Come Here To Me!

The destroyed car of 1916 leader The O’Rahilly. A Dublin urban myth suggested it found its place buried below Hill 16. (Image Credit: National Library of Ireland)

I am a relatively recent convert to Gaelic football, but I’ve been enjoying cold evenings (and the occasional scorcher) in Parnell Park and Croke Park for a while now, thanks to the invitation of friends. Like with League of Ireland football, I’ve found that there is a strong sense of history and identity among Dublin’s support, which of course finds its best expression on the celebrated terrace of Hill 16.

The Hill is central to the way Dubliners see themselves and their city, synonymous with the packed terraces of the Kevin Heffernan days when Gardaí struggled to keep new young GAA fanatics off the pitch, and the chart storming ‘Heffo’s Army’ shouted that “we came marching in from Ringsend, and from Ballyfermot too”, as “Hill 16 has never seen the likes of Heffo’s Army.”

Yet the Hill doesn’t only represent the triumphs of the capital in GAA, it represents the defiance of Easter Week 1916. The Hill, it was often proclaimed, was constructed from the very rubble that the Helga created in her bombardment of the capital. In the 1980s the Irish Examiner proclaimed that it was “no wonder the Dublin football supporters make no bones about claiming possession on big match days”, as “the famous Hill 16 terracing was built from the stones which were all that remained on the capital’s famous street after the conflict of the 1916 Rising.” As Turtle Bunbury notes in his history of Ireland and World War One, “the items reputedly buried beneath the Hill ranged from the bricks of the General Post Office to a De Dion Bouton motorcar belonging to Michael O’Rahilly, one of the Rising’s slain leaders.”

Prior to becoming Hill 16, the terrace was popularly known as Hill 60, the last major assault of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 in World War One. British forces, with many Irishmen in their ranks, endured enormous losses on the so-called Hill 60, located south of Ypres in Belgium, something that was strongly felt in working class Dublin. Though the Royal Dublin Fusiliers did not partake in the battle, the Connaught Rangers endured very significant losses. In a memoir of growing up in north inner-city Dublin almost in the shadow of Croke Park, Brendan Behan remembered the very powerful local significance of the First World War:

When the singing got under way, there’d be old fellows climbing up and down Spion Kop til further orders and other men getting fished out of the Battle of Jutland, and while one old fellow would be telling how the Munster’s kicked the football across the German lines at the Battle of the Somme, there’d be a keening of chorused mourners crying from under their black shawls over poor Jemser or poor Mickser that was lost at the Dardanelles.

The terrace was completed in 1915, in time for that years All Ireland Football Final. The Rising remained an idea in the heads of men like James Connolly and Seán Mac Diarmada, keen to capitalise on the chaos of the on-going European war. The adopted colloquial name of the terrace was tied on to a very recent moment then, much like Anfield’s Kop was a nod towards the Boer War and the Battle of Spion Kop.

Of course, the terrace witnessed some scenes of drama during the subsequent War of Independence. IRA Intelligence Officer Daniel McDonnell remembered standing on it during the Bloody Sunday massacre in his statement to the Bureau of Military History:

We parked ourselves on the famous Hill 16, and the match had just started when, as far as we could see, there was a rumble and bustle going on around the entrance gate at the Hogan Stand side. I personally had no interest in the match. We suddenly realised that the whole,ground was under rifle and machine-gun fire. We scattered and separated from, one another on the Hill. My hat’ fell off and while I was picking it up the man in front of was shot. I was very fit in those days and I ran across the slob lands’ at the back of Hill 16 over to the Ballybough gate. I ran so fast that I was nearly the first to reach it. The gates were not open. I jumped for the top of the gate, caught it and went over the far side

Given the horror of Bloody Sunday, it sat badly with some that the Hill’s name reflected British military conquest. On the fifteenth anniversary of the Rising, the Chairman of the Munster Council of the GAA reportedly raised his objection that “it was sacred ground, which commemorated their fight for freedom and not a fight in a foreign country.  If they could not call it Hill 16 some more appropriate title should be found for it.” From the 1930s, the name Hill 16 was adopted colloquially, reclaiming the Hill for the green.

Irish Independent, 1931.

Along with the new name, came the myth of the rubble. Paul Rouse brilliantly examines this in his Sport and Ireland: A History, finding evidence from as early as the 1930s of the claim. When Meath made it to the 1939 final, ‘Two Gaels’ writing to a regional newspaper urged the men to victory, reminding them the Hill honoured “Ireland’s fallen heroes, whose blood stains the debris in that immortal Hill.” Rouse also points towards a 1966 claim by one man in a Dublin boozer who claimed to have been paid to transfer rubble to Croke Park. Not for the first time, “history was overwhelmed by the power of men in pubs telling stories.”

The myth of The O’Rahilly’s car being amidst the supposed rubble remained widely believed in Dublin into subsequent decades of the Hill. It has appeared in biographies of O’Rahilly, while as recently as 2003, with the imminent redevelopment of the Hill, it was noted in The Irish Times that:

The recent news that the GAA is to redevelop the historic Hill 16 at Croke Park led us to wonder if the contractors will encounter the remains of an early De Dion car reputedly buried there after the 1916 Rising. The car belonged to The O’Rahilly, one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers.

That the Hill is not created from the rubble of Easter Week does not take away from its magic in any way. Rather, the complex history of its colloquial naming and renaming says much about memory and the meaning of the revolutionary period in Ireland. Republicans sometimes struggled with the continued importance of World War One to many working class Dubliners post-independence. Frank Ryan went as far as to speculate that those who participated in commemorative events around the war were primarily “bank clerks and students of Trinity College”. In truth, there were nowhere near enough bank clerks and Trinity students to fill the space around the Wellington Testimonial in the Phoenix Park or College Green every November 11. Ryan’s astonishing statement ignored the fact that as Brian Hanley has rightly noted, “a section of working class Dublin continued to identify with its contribution during the First World War” in the years that followed independence.

So, what happened to the car?