As Mayo’s Connacht Championship opener against New York at Gaelic Park last Sunday slips into the background, the memories of all that happened on the trip to the Big Apple will take far longer to dull.

From the point of view of the podcast the weekend was, of course, an extremely busy one. Not only did we provide podcast episodes every day we were out there – culminating in a Final Whistle pod recorded at Gaelic Park after the match on Sunday – but we also held a live podcast event on the Friday night, in conjunction with the Mayo Gaelic Football Club of New York, with close to seven hundred people turning up at The Joyce Pub on 39th Street for it.

It was great to meet so many people that night and to hear their different stories. Some were over, like us, just for the weekend, others have been in America for decades. All had a common connection, though, to Mayo, to the football and to the elusive hunt for Sam.

In the days since getting back home, I’ve been thinking some more about those transatlantic links involving the GAA, which help to place the trip within its proper historical context.

Sunday’s match in the Bronx was, of course, but the latest instalment of the long-running intertwinement of Ireland and America within the GAA. It’s a link that has strong Mayo connections, particularly in light of our emigration experience, which means that when it’s our turn to play the Yanks, a strong Mayo presence in the City That Never Sleeps is guaranteed.

It was during Covid, when I was researching a historical piece for the blog about delays in completing previous Championships, that I came across the story about the GAA’s ‘American Invasion’ of 1888.

The purpose of this trip was to raise funds for the planned revival of the ancient Tailteann Games. Undertaking it led to the GAA deciding not to play either the football or hurling Championships that year.

The initiative proved to be a financial disaster and a number of the travelling party decided to stay put across the water. The trip did, though, spark increased interest in Gaelic games in the US and it helped to forge the transatlantic connection that those of us who were over there last weekend saw at first-hand.

That’s not, however, the start of the story of Gaelic games in America. The first organised Irish hurling and football club was established in New York in 1857, nearly thirty years before the GAA itself was founded, with the aim of promoting “truly Irish national sport.”

It’s also noteworthy that last year, 135 years on from the American Invasion, New York competed for the first time in the preliminary quarter-final stage of the newly instituted Tailteann Cup.

For years, New York’s county team only had one day out in the Championship. While the Connacht SFC match in Gaelic Park remains their biggest day of the year, entry to the Tailteann Cup has opened the way for them to hosting a possible second home game each year, should they win at the preliminary quarter-final stage.  

While we’ve been playing New York at regular intervals since they entered the provincial Championship on the eve of the Millennium, our history of taking them on in matches over there goes back much further than the last twenty years.  

The first Mayo GAA tour of the US occurred as far back as May 1932 at the invitation of the prominent Irish-American and Bohola native Bill O’Dwyer. Then, as now, the trip was about far more than football, which was maybe just as well, as Mayo lost all three matches they played on that tour.  

The victorious 1936 All-Ireland winning team followed in the wake of that first trip, with the travelling party on the SS Manhattan docking in New York in May 1937.

That storied team fell to defeat against New York in their opening game too. Once their sea legs had stabilised, however, the reigning All-Ireland champions beat the locals comfortably in the next two games. In doing so they clinched the O’Dwyer Cup, presented, appropriately, by its donor Bill O’Dwyer.

So it’s clear that this year’s trip was built on a rich heritage of links between the old world and the new. With New York’s entry to the Connacht Championship in 1999 and, in particular, when Connacht counties – starting with Sligo in 2022 – travelled over to play at Gaelic Park, this connection has become much more tangible.

Their defeat of Leitrim last year, which everyone over there recalls with such pride, has ensured that the annual fixture has now become a meaningful one too.

A quarter-century on, however, the arrangement is now being called into question.

I understand these concerns – I was once a strong sceptic of this fixture myself – but, having finally made the trip and having seen at first-hand the positive impact it has on the Irish community over in New York, I’m convinced that the GAA needs to make sure that the New York game in Gaelic Park endures into the future.

It’s only in this way that the strong transatlantic ties that currently exist can be maintained and developed in future years, to the benefit of GAA people on both sides of the Atlantic.