Monthly Archives: October 2019

Fake Histories #44  The GAA was founded at a large and well-attended public meeting in Thurles in 1884?

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Today is the Gaelic Athletic Association’s birthday. The organisation has reached the grand old age of one hundred and thirty-five, boasts around half a million members worldwide and has probably done more for rural Ireland than electricity. In addition to the obvious sports of football (men’s and women’s), hurling, camogie and handball the organisation also administers a rather less visible pastime … any guesses?

Well done to whoever said ‘rounders’, which, some day, someone will definitively establish is a) Irish in its origins – we certainly set the first official rules  b) the grandparent of modern baseball.

It’s astonishing to think that, at one point, the entire membership of the GAA could fit in the billiard room of a family hotel! You can still see the hotel any time you walk down the main street of Thurles, County Tipperary. The Hayes Hotel is, understandably, very proud of its seminal association with organised Gaelic games. However, it’s hardly likely that, back in 1884 the Hayes family would have had any idea the inconvenience caused to their regular billiard players, when an odd bunch of people hired the room for the night, would be well worth it.

Of course the games themselves long predated the establishment of an organisation to administer them. Hurling, as anyone in Tipperary will tell you proudly, existed in their county, before the first Kilkennyman climbed down from the trees and learned to walk on two legs. In Kilkenny, where they have only recently become aware of the existence of the ancient sport of Gaelic football, they will inform you that ‘the sport played with the larger ball’ (which is how they refer to it) is an unsuccessful adaptation of faction fighting. They will also insist that no one from Tipperary knows what they’re talking about.

Raise the subject with a Kerryman and he’ll tap his nose,  whisper the word ‘Sam’, and smiling enigmatically. The official Cork GAA website reckons the Thurles meeting was really only a scoping exercise and that the real inauguration was in Cork on 27 December! A Meathman will direct you to the GAA’s own website where you will be informed that ‘the earliest records of a recognised precursor to modern Gaelic football date from a game in County Meath in 1670, in which catching and kicking the ball were permitted.’ Eat your hearts out Dubs!

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It was the Clare man, Michael Cusack, himself a huge cricket fan apparently, who decided that our ancient sports (including rounders) needed to have their rules properly codified. It was no accident that they chose 1 November to establish the new Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes—thankfully they dropped the bit after ‘Association’. The date had a mythological significance as the ancient feast of Samhain, positioned half way between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Cusack may also have had a vague notion that the date would mark the beginning of the off-season. I wonder how that one worked out?

Right from its birth the GAA was much more than a mere sporting organisation. It was its close affiliation to extreme nationalist politics that almost caused its undoing. Back in the nineteenth century Irish Republican Brotherhood never managed to find a cultural association it didn’t want to infiltrate. Such was its overt influence within the GAA that the organisation began to haemorrhage members, and almost foundered. But you would have to say that it’s recovered pretty well since then.

Back to the contents of that billiard room on 1 November 1884. It’s a bit like the GPO during Easter week 1916, no one is absolutely sure who exactly was there. Definitely among those present were the seven acknowledged founder members of the GAA. These included Cusack, Maurice Davin—who presided over proceedings—two journalists, John Wyse Power from Waterford and Belfastman John McKay, a local politician J.K.Bracken (ironically, he was the father of Churchill’s ‘bestie’ Brendan Bracken), local solicitor Joseph O’Ryan and, mirabile dictu, a district inspector of the excessively unpopular Royal Irish Constabulary, Thomas St. George McCarthy, clearly included because they desperately needed someone from Kerry. Later, Cusack acknowledged that a Nenagh man, Frank Moloney, also wielded a billiard cue on that fateful night, though he tends to be overlooked. Local newspaper reports also mention six other men, mostly from Thurles, as being among those present.

You might assume that an organisation of the stature of the Gaelic Athletic Association was established at a really well-attended public meeting in Thurles in 1884, which, for the record, started at 3.00 p.m. But no, that’s fake history. The fact is, back then, they all fitted around a billiard table. But look at them now! Happy birthday to the GAA.

