Heritage

at Play
Reflections on the project, its foundations, its
adventures and its feature film “Playing Irish”

by Zachary McCune
where ideas come from

I
t was still snowing in Providence, Rhode Island when Colleen and I first had the idea
for Heritage at Play. It was a Saturday evening and with a group of friends we were
showing YouTube clips of this and that. It was too cold to go anywhere, so we enter-
tained ourselves by traveling in the free, networked media of our global age.

After watching a number of mishap-filled videos, one friend insisted on showing us a clip of
something called “Road Bowling.” It was an Irish pastime, he said, and it featured Irishmen
of all ages pitching what appeared to be cannonballs down narrow country lanes. He was
struck by how wonderfully strange the games were, and how happy the players looked. As
were we all really.

Watching the video, I was reminded of something I had long forgotten; having once worked
with a number of Irish sailors at a community boating center in Newport, Rhode Island, I
had been exposed to an odd Irish game myself. It featured a long wooden paddle and a small
leather ball. But what was it called? I couldn’t remember. So I tried a few queries about Irish
games and wooden paddles before returning a short video highlight from a game of hurl-
ing. Hurling. That was the game. Look at this, I said to my road bowling friend, you want an
incredible game? Look at this!

Later that evening, with our friends away, Colleen and I went back over the videos. The
hurling had re-opened a long forgotten passion: the powerful excitement of seeing a com-
pletely new game and trying to puzzle out its rules, participants, and passion. But no matter
how many videos I loaded, I simply could not make sense of the game. And no matter how
many videos I watched I found myself driven to watch more. This game was beautiful and
remarkable. It seemed completely novel and notably un-globalized. For even while many of
my friends including Colleen were Irish-American, the game was a complete enigma. Unlike
shamrocks, Guinness, and St. Patrick, this game simply had not made the voyage across the
Atlantic into the popular consciousness of Irish-America.

2
Why?

As any American knows, sports are more than just entertainments and exercise. They rep-
resent an arena of pride and competition. Whether it’s Texas county football rivals or Cold
War hockey show-downs, sports provide a stage for measuring communities against one
another. As such, the ultimate goal of any sport is to grow. To extend beyond its point of
invention or development. For the British, colonization meant replacing native games in In-
dia, South Africa and Australia with cricket and rugby. With the Olympic games, the entire
world learns the same games in order that they may compete on a series of consistent playing
fields.

So what were these Irish men doing playing hurling? From the look of their stadiums, these
were not small-time events. They seemed popular. But why then weren’t they popular any-
where else? Why didn’t Irish-Americans know about these games? What did they mean to
the Irish people? What allowed them to perpetuate year after year in the very face of global-
ization? And how, of course, were they actually played?

how ideas become more

A series of fortunate events allowed these midnight questions to become more than lost
points of inquiry. Indeed, a strange arc of destiny actually allowed Colleen and I to ask Irish
citizens and dedicated Gaelic games players these questions less than six months after we
first thought them up.

The intercession, it would turn out, was the extension of a Brown University campus dead-
line for a “New Media Fellowship.” Reading about the $2,500 grant in a campus email, Col-
leen and I decided to apply for the Fellowships, but realized we would both need to win the
awards in order to make the funding sufficient.

3
 In a long evening a few days later, we drafted a complete proposal for exploring Gaelic games
with a film documentary. In an effort to buttress our application, I would take an Irish his-
tory class, and Colleen would take a film making class. As a group, we knew nothing about
Ireland or filmmaking. I mean we had some instincts, but nothing to really go on. We also
crafted a rough budget. We would need to be in Ireland for between two and four weeks.
We would need to two cameras, and they would have to be very light HD cameras, because
it seemed foolish to travel heavy and without high quality equipment.

And we needed a name for our project. Something catchy.

We did some preliminary research to contextualize our proposal. There was a consistent
theme in the work on Gaelic games; in the face of British sports, Irish nationalists had re-
vitalized Gaelic games as part of their broader efforts at establishing Irish cultural autonomy.
So the games were about heritage. Heritage… that was being played. Heritage at Play.

That was catchy.

Due in the morning, we sent the application in. It was a long shot, but as Wayne Gretsky
was known to say, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. So we took a shot at Ireland
despite never having been there, and knowing nothing about the things we were going to
study.

We can say that now.

