The Arrival of Hill 16

Ireland- USA hurling match in the Tailteann Games, 1924. (NLI) Croke Park during the Tailteann Games, 1924. (NLI)

The use of the name Hill 60 was a matter of disquiet to some members of the GAA. It is reasonable to suggest that this disquiet existed for some time before it surfaced publicly for the first time at a meeting of the Central Council of the Association in September 1931. Dan McCarthy, a former President of the GAA and then Chairman of the Munster Council, said that he took exception to the use of the name Hill 60. He said that Croke Park was ‘sacred ground… sanctified by the blood of martyrs’. The fight for Irish freedom should be commemorated, McCarthy argued, rather than one that ‘took place in a foreign country, fought by a foreign army’. In response to McCarthy’s words, the secretary of the GAA told the meeting that he had already drawn the attention of the newspaper to the matter. The meeting agreed that whenever he found the name Hill 60 used, he should draw newspaper’s attention to the association’s disapproval. Finally, McCarthy said that they should call it Hill 16, but that if they couldn’t, they should find some other appropriate title.

They called it Hill 16. Advertisements around matches now set out the charges for spectators entering Hill 16. The pressure on the newspapers was also successful and in that same month of September 1931 of the GAA meeting where McCarthy had raised his objections to the Hill 60 name, The Irish Press newspaper was published for the first time. It always referred to Hill 16; only once did it use the term Hill 60 in connection with Croke Park, and even then the paper apologised the following day.

It was one thing, of course, to change the name; it was another to change its origin myth and it took the rest of the decade for the full foundations of the myth to be set out. When the Cusack Stand was opened in August 1938 in honour of the founder of the GAA, Michael Cusack, the then president of the GAA, Pádraig MacNamee said in a speech that Hill 16 was ‘an ever constant reminder of the gallant band who made the supreme sacrifice that this land of theirs might be Gaelic and free’. The first mention of the rubble of the 1916 Rising being used in the redevelopment comes from a letter from ‘Two Gaels’ to the editor of the Meath Chronicle. These men in urging Meath to victory in an All-Ireland Final in 1939, note that the team will be facing the tricolor that will fly above Hill 16 during the playing of the National Anthem ‘in respect to Ireland’s fallen heroes, whose blood stains the debris in that immortal hill’. And so the story began to take hold; it was repeated in the newspapers and eventually hardened into fact: Hill 16 had been built from the rubble of the 1916 Rising.