The curious case of Patrick Holland – the former Tyrone GAA county secretary and prominent referee who left the GAA world behind to join the RAF to fight for Britain in World War 1.
This month, a new book 'Memories: 1900-56' by the late Tyrone historian Joe Martin, brings the Dungannon man's life to a wider audience, after the initial research carried out by historian Dr Dónal McAnallen.
With the GAA’s ban on members of the British security forces from membership in effect throughout the 20th century, the association wouldn’t seem like a hotbed for potential recruits, but as McAnallen has discovered over the years, that simply wasn’t the case.
What makes Holland’s case so unique though, as McAnallen explains to RTÉ Sport, was the prominence he held in GAA circles at a time when the county secretary was an all-encompassing role.
"The case of Patrick Holland stands out because he held a vital role in the GAA and then he turned away from that quite suddenly," said McAnallen, who won a GAA MacNamee award in 2019 for his publication, 'Forgotten Gaelic Volunteers', which examines GAA members who fought in the war.
"As I discovered, there were dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of GAA members who fought in the First World War in one guise or another.
"It’s impossible to put a number on it because they were generally men of lower ranks whose enlisting wasn’t reported. They didn’t go to secondary school, they didn’t go to university, they didn’t advance to high ranks in military terms and a lot of their sporting participation might not have been high level.
"I traced 150 players from all across Ireland through various sources, but there’s probably a lot, lot more who went to fight but we’ll just never know.
"The reason why Holland is particularly interesting is because the vast majority of those who signed up from a GAA background weren’t as deeply involved in the association.
"Holland is a good example of how, in the early history of the GAA, not only a lot of clubs, but even divisional or county boards, depended heavily on one or two individuals to keep them going.
"Quite a number of others might have been playing soccer as well and only played for a Gaelic club in as much as it was something sporting which they enjoyed, but they didn’t necessarily pledge that level of commitment to Gaelic games."
Holland was different from the majority though.
For one, the county secretary was held up as a real position of standing with Holland succeeding Carrickmore man Michael Coen in 1917 before being succeeded by Patrick Crawford of Coalisland.
He also was the referee for back-to-back county finals as Cookstown Brian Óg won finals against Kilskeery McDonagh’s (1917) and Omagh O’Neill’s (1918) – the latter requiring a second game, again won by Cookstown, after an Omagh objection.
It was in the same month of the latter of those finals that Holland indicated that he would be resigning the secretary position, although local press reports didn’t report on the reason and those present at the meeting encouraged him to remain in place until the next county board meeting.
A snippet in the 8 October 1918 edition of the Freeman’s Journal revealed the real reason, however, under the banner 'GAA officials enlist.’
"Mr Patrick Holland, Dungannon county secretary of Tyrone Gaelic Athletic Association, and Mr John Mooney, journalist, Dungannon secretary of the Craobh Ruadh Gaelic Athletic Club (whose father is president of the local division of Ancient Order of Hibernians) volunteered for service in the Royal Flying Corps," the report read, referring to the RFC division that would ultimately merge with the Royal Naval Air Service to form the RAF.
But then there’s the ‘why’.
After the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish political scene would start to see more radical nationalism with the eclipse of the Irish Parliamentary Party, to whom Holland was affiliated, by the rise of Sinn Féin.
Holland would feel the force of that radicalism after he was assaulted by Irish Volunteers armed with sticks at a rally in Dungannon in 1918.
"It seems only logical to me that the fact that Holland was beaten up in an affray during the run up to that by-election had a significant impact on his perspective."
Two important by-elections took place in early 1918. Sinn Féin was unable to prevent Irish Nationalist holds in south Armagh following the death of Charles O’Neill, and east Tyrone after William Redmond had resigned to successfully contest the Waterford City by-election which had become vacant when his father, John Redmond, had died.
The results would suggest that moderate nationalism was regaining ground, but such thoughts were blown away later that year where Sinn Féin won 73 of Ireland's 105 seats in the 1918 general election.
Or maybe the reason for his decision was much simpler than that.
"It seems only logical to me that the fact that Holland was beaten up in an affray during the run up to that (east Tyrone) by-election had a significant impact on his perspective, when you consider subsequent events," McAnallen continued.
"In Dungannon, the Clarke’s club was formed a few months earlier and Holland was a member of Craobh Rua. The Clarke’s club represented more of a radical viewpoint that was gaining ground quite quickly over the course of much of that year.
"With him being county secretary of GAA and having some prominence, how did this affect into interaction with young officials of new clubs? You can only speculate, but was there any hostility between the younger club officials and himself on account of party political differences having emerged?
"Or maybe there wasn’t any bad feeling towards him on a personal level within the GAA, but he felt that the physical force used against him reflected a change in the country that he was uneasy with, and he wanted to move away and try something new.
"It did require an extraordinary about-turn in his life to decide in late 1918 that he wanted to join the RAF.
Dublin Senior GAA Football Team visited the Ulster Tower and Thiepval Wood on Saturday to pay their respects. pic.twitter.com/UDYMGBKkWu
— Somme Association (@SommeAssoc) May 6, 2018
"Surely people like him were much more aware of the full horrors of war by August 1918 than they were in August 1914, or in 1915 or even 1916.
"He was not only going against the flow in nationalist Ireland but he was signing up at a time when it was clear that a lot of people going out to war didn't come back.
"Then was it much simpler? Was it just a case of being the first time in his life that he had an opportunity to fly?"
Joe Martin, author of 'Memories: 1900-56', died in August of this year but through the work of his family, his fifth volume on Tyrone history was published posthumously this month.
His son Ciaran explained why the story of Holland was one he was keen to include in the finished product.
"Dónal's work, dad always felt it deserved a wider audience. One of the things he got interested later in life was the whole wider complicated context of the foundational years of the GAA in Tyrone.
"When Dónal McAnallen uncovered these people who went off to World War One, this was research that wasn't available to dad in the first edition of 'The GAA in Tyrone' in 1984.
"In those days, he was the first amateur historian to look into it on a county wide [basis] and he was just fascinated by it. The chapter [featuring Holland] then is basically Dónal's work reprinted with his permission and dad was very proud that he was able to do it."
World War One ended on 11 November, 1918, a matter of weeks after Holland had signed up. That is information that the Dungannon man simply could not have known and few could have predicted when the hostilities would cease.
After the war, Holland spent time in Scotland before moving to Australia where he would see out his days.
Now at the tail-end of 2023, following the publication of the late Joe Martin's book this month and the work of Dr Dónal McAnallen, his story and those of many of the forgotten GAA volunteers are becoming more widely known.