For a long time, we didn’t hear anything about our proposal. Not that we were really listen-
ing hard. We were both busy with school work and trying to find jobs for after our coming
May graduation. In a dramatic week in February, Colleen went to the UK for an arts Con-

4
ference, and I went to interview for a job as a high school teacher in northern New Jersey.
And it was then that we received the unlike word that we had actually won the Fellowships
to go to Ireland. And so, thousands of milesly apart, in strange surroundings, we celebrated.

luck & the irish

By the time we actually arrived in Ireland, several things had transpired which were in their
own ways to shape the outcome of our project. The first was that I had completed a great
deal of research (and yet I recognized there was so much more) on the origins of the modern
Gaelic Games movement. I didn’t know much of anything about the GAA after the War
of Independence, but through the separation with Britain, I was fairly well-versed. I also
managed to practice shooting with the HD cameras and high-quality microphones that we
would be using. Finding five minute films both easy to make and fun to watch, I conceived
of the idea for “Broadcasts” from Ireland which would succinctly document our progress
with short, web-ready video clips.

Colleen, on the other hand, managed to make a number of friendships that would serve
us incredibly well in Ireland. A visiting Professor in Brown’s Public Humanities program
turned out to be a Dublin resident and was enlisted to help us find housing. With our bud-
get tight, we hoped to ascertain safe but highly affordable housing for a three week stay that
would be more secure and personal than a hostel room. With a great deal of luck, we negoti-
ated through Ian Russell to “let” (the preferred Irish verb for renting) a small home in Rath-
mines just outside City Centre Dublin. The house was small, and the hot water was sparse,
but it was all our own, and the price of 150 euro a week was simply impossible to beat.

We booked a flight and crossed the Atlantic on a Wednesday evening in late June. When we
arrived, we effortlessly made our way onto O’Connell Street passing Croke Park on our way
into town and offering me the first chance to interview an Irishman (our bus-driver) about

5
 Gaelic games.

It was 7 am when we crossed the Liffey and made our way towards Trinity College and
Grafton Street. Dublin, it would turn out, was quite small and very walkable. It was even
more walkable on that early morning because Aer Lingus had lost my luggage on our direct
flight from Boston. Which was a remarkable feat of ineptitude and absurdity.

At 9 am, when the shops opened, we bought a pre-paid mobile phone. It turned out to be
one of our absolute best purchases, as it not only gave us a 24-hour contact point, but also
enabled us to twitter without an internet connection via text message (which we used fre-
quently). We also would come up with a very clever way of posting blog content drafted in
advance via the cell phone (it had a limited internet browser) which allowed us to keep the
blog active even while we were far from internet access.

Rathmines proved a perfect base of operations for us. Though there was no GAA club in
area, there were three supermarkets, two internet cafes, and a liquor store (in the Irish an
“Off-License”). Our home was also within walking distance of anywhere in downtown
Dublin (about a 50-minute walk from the Liffey) though it was far easier to catch one of the
MANY Dublin Bus services.

colleagues & co-ordinates

We had co-ordinated to work closely with Boston College Ireland’s GAA Oral History
Project because their work seemed closely linked to our idea: use media to interrogate the
meaning of Gaelic games in Irish culture. But though we began our project by meeting with
them in their beautiful St. Stephen’s Green townhouse, it soon became clear that our timing
was poor (a number of the vital staff were about to go to a conference in Europe) and the
conceptual overlap was not incredibly strong. Where they took the importance of the GAA

6
for granted, and wished to push deep into its meaning among the Irish, we were hoping to
produce a comprehensive introduction that would serve people outside of Ireland.

So we followed up with a mutual friend from the Cogut Center for the Humanities at
Brown Unversity. Having grown up playing gaelic games in Texas, Kevin Patton represented
a unique Irish-American connection to the GAA, and he emailed introduced us to relative
Ciaran Goan north of Dublin in Malahide. With a friendly email and a phone number, Cia-
ran invited us up to see a match in suburban Malahide, and we quickly followed up. Ciaran
proved to be our first formal interview and the beginning of a wonderful trip across Ireland.
For when we finished interviewing Ciaran, he insisted on linking us in to Tom Potts, an old
friend, who we could meet with in County Cork. And he advised us to contact his brother,
head of the Irish broadcasting service RTE. Which unfortunately did not turn into an inter-
view or studio tour because Cathal Goan soon announced his surprising retirement.

the daily irish grind

Our days would go something like this: wake up at 10:30, make breakfast, pack lunch, and
be on the road to somewhere by 11:30. We might go to a game at Croke Park (as we did
that first Sunday to see the Dubs play and lose to Meath) or to a club somewhere in Dublin
(as we did when we traveled to Kilmacud to interview Ross O’Carroll). Or we might be in
a travel mode: packing our bags and crossing Dublin for Hueston Station where we could
catch trains to Tullamore (as we did to visit Cloghan, St. Rynagh’s and Ray Bell) or Cork
City (as we did to visit Tom Potts). On other days, we took in Ireland more broadly, visit-
ing pubs to watch GAA games with barstool fans, or just exploring Dublin’s theatres, parks,
bookshops, and attractions. Dublin became our home very quickly, and the Liffey’s ebb and
flow (it’s a tidal river but no one tells you that) became familiar.

