The meeting that invented the GAA
Saturday, 3pm, November 1884
Michael Cusack, a schoolteacher from Carron in Clare, and Maurice Davin, a farmer and athlete from near Carrick-on-Suir, had exchanged letters through the summer of 1884 about the state of Irish sport. On 1 November they called a meeting at Hayes' Commercial Hotel in Thurles. Seven men showed up — Cusack, Davin, John Wyse Power, John McKay, J.K. Bracken, Joseph O'Ryan and Thomas St. George McCarthy. Davin presided. They founded the Gaelic Athletic Association 'for the cultivation and preservation of national pastimes'. The GAA now has over 500,000 members and runs the two largest stadiums in Ireland. All of it from one room, on a Saturday afternoon, in this town.
The captain the stadium is named for
Tom Semple and the Blues
Thomas Semple was born in Thurles in 1879 and hurled as a half-forward for Tipperary through a dominant decade: All-Ireland medals in 1900, 1906 and 1908 as captain of the Thurles Blues club. In 1910, he helped organise the purchase of the showgrounds in Thurles that would grow into one of the great sporting venues in Ireland. In 1971 the stadium was named after him. In 2022 FBD Insurance added a naming rights title — it is now officially FBD Semple Stadium, though most people drop the prefix.
How a closure became a conservation story
The Sugar Factory and the Wetlands
The Thurles Sugar Factory opened in 1934 and ran until 1989. Three hundred permanent jobs and seasonal employment for farming families across Tipperary. When it closed, the economy felt it for years. But the factory's settling ponds had created accidental wetland habitats, and a group of locals moved to save them. The Cabragh Wetlands Trust eventually secured over 80 acres on the Suir floodplain. What was an industrial lagoon is now the largest area of freshwater semi-natural floodplain on the river — reed beds, fen carr, otters, herons. The factory is gone; the wetlands remain.
What the legend says happened
The Devil's Bite and the Rock of Cashel
The folk story running through north Tipperary is that the Devil was flying over the county, took a bite out of Devil's Bit Mountain just north of Templemore, broke a tooth on the limestone, and spat the rock out. It landed 25 kilometres south and became the Rock of Cashel. Geologists disagree. But the notch in the ridge of Devil's Bit is real enough, and on a clear day from the summit you can see nine counties. The River Suir begins its journey on those same slopes — so at least the geography checks out.
Eight centuries of pilgrimage, and a robbery
Holycross and the Relic
Holycross Abbey, six kilometres south of Thurles on the Suir, was founded around 1180 by Donal Mór O'Brien to house a relic of the True Cross. For eight centuries the abbey drew pilgrims. In 2011 the reliquary containing the relic was stolen in a raid using an angle grinder. By January 2012 it had been recovered by the Gardaí, relatively undamaged, and returned. It is now back in the abbey, which is still a working parish church and still draws visitors.