O'Donnell, John ('Kerry') (1899–1994), businessman and GAA administrator, was born on 15 November 1899 in Gleann na nGealt, Castlegregory, near Camp, Co. Kerry, the eldest child of Michael O'Donnell, a local farmer, and his wife Johanna (née O'Connor). At age 19 he emigrated to Canada and was a lumberjack operating north of Montreal before removing to New York city and then in 1922 to Detroit, where he worked in a Dodge car factory, played baseball and attended night school. A New York bricklayer from 1926, he bore a name common among Irishmen in the city so acquaintances distinguished him as John 'Kerry' O'Donnell. He grew obsessed with Gaelic football during a 1928 visit to Ireland and played for Camp in the West Kerry League alongside his brother Tim (1907–2003), who won three all-Ireland titles with Kerry. Back in New York, John lined out for the Kerry Gaelic football club there until 1942.
His later claim to have endured three jobless years following the 1929 crash seems improbable given his irrepressibility. He surfaced in the bar trade once prohibition ended and opened his first tavern-restaurant in 1935, accumulating a further four such establishments over the next decade. In 1934 he married Helen O'Callaghan, a New York city native whose parents were from Brosna, Co. Kerry. They settled in the Bronx at Riversdale, and had three sons and five daughters.
From 1929 he engaged in the administration of the New York GAA and, despite being dogged by rumours concerning his business affairs, served as either its secretary or treasurer for much of the 1930s, while organising social events, tours to New York by visiting Irish GAA teams, and the tour to Ireland in 1937 by New York's Kerry club. In 1944 he leased the Bronx venue used for Gaelic games in order to prevent its takeover by a soccer organisation. The cost of doing so and of upgrading the grandiosely renamed Croke Park obliged him to sell all but one of his taverns. He struggled initially, as GAA activity in New York had lapsed during the wartime ban on immigration and the absence of young men on military service.
His failed attempt to have the replayed 1946 all-Ireland football final held in New York as a means of reviving the local GAA bestirred the New York board's advocate in Ireland, Canon Michael Hamilton, who in April 1947 convinced the GAA's annual congress to sanction the exportation of that year's football final to the city. The GAA central council later ratified this astounding decision after O'Donnell assuaged myriad concerns, particularly regarding the proposed venue, the Polo Grounds baseball park. Supervising the game headquarters, he enabled an audacious logistical feat. Although the strict ticketing arrangements and steep prices produced a disappointing 35,000 attendance, the celebrated Polo Grounds final yielded record profits and popularised tours to New York.
From the late 1940s, surging Irish immigration produced a GAA boom in New York, which soon boasted sixty-five clubs. O'Donnell's stadium, known as Gaelic Park from the mid 1950s, hosted four matches every Sunday watched by some 4,000 spectators. Gaelic Park staged the touring Irish sides' secondary exhibition matches and also their headline encounters against New York selections once the Polo Grounds ceased to be available from 1959. Operating the main social outlet for the Irish in New York, O'Donnell thrived off the large bar, drawing accusations of exploiting vulnerable immigrants. Yet he was a generous benefactor, who charged cheap admissions, found employment for struggling new arrivals, and closed early on Sunday nights to prevent customers from getting into trouble at work. Field days were held at Gaelic Park for assorted benevolent causes both locally and in Ireland, as were banquets, meetings, Irish music concerts, and anti-partition rallies.
O'Donnell's connections assured him of his tenure and a nominal rent at Gaelic Park from its owner, the Irish-dominated New York City Transit Authority. In return, Gaelic Park was used gratis for fund-raising events on behalf of his political and trade union allies, particularly fellow Irish natives William O'Dwyer (qv), who as mayor of New York (1946–50) had facilitated the 1947 Polo Grounds final; O'Dwyer's brother Paul (qv), a lawyer and sometime New York city councilman; and the Transport Workers Union leader Michael Quill (qv). O'Donnell's pre-eminent status within New York's Irish community was instanced by his selection as grand marshal of the city's St Patrick's Day parade in 1970.
Dictatorially ruling New York GAA until well into the 1970s, O'Donnell was elected its president on seven occasions (1940, 1955, 1958–60, 1972–3) and served repeatedly as vice-president, treasurer and secretary, and as manager of the New York Gaelic football team. (He was also the president and patron of the Kerry club.) The always-fraught relationship between the New York board and Dublin headquarters was especially bad when the compulsively quarrelsome O'Donnell was in his gleefully disreputable pomp. Upholding New York's unaffiliated status, he disdained his antagonists as incompetent and scorned their principled amateurism; his restless, outsized personality and financial permissiveness clashed irreconcilably with the Irish GAA's cumbersome power structures and obsessive dogmatism.
GAA purists took umbrage at the sale of alcohol during matches in Gaelic Park, the sponsorship deals O'Donnell struck on behalf of New York GAA with breweries, and his poaching of players from Ireland through financial inducements and soft jobs. Furthermore, he bypassed the central council and disrupted the GAA calendar by enticing county teams and clubs to New York for unofficial exhibitions. Although he barred uncooperative journalists from Gaelic Park, the Irish media lapped up his withering criticisms of the central council. Answering direct questions with ambiguous parables, he enjoyed holding court, his proud, avid features radiating a sly belligerence. He was also a prolific correspondent, composing extravagantly phrased letters in an immaculate copperplate hand.