7
offaly: the heart of ireland
I don’t we ever could have expected how central our Offaly trip would prove. Once again,
a connection from a friend put us in touch with a remarkably receptive GAA club chair-
man named Ray Bell and we took an invitation to get out of the city. It would be a three
day to trip to the center of Ireland, County Offaly, a place I described well to friends as the
Kansas of Ireland. Ray picked us up at the Tullamore rail station and drove us 50 minutes
to Cloghan near the Galway border. Here, we found Irish life as we’d long expected it. In a
small, quiet village, the church was the centerpiece of town, and the next most important
thing was the pub. We stayed in a wonderful bed & breakfast that was more (wonderfully)
akin to a country inn. Everyone in town knew everyone and quickly found out we were the
Americans with cameras making a film (pronounced in Irish “fil-um”).

After a special unveiling of a new walkway around the town’s GAA pitch, Ray took us
through the players and coaches of St. Rynagh’s GAA Football Club to conduct five minute
interviews. With the shots well cropped, the audio recording working extra well, and the
answers to our questions vividly responded to, the Cloghan recordings became the center
of our documentary “Playing Irish.” With full Irish breakfasts in the morning and evenings
winding down in the pub at night, Cloghan was surely somewhere near the heart of that
imagined Ireland that has been so romanced. And we were smitten by it.

day to day in dublin

We came back to Dublin and took a few days to wrangle the clips we had collected. It be-
came traditional for us to produce our five minute “broadcasts” every three days or so with
four hour editing binges after dinner.

We also became attracted to the small television we had, for as media students, we were
fascinated by the cultural nuance we (attempted to) perceive in the programming of Ireland
and nearby Britain.

8
We spent one wonderful evening out with an old friend of mine who had been a sailing
instructor with me in Newport when I first inspired by Gaelic games. In the bathroom, I
made friends with a international boxing champion. Ireland was like that. It was small in size
and in pretense. In Dublin, there was no real upper crust. Everyone walked the same streets,
drank in the same pubs, watched the same games, complained about the same news.

My friend was from Cork and she insisted we go visit the Rebel County. We did. We already
had Tom Potts lined up as an interview through Ciaran Goan. Plus, Potts was going to show
us the Nemo Rangers club, which had more players than Cloghan had people. It was so big
and famous, I found it in the color photos of a book on the GAA in a Dublin bookstore.
We had to go.

further adventures afield

Cork, I must confess, disappointed us considerably. Where Dublin had the city feel, and
Cloghan felt rural, Cork felt second-best and in-between, like seeing Pittsburgh after New
York or Chicago. Something about the city failed to inspire, and the fact that it poured
while we were there and that we found the citizens less friendly than all the other Irish
solidified our griping. Nemo, however, proved beautiful and massive. Tom was a wonderful
tour guide and interlocutor. But we weren’t much for Cork.

A final trip across the border into Northern Ireland remained on our to-do list when politi-
cal tensions flared in Ulster amidst the protest marches known as the “Twelfth” celebrations.
We had hoped to actually examine how Gaelic games endured in the UK-part of the island
of Ireland, but would never make the trip after rail prices sky-rocketed and a bomb-threat
was called in to our train route into Belfast.

9
 Instead, we stayed in our adopted home and decided to travel a little outside of the city to
Phoenix Park and actually try playing some Gaelic games ourselves. At our earlier Kilmacud
Crokes interview, Ross O’Carroll had showed our basic way around the game of hurling. We
bought hurls from a Dublin sporting goods store, and a from a hurleymaker’s demonstration
at Croke Park. On our way out to the fields that afternoon, we purchased a gaelic fooball for
18 euro. The ball was heavier than a soccer ball and more grippy than a volleyball. We also
bought a children’s book on gaelic football that provided illustrations of the game’s tech-
niques. This was to substitute for an experience we simply couldn’t schedule we anyone in
Ireland: an playing introduction to Gaelic games.

