Unleashing 'The Blue Wave' A Strategy for Dublin GAA - Croke Park

1938 All-Ireland Hurling team
special supplements celebrating the Association’s 50 years and Dublin
County Committee published a splendid jubilee brochure. By 1934 the
various Boards administering the games from juvenile to senior levels were
in place.
If the ‘Declaration Rule’ dominated Dublin Conventions in the quartercentury
after 1925, then from 1950 onwards the non-native rule
championed by St. Vincents took centre stage. Originating in the parish
schools on Griffith Avenue the club grew through the Christian Brothers,
who were great nurturers of the games in Dublin, to dominate domestic
competitions in both football and hurling from the 1950s to the 1970s. The
non-native was excluded from their playing ranks and the County Board was
to implement the same policy in the selection of county teams. Success for
St. Vincents in Dublin competitions was not translated at senior county level
– one title in both the 1950s and 1960s – into national dominance.
Perhaps the competition engendered by the city/country divide made the
Dublin championship too intense. Perhaps, St Vincent’s greatest players, as
adept with the camán as with the football, simply played too many games
while their competitors at inter-county level, such as Kerry in football and
Kilkenny in hurling, were focussed on a single code.
Apart from its too brief Indian summer in 1961 Dublin hurling, if measured
in national senior titles, suffered a dramatic decline.
Paper wars over Rule 27, or the Ban as it was generally referred to,
dominated the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dublin as a capital city had
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