The All-Irelands and the Council

On Friday, 13 August 1971, the president of the Irish Handball Council came to the Skokie, Illinois, headquarters of the United States Handball Association with two companions for a friendly match. The Association's president wrote the visit up in the October issue of its magazine, Handball, under the heading "We've Loved a Little Longer." The visitor told him that Dublin's new glass court held 1,800 spectators and that the championship finals had sold out. The column says the Irish played on courts 60 feet long and 30 wide with a Dunlop ball, and asks readers whether Ireland could be brought into the American orbit or the Association must accept the Irish court. The body the president had visited is this chapter's subject. A good part of what the record holds about it reaches the record, as this column does, through American publications.

Two accounts put a national handball body in Ireland in 1924 and give it different names. Tom O'Connor's history of handball, in a copy of the USHA's website saved in 2016, says the Gaelic Athletic Association helped set up the Irish Amateur Handball Association that year, and that one of its first tasks was to arrange trials and competitions for the Tailteann Games. The same history says a team of Americans, named as McDonagh, O'Donnell and Meeney, arrived and, to the amazement of the Irish, swept the invitational events in both hardball and softball. No report of the Games has been read, so the sweep is O'Connor's account and nothing more. The page of GAA Handball, the present body, says instead that the Irish Handball Council was established in 1924 and affiliated that year with what the page calls the International Amateur Athletic Association Handball Commission, and that players from Ireland, England and Scotland took part in that year's Tailteann Games. It names no Americans. The National Library of Ireland catalogs a 70-page pamphlet, Irish handball 1924-1974, credited to the Irish Handball Council and dated 1974, whose title runs from 1924 but which does not settle the name. Whether the two names belong to one body or to a successor is not shown, and this chapter says the Council, as GAA Handball's page does.

The date of the first championships is also in dispute. GAA Handball's page says the first championships sponsored by the GAA were held in 1923, while the rolls on the same site open in 1925, in both hardball and softball, for the senior All-Ireland championships. The rolls list 1924 as a year with no championship and carry nothing for 1923, so either the first championships are missing from them or the events of 1923 and 1924 were not All-Ireland senior titles, and no source read decides which. Where softball as a separate game came from is not in any source read; the roll of 1925 is its earliest evidence. O'Connor adds a rival body, the semi-professional Irish Handball Union, which he says kept holding national and even world championships until 1936, though most players moved to the new amateur association.

The record's next Irish dates are one line each. GAA Handball's page lists exhibition matches with Spanish players in 1929 and Irish tours to Liverpool in 1932 as steps that widened handball's exposure abroad, and says nothing of where the matches were played, by whom, or at which game. O'Connor says that in the Second World War the scarcity of rubber stopped softball in Ireland and brought hardball back into its own, and gives no year. He adds that Gilmartin won a national title in 1946, without saying which game. No Irish paper of those years has been read.

Provincial councils were revived between 1950 and 1966, by GAA Handball's page, and an Irish Times article of 2025, written in Irish, says handball boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, with local and school competitions adding to its popularity. The GAA's site also holds a roll file that its file name gives to an adult Gael Linn competition at the 60-foot size from 1954 to 1979; it was captured for this record and not parsed. One match from these years reaches the record by another road. The A.A.U.'s official rules of 1962, known here only from a seller's photographs of its pages, say the first international handball match in over twenty years was held in Ireland in 1957. The New York Athletic Club sent Tom Ginty, Harry Hyde and his brother Bob. Each match was two games out of three, the first under Irish rules with the Irish softball and the second under A.A.U. rules with the 555 ball, and the New Yorkers won four of the seven matches, one being rained out. O'Connor says the champions of Ireland and America had not met between 1909 and 1964, a statement about champions, not club players. No Irish or New York report of 1957 has been found.

The traffic then ran the other way. The USHA's December 1971 tribute to Charles J. O'Connell lists him under 1964 as chairman of the First World Handball Championship, at the New York Athletic Club, and a letter in the August 1972 issue says the world championships are now held every three years. The magazine places the championship of 1970 in Dublin. Its October 1971 issue says the Council's president chaired the most recent world championships held there, and its August 1972 issue says Kirby won the 1970 world championship in Ireland. GAA Handball's page dates the first American-style court in Ireland, 40 feet by 20, to 1969, and the roll for the All-Ireland four-wall championship opens in 1975, six years later. The USHA wrote of the court as news in the autumn of 1971. Its president's column says the Irish "have now built" a 20 by 40 court in Dublin, and the instructional outline in the same issue says the head of the Council reports the first such court built, the rest of Ireland's courts being 30 feet wide by 60 long. Neither piece says when it was built, so neither contradicts 1969 and neither supports it.