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FH#42  Did Al Capone kill three men personally with a baseball bat, as depicted in the film The Untouchables?

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Today is the anniversary of the conviction, in 1931, of the notorious Chicago gangster Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone. He was famous for aphorisms like, ‘you can get much further with a kind word, and a gun, than you can with a kind word alone’. He was probably also responsible for the deaths of more than thirty fellow human beings. Did he go down for murder? Was he sentenced to a stretch in Federal prison for racketeering? Did he even end up in Alcatraz Prison on San Francisco bay for bootlegging? None of the above. Famously he went to jail for tax evasion. Al Capone was, in the eyes of the law, a white collar criminal.

‘I am like any other man. All I do is supply a demand’ he once said. And this simple businessman, with the ethics of Wall Street banker and the sensibilities of a shark with a taste for Bondi Beach surfers, took advantage of America’s Prohibition legislation of the 1920s to make a huge fortune for himself and others.

In 1925 at the tender age of twenty-six Capone took over illegal breweries on Chicago’s south side, and a liquor distribution operation that stretched as far as the Canadian border. Capone, whose mantra was ‘I just give people what they want’, became something of a folk hero in an era where millions of drinkers were happy to encourage the flouting of an utterly senseless law. He encouraged and clearly enjoyed the attention of the media, including the new medium of radio. Basing himself in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, where he controlled local politics, Capone quickly became a national celebrity. His only rival was an Irish-American gang led by a lesser hoodlum named Bugs Moran, which dominated organised crime on the north side of the city.

While local and Federal prosecutors took an interest in Capone, he also managed to bribe countless public officials and policemen. He made things difficult for investigators by never registering any property in his own name. This was despite the fact that he owned a mansion in Miami where he spent more and more time in the late 1920s. He also never opened a bank account, though I suppose that probably looked quite clever after the Wall Street Crash.

Capone’s hold on the Chicago criminal underworld was abetted by the accession to the office of mayor of ‘Big’ Bill Thompson, a man who never saw a bribe he didn’t like. Capone allegedly bankrolled Big Bills 1927 campaign to the tune of $250,000 – a huge sum of money back then.

Capone’s most notorious ‘hit’ came on 14 February 1929, the so-called St Valentine’s Day massacre!

Bugs Moran’s HQ was a warehouse and garage at 2122 North Clark Street. On the morning of 14 February a group of policemen showed up to raid the premises. Except that they weren’t cops, they were Capone’s gunmen. They lined up the seven occupants of the warehouse (one of whom was not even a member of Moran’s gang) and opened fire, killing all seven in the most horrendous crime of the Prohibition era.

            The killings quickly shattered any aura of romance or begrudging tolerance of Capone’s activities, after photographs of the slain mobsters were published in local and national papers. Scarface, so-called because of an old knife wound, had overreached himself.  Law enforcement in Chicago and Florida now began to harass Capone and threaten his operation

His ultimate downfall, however, was due to a 1927 Supreme Court ruling that illegal earnings were subject to income tax just like all legitimate earnings – evidence was adduced, in a 1931 Federal trial, of Capone’s massive spending, and in October of that year he was convicted of tax evasion, sentenced to eleven years in jail, fined $50,000 and found liable for the payment of more than $200,000 in back taxes and interest.  He served the first part of his sentence in a Federal prison in Atlanta, where he was also officially diagnosed with syphilis and gonorrhoea

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He was later transferred to Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, the high security Federal prison, becoming, after the Birdman, Robert Stroud, the facility’s most famous inmate.  When he was released in 1939, already in the advanced stages of syphilis, he headed for Florida where he died in his mansion in 1947.

Capone is believed to have been involved in the deaths of thirty-three men between 1923 and 1930, including the seven Valentine’s Day Massacre victims. Despite suggestions, in the Brian de Palma film, The Untouchables, that he personally beat three men to death with a baseball bat, it is unlikely that he actually killed any of the thirty-three himself. That’s fake history.

