“Maybe it’s cringey and maybe other people don’t see it like this but I don’t really care. I see it as a way to bring Irish people together.”
When Patrick O’Rourke (20) moved from Ireland to Groningen to pursue International Business in 2022, adapting to this new but similarly cold country wasn’t a big struggle. “I look at some other countries that people move to, especially like Asia or whatever. I’m like, Jesus Christ, even the alphabets are different, you know. Moving here, everyone speaks English, traditions are pretty similar in general,” he said in an interview with The Northern Times, “it’s not that different.”
Making friends for Patrick, or Paddy as many call him, was also not an issue, but something was missing: a piece of home. That he would soon find, of all places, at a football game in Groningen.
“I was playing in a football match and our goalkeeper wasn’t there and a guy showed up to play in the nets for us,” he says “I was talking to him and he’s from the same place as my cousins,” he continues, “classic Irish thing,” Paddy quickly adds. As it turns out, the guy in question was David Grenham (22), the current chairperson of the local, and Groningen’s only, Gaelic football team, the Groningen Gaels.
“He was just like, oh, man, you should come to training one of these days, it’s a bit of craic,” Paddy says. After the first training, he was hooked. “I showed up and there were only other Irish people there. I just kind of felt like for an hour and a half you’re back home.”
Gaelic football is a fast-paced ball game played between two teams of 15 players. To those unfamiliar with this Irish national sport, the game is akin to a mixture of football and rugby. Though the origin of the current version of the sport can be pinned to 1884 with the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), a version of Gaelic football is traced back as far as the 1600s.
In 2018, a group of Irish students in Groningen decided to bring Gaelic football to the Dutch North when one noted how despite the large number of Irish people in Groningen, no one was playing Gaelic football. “We thought that it would be brilliant if we could establish a club to bring us together to play our national sport, and also build something that will last beyond our time here,” Jack Barrett, one of the founders, previously told The Northern Times.
Six years later, the team still stands, and according to Grenham, despite the game’s deep Irish roots, it is starting to spread in the North. “At the start of the year, you always get loads of different people coming in and like international people come in and want to try it.”
But Grenham still wants to see the team grow more and engage its members. “I just entered us into the Benelux championship,” he says “I want to enter into a lot more matches and try to make the club a little bit bigger, get more membership-paying members. And I think the only way is to go for more matches in the future and more tournaments.”
Last year, the team went to Leuven for a big Gaelic football tournament, which both Grenham and O’Rourke remember very fondly.
“That was a highlight, probably one of the best weekends of my life. We went down to Belgium, with the team. As I said, we were all friends but that weekend, we just became so close,” O’Rourke says.
“Thursday it was King’s Day. So we have King’ s Day on Thursday, the next day hungover going down to Leuven to play. Go down there, stay the night, and then the next morning, we played the tournaments from like 9 am to like 6 pm,” Grenham recounts “Every team was slightly hungover.”
Hangovers aside, the trip was an athletic success: “We ended up winning like the second division,” he explains, “and the girls also brought home a couple of goals.”
The team currently has games planned throughout the year, but this goes beyond giving members an athletic goal to train for. “We’re having a bit of a laugh, getting an Irish community together and, you know, making us feel home when we’re surrounded by a bunch of Irish people playing Gaelic,” Grenham says. A sentiment which Paddy echoes.
“To promote this isn’t just promoting a sport and isn’t just promoting keeping fit. It’s promoting culture,” Paddy adds, “And I feel proud to be part of that.”
