Opinion: East Belfast GAA's experience offers lessons beyond sport, about grassroots communities, belonging and the future
In July 2025, North Down Cricket Club was forced to cancel a cross-community summer camp for children in Comber after criticism on social media of the inclusion of children who play GAA, including from a local Orange lodge. The incident echoed familiar patterns of cultural resistance in Northern Ireland, reminding us that three years after an Irish language school had to relocate due to local pressure, the struggle for shared spaces remains as contentious as ever.
Meanwhile, in East Belfast, a GAA club continues to defy these odds, offering a powerful counter-narrative to the politics of exclusion. Five years since its founding, East Belfast GAA has grown from a small group of hopeful players to what one member proudly claims as "the biggest club in Ulster". Regardless, their success story is inseparable from an ongoing fight for acceptance, space, and the right to exist.
"There’s a movement here"
Early members fondly recall how something that started with an anonymous tweet (or "the infamous tweet", as members now refer to it) from co-founder Dave McGreevy, asking for general interest in playing GAA in East Belfast during the pandemic, has snowballed into something so valuable. Some members, like Niamh Dolan, were initially driven to the club when the pandemic upended their usual weekend exercise routines, leaving them searching for new ways to stay active. Some saw the club as a space for reinvention; on the one hand, it welcomed people who were completely new to the sport—and Irish culture—while on the other, it allowed those who grew up in a sectarian divide to shed inherited baggage and explore something new together.
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From RTÉ Morning Ireland, Down cricket club halts sports camp over criticism of children who play GAA
One member who feared being "laughed out of the clubhouse" at traditional hurling clubs found refuge in East Belfast’s fresh start: "these guys are brand new. So I could sort of hide behind that". American-born Kimberly captured this spirit: "We’re all new, no one belongs to this club yet, we have the opportunity to make this club what we want it [to be]".
Interestingly, the club’s cross-community character emerged organically rather than through grand design. Caoimhe O’Connell, Cultural Officer of the club, says the breakthrough moment came when members realised they had "fans" after supporters turned up at a céilí they organised. "That’s when we realised there’s a movement here", she observes, recognising that their symbolic importance extended far beyond sport.
Growing up, Cabrini Brown viewed GAA simply as a sport "for them", but she found the East Belfast GAA’s cross-cultural element "eye-opening". "It has been a fuse", she says, adding, "… a fuse that’s going on ironically enough, like set off something which is going to be good instead of bad." Dan Stewart agrees that the cross-cultural element was important for his association with the club too, remembering how sitting in a bar in East Belfast wearing a Gaelic top—the very scenario his father had warned him against—had made him feel like society was "finally" moving beyond old divisions and symbolic boundaries. "It was at that moment that I just fell in love with [the club]", Dan adds.
Read more: What's behind East Belfast GAA's struggle to find a home?
Cross-community relations as a daily practice does not mean the club turns a blind eye towards history, but that it approaches the shared futures promised by the politicians of Northern Ireland with openness. The "mish-mash" of people from "mixed religions and backgrounds" may not be a "grand politicised message" but has allowed members to get a "better perspective of different communities and cultures in Northern Ireland".
Despite its success on and off the pitch, East Belfast GAA’s hunt for a permanent home reveals how deeply space and belonging continue to be intertwined in Northern Ireland. The club currently practices on Henry Jones Playing Fields—the only public GAA pitch in East Belfast—but members feel they deserve a permanent home. Caoimhe observes the location’s symbolic significance: "it’s like as far out of the way as they can have us – and people will still make the trek up there to cause damage". The latest security threat at the Fields was reported only in August. In a region where conflict has been territorial, this geographical marginalisation reflects broader dynamics of control, and finding "neutral ground" becomes a political act.
The absence of a social space where members can meet and socialise outside the pitch compounds this isolation. "We do not have a building that is ours. Every other GAA club has a building that is [theirs]", Caoimhe notes, adding "…it’s where we should be christening our kids, it’s where we should be having our 30th, 40th, 50th birthday parties, it's where we should be doing our fundraisers... we still don’t have our heart, which is our building, our clubhouse: where you’ll run into each other".
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, Linda Ervine, President of East Belfast GAA, discusses their first year in existence
A model for shared futures?
The club now boasts established senior and junior teams in football, hurling, and camogie, and the men’s football 1st team secured promotion this season. Chris Elliott, coach, player and committee member, feels that the club’s mixed, secular social ethos is paying dividends on the pitch and hopes that the first team will see a successful campaign this year. But East Belfast GAA’s experience offers lessons beyond sport. In a context where institutional initiatives see limited success owing to political pressure, grassroots communities continue building bridges through shared passions and mutual respect.
At a time when anti-migrant and far-right vitriol is rearing its head across the island on the one hand, and conversations about Ireland’s shared future continue on the other, East Belfast GAA demonstrates that such futures are already being built, one training session at a time, by ordinary people willing to cross invisible boundaries in pursuit of something bigger than themselves. And maybe sport is a good place to begin, so it is heartening that the cross-community Cricket Camp, which was cancelled in Comber, eventually took place successfully at Stormont premises, supported by Cricket Ireland—a reminder that progress often requires both grassroots determination and institutional courage working hand in hand.
This article includes quotes from interviews conducted by Samuel Guthrie for East Belfast GAA’s oral history archive of the Club. I would like to thank Sam for generously sharing the interviews with me and for providing such valuable insights.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