 

 

Fake Histories #40  Katharine O’Shea was a British spy whose job was to destroy Parnell?

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Next Sunday is the hundred and twenty eighth anniversary of the death of the so-called ‘Uncrowned King of Ireland’ Charles Stewart Parnell. The honorary title is ironic as the man who conferred it on him in 1880, Timothy Healy MP, played a huge part in consigning Parnell to an early grave at the age of forty-five on 6 October 1891.

The waspish Healy had long since fallen out with his aloof and arrogant party leader before he got his opportunity to bring his animosity out in the open. This was handed to him, neatly tied up with silk ribbons, by Parnell himself, after the Irish party leader’s citation as co-respondent in the divorce of William and Katharine O’Shea.

This allowed Healy to give full reign to his vitriol in the pivotal five day meeting in Committee Room Fifteen at Westminster where Parnell’s continued leadership of the Irish Parliamentary party was being debated by its MPs in December 1890. At one point in that marathon internecine squabble Parnell squarely addressed the issue at stake by demanding pointedly ‘Who is the master of the party?’. To which Healy responded ‘Aye, but who is the mistress of the party?’ Legend has it that Parnell had to be physically restrained from assaulting his tormentor.

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In the months that followed the inevitable split in the ranks of the party, at every opportunity, Healy would refer to Katharine O’Shea—even after she and Parnell married—as ‘Kitty’ O’Shea. It’s the name by which many people know her today. But back in late Victorian Britain and Ireland the word ‘Kitty’ had an entirely different connotation. It was one of the many nicknames for a prostitute, and fed into the prurience of the political opponents of Parnell in the months before his death.

Such was the devastation the entire affair caused to Parnell’s political career, and the damage it did to any hopes of Home Rule for another generation, that many contemporaries of the nationalist leader, both supporters and opponents, wondered, and openly claimed, that Katharine O’Shea and her pompous, self-aggrandising, cuckolded husband, William, had been agents of the British, expressly charged with the task of destroying the threat posed by the biggest Irish nuisance to the British establishment since Daniel O’Connell. The entire affair, so the allegation went, had been whistled up by the Tory establishment to discredit and disrupt the forces of Irish constitutional nationalism.

It has to said, if this were true, then the O’Sheas were very good at their jobs. Double Oh Seven himself would have been proud to be numbered among their successors. Bringing Parnell down was a masterstroke, but killing him off was the coup de grace. There are no comebacks from the grave.

There is no doubt that both the O’Shea’s were well connected. Husband and wife, at different times, would have had dealings with the British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone. But the circumstances of the downfall of the Irish leader who, by 1890, was a staunch ally of the Liberal Prime Minister, were almost as much of an embarrassment to Gladstone as they were to the Irish party. That’s why it has to be a diabolical Tory plot.

The problem with that scenario is, when Parnell and Katharine met, and embarked on their ten-year affair, the Tories had just been tossed out of office. They didn’t get a whiff of power for another five years and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle of Parnell baiting Gladstone and the Liberals for most of their period in opposition. Until they got back into government, in 1886, five years after the affair began, they would have had no interest whatever in shaming of humiliating Parnell by exposing his relationship with a married woman.

Which leaves us with the Victorian ‘deep state’, the shadowy institution that lives forever, irrespective of who is in power. It’s tempting to believe anything of an establishment that, because of its many mansions, and competing agents provocateurs,  succeeded, in 1887, in exposing a plot against the life of Queen Victoria which its own agents had concocted in the first place. But there’s not a shred of evidence for this proposition. In addition to which anyone even vaguely familiar with William O’Shea is always astonished that he was able to put on his own boots every morning. A former military type, he was always at least one brigade short of a division.

And anyone familiar with the relationship between Parnell and Katharine O’Shea would never accept that it was based on a treacherous deception.

So, even though one is prone to believe William O’Shea capable of almost anything, is it possible that he and his wife were British spies given the onerous chore of destroying Charles Stewart Parnell? Not a hope. That’s fake history.

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