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The fascinating story of Gaelic football's historic roots
Analysis: Right at its core, Gaelic football is a mirror to Irish society and to the nature of that society at any given time
By UCD
Before January 17th, 1885, there was no such thing as Gaelic football. What there was, though, was centuries of folk football played across Ireland in every corner, recorded in legal texts, in poetry, in newspaper accounts, in travellers' records. You'd games played between parishes, villages, groups of friends, two people kicking a ball to each other and presumably one person kicking a ball to him or herself.
The tradition of kicking a ball is universal. It's the same type of game that was played across England or in the mining villages of Wales or across Scotland. You can go to China on the one side and there are records of people kicking a ball in sport. Spin right the way round to the far side of the globe to Mesoamerica, and you get exactly the same thing.
From RTÉ, trailer for new series Hell for Leather – The Story of Gaelic Football
This shared human experience is remade in Ireland by Irish geography, by Irish people, by the peculiarities of life on a small island off the edge of Europe, where it developed its own traditions, its own forms, its own lore. You can see it in the statute of Galway written down from 1527. You see it in the school constructed by Hugh Montgomery in Newcastle in Co Down when he laid out a playing ground for football for his students in 1620. You see it in the matches played in the Curragh of Kildare or in the fields around Drumcondra in Dublin.
It's a game which created heroes who were recorded in poetry. It is a game which created violence, which made its way to the courts, which saw army and police brought to suppress riots at football matches in Drumcondra in the 1770s. From the 18th century, there is also talk about a football match played out of Parsons Castle in Parsons Town, now Birr in the south of Offaly where bachelors played married men in a game near the castle and cheered the king after the game and came back and drank barrels of beer in celebration.
It's formal and it's informal. It's not reckless and it can be reckless. It's not violent and it's very violent and it's wrapped through communities and traditions. It's not recorded with the same fervor as hurling, not presented in the same thrilling, exciting manner as hurling not seen to be something that reaches that incredible crescendo that hurling reached through those centuries. But it's there all the time, and it's there everywhere.
From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, Paul Rouse reads A Christmas Ball about the first Gaelic football match ever played in Wexford
The context for the arrival of Gaelic football is the existence of soccer and rugby on the island by the early 1880s and these games beginning to spread around the island. One of the people who helped spread those games was Michael Cusack, a devoted rugby player who described himself as a sterling lover of the game. A man then who turned away from the sports of empire, in founding the GAA with Maurice Davin and set upon putting together their own version of football. Partly because Davin despised rugby and thought it was a brutalising game, unfit to be played because people just got injured.
Those two men knew the rules about soccer and rugby. When they founded the GAA, they set out to invent a Gaelic football, a football game that would stand against the games of the empire. They drew on the rules of soccer and rugby in constructing those broad rules that Davin wrote up. He was well placed to draw up rules because he was methodical and these rules were clearly influenced by the other games that were in existence.
The first match was held on the green in Callan between a team from Kilkenny and the team from Callan. It was a remarkable game in that there was no score by the time they finished. The game was intense and physical, but you could only score a goal. There were no points, there were no points posts. They quickly understood that there were going to be very few scores if they left it like this, particularly when the initial rules permitted 21 aside.
From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Sport, GAA president Jarlath Burns on his hope that the "basic principles" of Gaelic football can again flourish following rule changes to the game
The context for the arrival of Gaelic football is the existence of soccer and rugby on the island by the early 1880s and these games beginning to spread around the island. One of the people who helped spread those games was Michael Cusack, a devoted rugby player who described himself as a sterling lover of the game. A man then who turned away from the sports of empire, in founding the GAA with Maurice Davin and set upon putting together their own version of football. Partly because Davin despised rugby and thought it was a brutalising game, unfit to be played because people just got injured.
Those two men knew the rules about soccer and rugby. When they founded the GAA, they set out to invent a Gaelic football, a football game that would stand against the games of the empire. They drew on the rules of soccer and rugby in constructing those broad rules that Davin wrote up. He was well placed to draw up rules because he was methodical and these rules were clearly influenced by the other games that were in existence.
The first match was held on the green in Callan between a team from Kilkenny and the team from Callan. It was a remarkable game in that there was no score by the time they finished. The game was intense and physical, but you could only score a goal. There were no points, there were no points posts. They quickly understood that there were going to be very few scores if they left it like this, particularly when the initial rules permitted 21 aside.
The late great Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh in one of his final television interviews explaining the origins of Gaelic Football ☘️❤️ #HellForLeather | Monday at 9.35pm
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) June 5, 2025
By 1886, there was a GAA club playing Gaelic football in every province and multiple teams in many counties playing against each other. Cusack wrote repeatedly in the newspapers, praising the discipline and good temper of these players who now began to spread the game.
But all across the country, there was mayhem around these matches. All around the place, there was this idea of a deep physicality in the games. Of course, there were loads of matches conducted in good spirit and, and in flying discipline. But a match in Kilkenny in early 1887 between Ballyhale and Slieverue went out of control and the two teams forgot about the ball and ripped into each other. The county board officials who were there couldn't get them to stop and the only way they could do so was to pull up the goalposts.
Down in Tralee, there was a match between Castleisland and Tralee. Rev John P Davan wrote a reminiscence of that match about 50 years later. He'd no idea who won the match and all he could remember was a fella from Castleisland called Foxy Tom, who threw three fellows out over the rope on the sideline as this expression of manhood.
It reached the point where it could only be a contest which inspired something like that if it had meaning - and the meaning was that you represented where you were from. It was a stroke of genius - a lucky stroke in many respects - to make the organisation parish-based. You played for where you were from on a parish basis. Contests then began to take off, particularly after the establishment of the All Ireland and local county championships from the beginning of 1887.
We often talk about the GAA in a local context and this idea of local people competing against each other. It's the engine which drives it, and you cannot beat a bit of local bitterness to draw a crowd and give something more meaning.
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But it also mattered because it had a national framework and you could be the All Ireland champions if you were properly put together and you progressed. If you won your county championship, you earned the right at this point to represent your county in an All Ireland championship and become the All Ireland champions no matter what county you were in.
Sport always reflects the society in which it is played and the times in which it is played. Because it is so popular and so intrinsic to so many people in so many different areas, Gaelic football is a mirror to Irish society and to the nature of society at any given time.
Just as the informal games of the years before the founding of the GAA reflected that world and just as the pre-television era reflected that world, our game now reflects the modern world. It's hugely organised, driven by data, obsessed with trying to find an edge in fitness and trying always to be on the cusp of the next great thing in that search to be better. But right at the core, it's still the love of play, the love of the ball, the love of kicking the ball, the love of the challenge of taking on another person and the desire to win.
