28 October 2009
GAA Founders with Ulster Families: Michael Cusack & John McKay
The strong family ties of two GAA founders with Ulster will provide the focus for the province’s celebrations of the association’s 125th birthday, in an event in the Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library and Archive, Armagh, on the evening of Sunday 1 November.
Exactly 125 years on from the inaugural meeting of the GAA in Thurles, the event in Armagh, run in conjunction with the Ulster Council, will outline recent discoveries about the Co. Down backgrounds of the wife of founder member Michael Cusack, Margaret (née Woods), and John McKay, who also attended that fateful meeting.
Michael Anderson will deliver the first of two lectures, ‘The Cusack Connection: The founder of the GAA and his links to the Woods family of Dromore, Co. Down’. This talk will outline Michael Cusack’s early career in Co. Down and the subsequent family tree of the Cusack and Woods families to the present day.
Kieran McConville will follow this with ‘The Search for John McKay’, an account of several recent important findings about a largely forgotten GAA founder and secretary. It will reveal how McKay’s unmarked grave was located in London in 2009 after many years of mystery, and how it emerged that he was actually a Co. Down native who worked as a journalist in four cities.
The evening will also feature a special reading of GAA patron Dr. Croke’s famous letter to Michael Cusack in 1884, which is often regarded as the founding charter of the association.
The event, which is part of the Ó Fiaich Library’s ongoing Heritage Lottery Funded Outreach programme, begins at 7.30 pm, and refreshments will be served afterwards. Admission is free to all (but IRB members are advised to stay outside the meeting).
Further details may be obtained by contacting Roddy or Dónal at the Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library on 028 3752 2981 or at eolas@ofiaich.ie.
