Four codes, one rulebook

A booklet of GAA Handball playing rules for four codes, 4-Wall, Softball, Hardball and Wallball, is dated on its cover to a Congress of 9 February 2025, which was a Sunday. The cover does not say whose Congress it was. The booklet comes out under the name of GAA Handball, the handball body of the Gaelic Athletic Association (Cumann Lúthchleas Gael), and I have found no report of the meeting itself. A note on the cover says the rules govern the All-Ireland championships in the four codes, and that four-wall nationals or open tournaments may be played under international four-wall rules, whose differences the book lists at rule 4.11. The copy I read was posted on a Wexford handball site in June 2025. It is the first booklet of the four-wall and 60 by 30 series in the record to include a Wallball court, and it specifies goatskin for the hardball ball.

Sixteen years earlier another name stood on the rules. A booklet of Official Playing Rules, dated by a note on its page of contents to January 2009, belongs to the Irish Handball Council, which GAA Handball's page dates to 1924. The booklet says it applies to Irish handball as played in two codes, 60 by 30 and 40 by 20, yet its contents list a section of one-wall rules at page 46. I know it only from inside a PDF that the same Wexford site uploaded in August 2016. The Council had begun an annual yearbook in 1996, with none in 1997, by the National Library of Ireland's record. That record's entry for the yearbook's successor, Top Ace, names GAA Handball as the publisher of a run beginning in 2007; one of its subtitles is "Official GAA handball magazine." A catalog entry describes a run, not each issue, so it does not date a change of name. A second booklet, labeled 2014 Rule Book on its contents page, was made as a PDF in November 2016 and posted in August 2017. Where the 2009 booklet speaks of Irish Handball, this one says GAA Handball, so the name changed on the rules between the two. I have found no dated statement of the change. GAA Handball's page gives its headquarters as Croke Park, Dublin.

Until 2025 the one-wall rules were printed apart. A one-wall booklet, dated January 2019 on its title page, set a court 20 by 34 feet with a wall 16 feet high and a ball of 1 7/8 inches and 61 grams. It was not the first one-wall text Ireland printed, since the Council's booklet of 2009 had a section for the game. A booklet for 4-Wall and 60 by 30, dated March 2020 on its cover, said the one-wall rules were to be found elsewhere, and carried competition regulations with text revised in 2016. The Wexford site posted both in April 2023. A booklet of 4 February 2024, a Sunday by its cover, still names only 4-Wall and 60 by 30 in its running head, yet its first rule lists four codes: four-wall, one-wall, and the two forms of the 60 by 30 game, softball and hardball, the last two played only in Ireland. Whether the 2025 Wallball section replaced the 2019 booklet, as it seems to, no source says.

Wallball has its own record. GAA Handball's published rolls, kept as workbooks, list wallball open Irish nationals from 1997 and a senior wallball championship from 2016, and another lists All-Ireland four-wall championships from 1975, six years after the year GAA Handball's page gives for the first American-style court in Ireland, a date the Council's chapter weighs against an American magazine of 1971. Those dates are the earliest years on the lists, not the beginnings of the events, and I name no champion. By an undated page on a French website, written before April 2012 since it looks ahead to April and May of that year, GAA Handball, the World Handball Council and the Confederación Internacional de Pelota a Mano (CIJB) signed a constitution for a one-wall federation to be called the World Wall Ball Association, based in Dublin. One later summary has the body formed at that year's world championships in Dublin; the page does not, and I have found no later trace of the body. The United States Wallball Association's page for the 2026 World Wallball Championships gives 14 to 19 September 2026 in New York City, with results copied from another site and still being checked against the organizers' records.

Two of the four codes were written largely from American text, and not first in 2019. The one-wall booklet says on its title page that its rules agree with the USHA's one-wall rules. A comparison of the two texts, five words at a time, finds 84.7 percent of its wording (6,251 of 7,380 runs) in the USHA's one-wall text of January 2014, as it stood before the USHA's revision of 27 January 2019. The booklet carries none of that revision's new wording, which may mean only that it was set earlier. The 40 by 20 rules also follow the USHA's four-wall rulebook, in numbering and in much of the wording. The numbered rules for dead-ball hinders and avoidable hinders are 4.7 and 4.8 in the GAA book and in the USHA rulebook of January 2025, and the March 2020 booklet draws a large part of its wording directly from the USHA's four-wall text of 2015 to 2017, and not by way of the one-wall booklet: 891 runs in 74 clauses come from that text, against 466 runs in 59 clauses carried over from the GAA's own one-wall document. The USHA wording is not confined to the international codes: by the same comparison, more than half of the wording that the 2020 booklet adds to the Council's booklet of 2009, in the text that applies to softball on the 60 by 30 court, is found in earlier USHA texts. The Council's booklet of January 2009 shares about a quarter of its wording with the USHA's four-wall text of 1999, and its one-wall section shares wording with the USHA's one-wall text of 1994, by a comparison that no person has yet checked. The evidence is the comparison and the 2019 booklet's own statement. Nothing on record says who adapted the text or when.

The Irish side has the older text. The oldest Irish text in the record is the rules headed Gaelic Rules in a Spalding handball manual of 1903 whose title page names Michael Egan. It prints them as the rules of the Gaelic Athletic Association of Ireland, and its headnote says they "differ mainly from those in vogue in America." It gave a game as fifteen aces, not twenty-one, and a floor 60 feet long or as near as possible, with no width. The two alley codes are named for a court 60 by 30. I have not compared the 1903 wording with any GAA text from 2009 on, so what joins them is the court and the game, and the year the GAA adopted the rules is unknown; the US printings point to some year between 1884 and 1903.

The 2025 book prints four codes in one booklet, with their courts in feet: 20 by 34 for Wallball, with a wall 16 feet high, which is also the size of the USHA's one-wall court; 40 by 20 by 20 for four-wall; and 60 by 30 for the alley. It names two wallball balls by brand, Big Blue and Penn, and the USHA's one-wall rulebook of January 2025 also has provisions for a big ball. The CIJB, named in that announcement beside GAA Handball and the World Handball Council, gives its own wallball court in meters in its rules, a PDF made in March 2023, 6.10 by 10.60 with a wall 4.90, about the same size in feet; by the comparison, its wording shares almost nothing with the American or Irish books.

No dated statement of the renaming has been found, and the two booklets that bracket it, January 2009 and the one labeled 2014, are the only rulebooks I hold from before 2019; none is known for 2010 to 2013 or for 2015. The booklet labeled 2014 has no edition record yet, and the PDF I hold has 27 pages where its contents run to 52. The international four-wall rules that the GAA book points to are not found, and the book does not say which body issues them. I looked first for the World Handball Council's rules, but its former web domain now carries unrelated content. The GAA's texts are research-only here, so I describe what the rules do and quote none; the 1903 text is the only Irish rulebook I can print. The world championships and the World Wall Ball Association have records I have not parsed.

A copy that GAA Handball's own site links, a file named for June 2026 and made, by its file data, on 25 June 2026, re-lays out the 2025 rules; I have not compared the two line by line. I fetched it on 28 October 2026. Its cover still prints the date of the 2025 Congress. Its first rule now calls the third code Wallball where the 2025 text had called it 1-Wall. The file prints the 60 by 30 codes and four-wall rules that follow the USHA's numbering side by side.