LIKE MANY PEOPLE, my first experience of the GAA was being brought to matches by my father. This took place in stages: first, to our local club, Palatine, then to Dr Cullen Park, the county grounds in Carlow, and, finally, to my first All-Ireland final in Croke Park in 1979.

There I witnessed one of the contests between the great Dublin and Kerry teams of the 1970s. In time-honoured tradition, my father’s ticket allowed me to be lifted over the turnstile.

Once inside, my father bought the official match programme and gave it to me to mind. Thus began a lifelong pastime of buying the programme of every match I went to and keeping it as a souvenir of the event.

The primary purpose of the match programme is to name the players on each team. It should also include the match officials, the date, time and venue of the match. Most of the early GAA programmes merely fulfil this basic requirement.

As programmes evolved, they also began to include photographs, match reports, season and all-time statistics, player profiles and advertisements. These features are what now make them invaluable local, social and sports history documents.

Team and action photographs have preserved players in the vigour of their athletic youth. Contemporaneous match reports provide us with an idea of how the games were played and perceived at the time.

Advertisements reflect how attitudes have changed regarding alcohol and tobacco consumption and, in some cases, gender roles. Player profiles and statistics have increased our awareness of the people who play our games and further our interest in the GAA.

The earliest known GAA programme was produced on 31 August 1886 for the ‘First Grand Inter-County Contest’ between Wicklow and Wexford at Avondale, the home of Charles Stewart Parnell. The contest consisted of six matches featuring various clubs from the respective counties.

This programme listed the teams, players, match officials and also provided details of the trains on which spectators could travel to and from the venue.

The first programmes produced were never intended to be kept or indeed collected. They were ephemeral, for use on the day of the event to provide the spectators with information about the match.

The programmes for the 1913 and 1914 All-Ireland finals were small and designed to fit into a coat pocket. In fact, some programmes advised spectators to dispose of the programme carefully after the match. This caused programmes to become scarce, and many are no longer in existence. Trying to source the material for this book therefore became an exercise in finding those programmes that have endured.

The earliest surviving All-Ireland final programmes are those from the 1913 finals.
Programmes from All-Ireland finals in 1914 and 1915 also survive, but from then until the mid-1920s, few remain. This may be attributed to the political situation in the country during those years when censorship and the breaking of printing presses made the production of programmes extremely difficult.

The All-Ireland final programmes of the 1920s and........

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