While we had an enchanting afternoon at Phoenix Park playing hurling by ourselves and
kicking the gaelic football, I was very disappointed that despite our youth, athleticism and
efforts, no one actually let us into a game of hurling or football. I had imagined this would
be very easy, as I imagined that like kids playing pick-up basketball, soccer, or football in
America, all I would need would be some confidence or a friendly request to step in. It
would never come to be. Even months after I became quite attached to the feel of the wood-
en hurl and the crack of the ball flying down field, I fear I may never actually play a game of
hurling and that seems regrettable indeed.

end game
We ran out of time and money. Fortunately, they were at about the same time. We certainly
ended up shelling out $500 + of our money for the project, but every dollar was worth it, as
were our adventures and times in Dublin. We bid adieu to the city from the same bus termi-
nal we entered it, driving past Croke Park on our way out to the airport.

Colleen had work to do when we returned, and I had a conference in Washington D.C. for
a week at the end of the July. So we postponed editing the film for nearly three weeks before

10
re-visiting our adventures and becoming overwhelmed by the task of organizing twelve plus
hours into a single cohesive object.

making the film

The good news was that we had a wonderful set-up to work on the film. Colleen got an
apartment in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts and we installed a powerful
air-conditioning unit to cool it down. We edited the film on my Macbook Pro, using the
standard-issue iMovie to the fullest of its capabilities, preferring the lightness of the program
to the bulk of Final Cut Pro.

Our greatest challenge in making the feature film was finding a way to introduce the mean-
ing and details of gaelic games within a narrative structure. Having shot by event and theme,
rather than through a narrative arc, we couldn’t configure a film story for our film idea. We
didn’t want to focus on us, though that seemed one option, but instead wanted to empha-
size the Irish people and the games themselves. We also wanted to avoid a travelogue, as it
seemed distracting and inappropriate. The point wasn’t that the games were here and there
in Ireland, it was that they were everywhere.

Eventually we decided to break the film into two acts, each with three brief movements. The
first act would be about gaelic football, and the second about hurling, although each act
would really consider Gaelic games overall. And we came up with a clever phrase, split into
fragments to narrate the thesis of the film into its constituent parts: A COMMUNITY
– AT PLAY – BELIEVES IN ITSELF / AN ANCIENT SPORT – TAUGHT AGAIN –
CELEBRATES HERITAGE. We decided to repeat this at the end of the film in sequence
to show this connected message, and drive home our thesis.

After three weeks of editing in August, we had a 32-minute film. And we were proud of it.

11
from screen to screen
In the third week of September, nine months after first having the idea, we showed the
film to an audience of ten at a public premiere in Newport, Rhode Island. We followed the
screening with a half hour question and answer period. The response was remarkably posi-
tive, with one woman in the audience, admitting she was from Ireland and came to see what
Americans made of Gaelic games. “You captured the whole ethos” she said, “it’s remarkable.”

For the American watchers, the response was also positive. Like us, they were enchanted by
the games and wanted to know more about how they were played.

But perhaps most importantly, they spoke about the idea of heritage being something that
could be played. “I think you could do a whole series like this,” one local man said, “ a whole
global investigation of heritage at play in different communities.”

Colleen and I smiled when he said that.

We’d been thinking the same thing for sometime.

12
 an afterword
So then this idea, culled from a midnight in the winter, grown full in the summer, and har-
vested in the fall, comes at last towards a gentle conclusion. It’s hard to let go of something
you’ve been so involved in, but the time has returned for new ideas to be considered and
sown for future projects and all that.

As for its players, Colleen Brogan was hired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York
City to be an assistant in the department of Digital Learning. She actually was interviewed
by MOMA while we were in the magical environs of Cloghan, and the heritage at play proj-
ect would prove a considerable influence on the hiring committee who found the project
“exciting” and “powerful.”

Zachary McCune was accepted by a one year master’s program to study Modern Society ang
Global Transformation at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He has been awarded
a Craig Cambridge Fellowship and is a member of Selwyn College where has been invited
to join the College athletics teams in rowing, football (soccer), and rugby. He also noticed
their is a GAA club in Cambridge. Maybe he’ll be a hurler yet.

13
Heritage
at Play
is now the documentary “Playing Irish”
and the intermedia website heritageatplay.org
by Colleen Brogan
& Zachary McCune

photo on cover shows the two filmmakers

document design
by Zachary McCune

creative commons 3.0 - September 2010