New book charts the history of GAA match programmes

If you’re doing what you love, it doesn’t feel like work and that was definitely the case for the author of a book that is sure to a popular gift for GAA fans this Christmas.

The GAA Covered, by John Kelly and published by Gill, charts the history of match programmes, from the very early days when it was little more than a sheet with the players’ names up to the glossy productions of the present day.

Kelly, a primary school principal in Carlow, is part of a small but dedicated band of programme collectors.

“I suppose I've been collecting since I was a young fella in the 70s, being brought to matches by my parents,” he says.

“I just always seemed to end up with the programme on the way home and I just kept them on, they never got thrown out.

“I’d have been in touch a with a few other lads that were serious collectors and then, around ten or 15 years ago, I just decided to build a collection from there.

“The group is quite good – there’d be a few fairs during the year and we swap among ourselves and buy and sell among ourselves.”

While the changing nature of communications means that hard copies of newspapers and magazines are becoming an endangered species, the programme continues to prevail and Kelly’s book showcases that evolution.

Managing to appeal to the hardcore collector and the casual observer, there were a couple of inspirations.

“Among collectors, there was a certain lack of awareness about what existed or what didn't exist,” Kelly says.

“When you go back far enough, you know, lads might be missing a programme from the 1930s and they could be searching high up and low down for it but the thing might never have been printed in the first place or it could be lost to history.

“The idea was to set about building a full collection of All-Ireland programmes, if it was possible to do it and then what would it look like?

“Secondly then, a guy called Andy Marsden brought out a lovely book of Liverpool programmes since the war. It's about a thousand pages long, it's a massive book, but it's a beautiful book.

“Those were the two things that were the main inspiration for the book, really.”

Bringing it to fruition was the next task.

“I did up three chapters, by decade, from 1990 until 2020,” Kelly says.

“I sent it off to three or four publishers – I got one or two rejections, I think, and then Gill came back to me. It all happened very quickly.

“Patrick O'Donoghue, from Watergrasshill, had been involved with Siobhán Doyle when she did A History of The GAA in 100 Objects and we hit it off straightaway and went from there.”

Across a period of 12 months that encompassed man-hours and travel, John put it all together, being rewarded with a shortlisting for the best-published book of the year award.

A follow-up edition featuring camogie and ladies’ football is a possibility, while, like any good collector, John is always on the look-out for the ‘white whale’.

“Carlow had a good team in the 1940s,” he says. “we were in three Leinster finals but, unfortunately, I haven't discovered a programme for any of them.

“The 1944 Leinster final, which we won, if there was one, I'd love to get my hands on it, but it doesn't appear as if it's there at the moment.”