I made what seemed to be my last roll of the dice. I pounded the streets of the city, chasing ghosts at former McKay addresses.

As I walked from Fulham Broadway tube station to the house where the great-grandsons were born, something very serendipitous happened. The street names in the last mile were leading me to him: Clonmel Road, Rostrevor Road, Munster Avenue and Burnfoot Avenue. Each seemed to have some link to the lifetime trail of McKay.

I went home and tried something different. Why not search through online records by address?

I typed in Burnfoot Avenue. The eighth and last mention in newspaper archives had it. A letter from Mrs K. Priest, formerly of this address and now living on the Isle of Wight, to the Fulham Chronicle, and referring to her son Patrick McKay having just run the London Marathon of 1982. She had obviously remarried and changed name.

From that, after 14 years of stasis, everything came together rapidly.

I searched online for a Patrick McKay on the Isle of Wight. This led me to see a picture of a man who looked the right age and even bore a little resemblance to John McKay.

One of his ‘friends’ on social media was a Simon McKay who could be his son and owned a business in Kent.

Nervously, I prepared to call the business. I feared that I might be cut off. Who was I but a mad Irishman? He might not want to know.

‘Hello Simon ... Is your father Patrick Terence McKay, born in Fulham in 1950?’ 

‘Yes.’ 

Eureka! I managed to sound still a little sane and keep his attention. Within minutes I had emailed the family tree to him.

That night, I had a video call with Patrick McKay. It transpired that he knew nothing of his father’s roots, having been told that he came from Dundee! Over 150 minutes, I revealed his paternal family background to him – not just what his great-grandfather had done in Ireland; but also his grandfather Patrick Joseph McKay, born at Cork in 1887, who joined the Royal Navy at the age of 15 and entered ‘1 November 1884’ as his date of birth on attestation papers, and had a life of tragedy; and his granduncle, ‘Paul Murray’, who was a world-famous theatrical producer between the 1910s and 1930s.

Patrick disclosed that he had been to Ireland once, in 1957. One photograph survives from that visit – showing him standing in front of the statue of St Patrick in Kilkenny, along with his younger brother Joseph, and both holding camáns. Yet, until we spoke 66 years later, he was unaware of his ancestor’s central role in establishing an organisation for hurling and setting its rules.

Patrick made a long-overdue and poignant trip to Ireland in April 2024, with his daughter Emilia and son Simon. They visited the McKay homestead near Downpatrick; were treated to a dinner by the Down County Board; were hosted at the new Irish News office in Belfast, where a blue plaque for John McKay had been reinstalled; and met their distant cousins at last.

The trip closed with their maiden pilgrimage to Croke Park. ‘GAA & CROKE PARK welcome the McKay family 1884-2024’, the stadium scoreboard proclaimed. They entered Seomra Uí Thuathail, the inner sanctum where McKay’s picture sits on the wall of GAA officialdom. Uachtarán Jarlath Burns presented a special ceremonial camán to them at pitch-side. A visit to the GAA Museum rounded off the whistle-stop tour.

This weekend, Patrick and Simon McKay are completing their great GAA DNA journey.

They are visiting Hayes’ Hotel on the GAA’s big birthday, as guests of the History Committee.

It’s very apt, as Patrick shares the unofficial title of the closest living person genetically to the business of the foundation of the GAA. He shares the honours with his younger brother Joseph, and some great-grandchildren of J. K. Bracken, scattered about the country. No direct descendants of Cusack, Davin or Wyse Power survive. Brendan Bracken, who died in Dalkey in 2019, was reported as the last living grandchild of a founder member. If we extend the net beyond the five active founders, Paddy Bourke, a nonagenarian grandson of T. K. Dwyer, is still about, residing at Moycarkey. And great-grandchildren of J. P. Ryan are out there today. But it’s not worth falling out about.

Next up for the McKays is Tullacondra, Ballyclough, near Mallow, to see the homeplace of Ellen Browne, who married John McKay in 1883 and lived to reach 95. They are meeting Tom Browne, grandnephew of Ellen, still residing nearby.

Finally, their path leads back to the Lee. On Saturday they will tour houses, offices, churches, cemeteries and fields where John McKay and family sported 14 decades ago.

Then at 3pm, I will tell the remarkable tale in a talk at Supervalu Páirc Uí Chaoimh, before the Intermediate A Hurling Championship final between Erin's Own and Lisgoold, at which the McKays will be special guests.

Regardless of who wins the game, for one visiting family, and indeed for the GAA family in Cork, this should be a very happy ending.