January 13, 2020

As the new GAA Year has just started for many of our Adult and Juvenile teams and the Youth Development groups prepare to commence their Hurling & Football for 2020 in the coming weeks we invite and encourage Ballincollig residents to get involved in Ballincollig Hurling & Football Club. If you are new to Ballincollig or new to the GAA we welcome you to join our Club in 2020.


About The GAA

The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is Ireland’s largest sporting organisation. It is celebrated as one of the great amateur sporting associations in the world. It is part of the Irish consciousness and plays an influential role in Irish society that extends far beyond the basic aim of promoting Gaelic games.

It was founded on November 1st 1884 at a meeting in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, by a group of spirited Irishmen who had the foresight to realise the importance of establishing a national organisation to make athletics more accessible to the masses and to revive and nurture traditional, indigenous sports and pastimes. At that time, it was largely only the gentry and aristocracy who were allowed to meaningfully participate in athletics.

Until then all that was Irish was being steadily eroded by emigration, intense poverty and outside influences. Within six months of that famous first meeting, GAA clubs began to spring up all over Ireland and people began to play the games of Hurling and Gaelic Football and take part in Athletic events with pride.

The Association today promotes Gaelic games such as Hurling, Football, Handball and Rounders and works with sister organisations to promote Ladies Football and Camogie. The Association also promotes Irish music, song and dance and the Irish language as an integral part of its objectives. The GAA has remained an amateur Association since its founding. Players, even at the highest level, do not receive payment for playing and the volunteer ethos remains one of the most important aspects of the GAA. The organisation is based on the traditional parishes and counties of Ireland. 


The Club

The club is the most numerous and important unit of the Gaelic Athletic Association. There are in the region of 2,300 clubs based in Ireland and combined they provide a network for the GAA in every area of the country. Clubs train and foster the players that eventually go on to represent their respective counties at the highest level but they also compete in their own competitions, right up to Croke Park finals at national level. In many cases clubs serve as community outlets for social interaction promoting as they do different community based activities in addition to the promotion of our games and culture. As a community-based organisation, it is often stated that it is difficult to determine where the community ends and the GAA club starts as they generally overlap and are intertwined. The rapid growth in the number of clubs overseas has been one of the recent success stories of the GAA and the figure now stands at 330, ensuring football and hurling is played on all continents at a variety of grades and age levels. The club is the bed rock of the Association.