O'Donovan Rossa GAC'S Centenary year celebrations culminate with their Gala Dinner in the Europa Hotel on Friday 25 November, with over 500 members and friends attending.  It also marks the launch of their 160 page Centenary Book, charting the formation of the club on the Falls Road in 1916 through to the present day. 

Club Chairman, Donal McKinney, in his centenary book introduction epitomised all that is good about not just Rossa, but all GAA clubs throughout Ireland.  It demonstrates the courageous resilience of a grassroots GAA club.

"O'Donovan Rossa is much more than a sports club.  It is a beating heart that promotes friendships among the most diverse and eclectic mix of people who cherish and value our Gaelic games"  

O' Donovan Rossa GAC is, by any standards, a remarkable club. A voluntary sports' club does not exist for 100 years if it were not!  Our Centenary Book captures a flavour of all that has gone before us and helps to give testimony as to why we are a great club. We are a club that our members, Antrim Gaels and the wider GAA family can be proud of. Over 100 years the Rossa family have carried the mantle given to us by Cusack, Kelvey, Fox and others: we have excelled in the promotion of our Gaelic games and culture.

This year is of course special to our nation - we have done much to remember and celebrate the contributions of those who fought and died 100 years ago so that future generations might live as citizens of a free and independent State.

The decades from which the rebellion of 1916 sprung were ones of vision, energy, and imagination. It was a time of cultural renewal in Ireland.  It is all too easy 100 years later to forget what people gave up for our independence and our rich Rossa GAA heritage.

This book celebrates not only that heritage, but also the many innovative ways in which we will ensure the future Rossa generations' needs are met.

The Rossa is an embodiment of many things:  passion, pride, fidelity, companionship, joy and heartbreak in equal measure, teamwork, fun and great memories but it also means education, leadership, respect, self-discipline, volunteerism and fundraising, generosity of spirit, goodwill, commitment, ambition, and vision.  

This publication with its fine words and pictures helps to bring to life the people who gave up so much for successive generations. The stories and pictures recall the great people who we are privileged to know as our, family, friends, and mentors.  They taught us the games' rudiments; willed us on to higher and greater excellence; taught us about endurance;  cleaned our  training rooms; lined and cut our pitches; they stood on wet sodden winter days willing us on; they encouraged us to do things better the next time; they washed dirty  kits week in week out, brought us to matches, fed and watered  us , organised training and travelled the length and breadth of Antrim to see us play  and of course they shared our grief but also  laughed with us in the many good times. These people were our flesh and blood and their souls lives through each and every one of us.

Therefore, the great O'Donovan Rossa GAC is much more than a just a sport club. It is a beating heart that promotes friendships among the most diverse and eclectic mix of people who cherish and value our Gaelic games.

So as this book casts a glance to the past it has one eye to a continual bright future.  The book goes back 100 years, to another era, and in much less fortunate times, when a couple of young men up on Bunker's Hill thought it would be a good idea to establish a new GAA club.  A century later the founding fathers of that fledging club can rest knowing their efforts have surely been vindicated many times over by the people who came after them and who took on the stewardship of this great club - O'Donovan Rossa, Belfast!

Nobody has captured the joys and complexities of GAA more brilliantly than Seamus Heaney.  In 'Markings', Heaney writes of four jackets laid on bumpy ground for goalposts, teams picked and, then, a game underway:

            Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field

As the light died and they kept on playing

Because by then they were playing in their heads

He concluded:

It was quick and constant, a game that never need

Be played out. Some limit had been passed,

There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness

In time that was extra, unforeseen, and free.

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