Page "Gaelic Athletic Association" Paragraph 6

The Gaelic Athletic Association was founded at 3 pm on Saturday, 1 November 1884, in the billiards room of Lizzie Hayes ' Commercial Hotel, Thurles, County Tipperary.

All present that day had come in response to a circular published in the national press, or had been invited privately by Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin, both of whom were leading figures in Irish athletics.

From its very beginning the GAA was considered to be no mere sporting organisation, with T. E.

O ' Sullivan their first historian noting that the association was founded by men who wished to " foster a spirit of earnest nationality " and as a means of " saving thousands of young Irishmen from becoming mere West Britons ".

A police report written by Inspector A. W.

Waters in the mid-1880s claimed that the GAA had been founded by the Irish Republican Brotherhood with the intention of getting " the muscular youth of the country into an organisation, drilled and disciplined to form a physical power capable of over-awing and coercing the home rule government of the future ".

GAA historian Marcus de Búrca, writing in the Tipperary Historical Journal ( 2004 ), notes of the suggestion that the IRB were the true founders of the GAA, " far from this theory fading out the further away we move from the 1880s, the more convincing it is becoming ", in light of new information coming to light,