The Council's other new court of those years was the alley at its headquarters at Croke Park. An item in the October 1972 issue, attributed to officials of the Council, says an alley with three toughened glass walls was opened there a year before the item was written, as Ireland's first indoor sports court with three glass walls, and that a Council booklet of August recommended glass in all alleys. It gives the alley's walls as 60 feet and 30, the Irish court and not the American size, so the glass alley and the first American-size court are not shown to be one. The item carries no date of its own. Read as written in 1972 it puts the opening in 1971, against the October 1971 issue, which already has Kirby winning the world title in that court the previous October, in 1970. Read as written a year earlier it agrees. The item's record crowd of 2,000, standing spectators included, sits against the Association's president's remark that the Irish glass exhibition court "actually seats less than 1,000 spectators," and against the visitor's 1,800.

The same October 1971 issue reports the first series of All-Ireland finals played in that court before an estimated 1,000 spectators, televised and shown again the following week for 80 minutes. Lyng of Wexford won the senior singles final, 21-8, 21-13. The issue also reviews Ray Doherty's Handball, printed at Bray in 1970, as the first instructional book on the game that the magazine had seen come out of Ireland, and describes the Irish game as played outdoors, with no ceiling shot and points called aces. The National Library lists the book among items similar to the Council's 1974 pamphlet. In August 1972 the Irish-American Handball Association of Broderick's Court in the Bronx wrote that the proceeds of its dinner-dance would go to a fund to send an American team to Ireland in mid-September, and that an official of the Council and its president took a great interest in a tour of this kind, which he described as a home-and-home series for club players. No report that the team went has been found.

The Council did not end in 2008. The era this record gives it closes that year because the project's notes say GAA Handball became the body's name in 2009, and that date is not in any source read. GAA Handball's own history page gives no year for the name, and the 2009 in the notes is unsourced. The Council's name is on the other side of the line. Its booklet of playing rules, Official Playing Rules, carries a note that it was modified in January 2009 and the Council's name in Irish, Comhairle Liathroid Laimhe na hEireann, as the booklet prints it, and the PDF it survives in was created in April 2009. Against that, the National Library's record for Top Ace gives the publisher from 2007 as GAA Handball, but the record was made in 2011 and may use the later name for a run that began under the old one. The booklet is the stronger evidence: a dated text of the body itself, showing the Council's name in use in January 2009. When the name changed is open, and a GAA congress report or Council minute of 2008 or 2009 would settle it.

The late Council is thin in the record. By GAA Handball's page, Britain entered a team in the world championships for the first time in 1984, and London hosted the All-Ireland final in 1990, only the second All-Ireland final in any GAA code held outside Ireland; the page does not say which handball game was played. Two Irish books of 1984 appear in the National Library's catalog, T. J. McElligott's The Story of Handball and the Council's Handball: fás agus forbairt, and neither has been read. The Council began an annual Irish Handball Yearbook in 1996, with none in 1997, and the Library lists Top Ace as its continuation from 2007. The roll for the wallball open Irish nationals gives its first champions in 1997, the earliest year with one, which is as early as this record shows the one-wall game in Ireland.

The Council's rule texts for 1924 to 2008 come to three entries. An Official rules of 1963, published by the GAA under the heading Irish Handball Association, is a line in the Open Library catalog, and that it is the Council's rule book is itself not shown. A Handball Playing Rules of 1997 is a citation in one bibliography of 2002. The booklet modified in January 2009 can be read but is held for research and not cleared for quotation. An edition of about 1999 to 2000 is inferable from it, since it carries USHA wording of 1999 and 1994 that the USHA changed afterward. A second booklet with the same title and a sponsor's name on its cover is known from a cover photograph and has no date. No Irish newspaper, yearbook or issue of Top Ace has been read for this record, and the Gael Linn roll and the world championship lists were captured and not parsed. The Council's eighty-five years rest on its rolls, GAA Handball's own page, a history on the American site, and two American publications.

The last Council document in the record is the booklet of January 2009. It covers Irish handball in both its sizes, the 60-foot alley and the American-size court, under the Council's name. Chapter 10 returns to the same booklet and reads it against the later rules of GAA Handball.