Last week, Jim Gavin was elected by the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party to be its candidate for the Irish presidential election, due to take place in late October.

Gavin is best known for his involvement with the GAA – as a player, as a hugely successful manager of the Dublin senior men’s football team, and more recently as chairman of the Football Review Committee, which has led to significant and generally well-received changes to how the game is played.

Fianna Fáil’s relationship with senior GAA figures was a lot more strained in the late 1930s/early 1940s, particularly over the GAA’s treatment of the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde.

On November 13 1938, Hyde, the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, and the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, Oscar Traynor (a former professional footballer, who previously played for Belfast Celtic), attended an international soccer match between Ireland and Poland at Dalymount Park.

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The following month, the GAA removed Hyde as patron of the association for breaching its rules on playing or attending “foreign games”.

The decision........

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