Commencing in 1950, the regular GAA tours – both to New York by Irish teams and to Ireland by New York teams – proceeded amid constant wrangling rooted in O'Donnell's bravura brinksmanship. Differences arose over finances, format, dates, choice of referee, New York's selection of players deemed ineligible by central council, and the New York team's physicality. Reminiscent of how Gaelic games were played in Ireland during O'Donnell's youth, the roughhousing owed something to his fiery dressing-room orations and was consistent with the robust fare normally on offer at Gaelic Park, which American reporters dubbed the 'Bronx Bloodpit' and where visiting teams and referees were menaced by New York supporters and officials.
From 1962 O'Donnell invited leading GAA players in Ireland to participate in the Cushing Games, a series of exhibition matches held in Boston and New York in support of the catholic missions in South America (initiated by Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston). Continuing annually until 1973, the Cushing Games earned O'Donnell a knighthood of St Gregory from the catholic church in 1969 and inspired the GAA all-star tours. Similarly he arranged 'compromise rules' encounters between New York and Australian rules football teams, which were later adopted by the GAA in Ireland, and took New York on world tours in the 1960s and 1970s. His calculated munificence meant he had supporters as well as detractors across Ireland, especially in Kerry. Made assistant trainer of the Kerry footballers for their 1969 all-Ireland triumph, he was sacked a year later for rowing with the county chairman over the Kerry team's world tour.
Despite his efforts as national treasurer of the American Irish Immigration Committee, changes to the US immigration laws in 1965 curtailed Irish immigration and Gaelic Park attendances fell from the late 1960s. (Many Irish also left the Bronx during this period.) The short-sighted and controversial expedient of paying Irish-based players to travel over for weekend club matches alleviated this decline, as did the regular staging of rock festivals in Gaelic Park during the 1970s.
As his financial position weakened in the late 1960s, the previously astute O'Donnell imprudently escalated tensions with GAA central council before relations sank to a new low in 1970 when the referee was assaulted and suffered a broken jaw following a ferocious encounter between the Cork and New York hurlers at Gaelic Park. After the New York board refused to accept the central council's ensuing suspension of one of its players for life, official tours to New York were banned until 1973. A younger generation of New York GAA officials reacted by advocating a more constructive attitude towards the central council in opposition to O'Donnell.
He repelled this challenge, partly by stoking the New York GAA's traditional republicanism through his characteristically fervent and outspoken support for the Provisional IRA. Frequently embarrassing the central council on this divisive issue, he was heavily involved from 1970 in NORAID, an organisation established ostensibly to provide relief for distress in Northern Ireland, but widely assumed to be funding arms purchases for the Provisional IRA. NORAID operated hand-in-glove with the New York GAA, its collectors a ubiquitous feature of Gaelic Park. When O'Donnell arranged a tour to New York by a 'six counties' football team in 1971, the central council refused permission (though it proceeded nonetheless) because there was no assurance that the money would go solely to the distressed.
The New York GAA finally slipped from O'Donnell's grasp in the late 1970s, but as manager of Gaelic Park he continued to disrupt relations with the central council through assorted provocations. Soon after the dismal failure of his vainglorious bid for the presidency of the GAA in 1981, his animosity towards the Roscommon-born New York GAA official Terry Connaughton led an affronted O'Donnell to pilfer the Sam Maguire Cup, then on show in New York, and spread rumours that the culprit was a Roscommon supporter disgruntled by his county's recent all-Ireland final loss. The trophy eventually reappeared, daubed with pro-Roscommon and pro-IRA graffiti.
Renewed Irish immigration during 1985–90 produced bumper crowds at Gaelic Park, but exposed a more expectant generation to the deplorable state of what had become a glorified drinking den. O'Donnell's longstanding failure to develop Gaelic Park embarrassed the New York GAA, which also challenged him regarding his allotment and unsupervised collection of the gate receipts. Disputes over admission prices led to the ground being closed to the GAA for a month during 1986 and to the cancellation of the New York club final replay in 1987. Old age failed either to temper O'Donnell's pugnacity or induce his retirement, though he delegated the daily running of Gaelic Park to his children.
Determined efforts were made from within the Irish community to oust him when his lease came up for renewal in 1990, but despite a damning consultants' report on his tenancy and the rival bidders' readiness to invest more in the stadium, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority made the controversial and politically motivated decision to award O'Donnell a twenty-year lease. This entailed a much higher rent and was conditional on $1.5 million worth of renovations, for which he needed the New York GAA's help. After months of tense negotiations, a projected deal unravelled in April 1991 due to the personal bitterness between O'Donnell and the principal New York GAA officials.
O'Donnell retained the bar, but the pitch was leased to Manhattan College. Partly to deprive him of custom, the New York GAA unsuccessfully sought an alternative venue before coming to terms with Manhattan College in 1994 following three calamitous years of staging matches in an open field. Just as this agreement was reached, O'Donnell died in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx on 21 April 1994 after a short illness and was buried in Gate of Heaven cemetery, Hawthorne, NY. In confronting the GAA with its uncomfortably violent past while portending its commercially tainted future, O'Donnell epitomised the diaspora's unsettling influence on the insular pieties of post-independence Ireland.