Did I ever tell ye about the time the Blueshirt General O'Duffy tried to proposition a well-known hurler below in Waterford, asks An Fear Rua....

The revelation in a recent RTÉ television documentary that the Irish Fascist leader of the Nineteen Thirties, General Eoin O'Duffy, was involved in a torrid affair with the gay actor, Mícheál MacLiammóir, will have come as no surprise to many GAA followers in Waterford.

For the benefit of his younger readers, AFR may say that MacLiammóir was an improbably camp, over-the-top actor who, for many years, specialised in a one man show based on the life and writings of that other Irish-born gay icon, poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde. Together with his partner, in every sense of that word, Hilton Edwards, MacLiammóir was a founder of the Gate Theatre in Dublin, now one of Ireland's leading theatrical centres. At a time when Irish public opinion was so narrow-minded in other ways, Edwards-MacLiammóir lived openly together in Dublin and were respected figures of the Irish establishment.

O'Duffy, however, was a pantomime horse of a different colour altogether. He had a distinguished enough record in the Irish War of Independence, and later became Commissioner of the Garda Síochána under the first Free State government of WT Cosgrave. In that position, O'Duffy took quite an interest in sport – he was Chef d'Equipe on the Irish team at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics when we took two gold medals. But there were also some nasty rumours at the time that he was overly-interested in, shall we say, the physical prowess of some of the young boxers under the aegis of the Irish Amateur Boxing Association, of which he was a Patron.

The first Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, Eamon DeValera, understandably enough, dismissed O'Duffy from the Commissionership when he was elected to government for the first time in 1932. This rebuff spurred O'Duffy to form a group known as the Army Comrades Association, modelled on Hitler's brown shirts in Germany and Mussolini's black shirts in Italy. These Irish Fascists, under O'Duffy, wore blue shirts. Sometimes, attempts are made to portray O'Duffy as some kind of harmless buffoon. Nothing could be further from the truth. His ambition was to establish an Irish National Socialist state on Hitlerite lines and he proved his commitment to this dangerous notion when he led several hundred misguided young men to Spain to fight on the side of Fascism in that country's tragic civil war.

Learned letter writers to well-thumbed organs like the ‘Irish Times' have expressed doubts about the programme's revelations. However, as his old pal Charlie Bird often says these days on RTÉ News, An Fear Rua can reveal exclusively – for the first time anywhere - contemporaneous confirmation of General O'Duffy's proclivities from an impeccable GAA source in Waterford City! This source told AFR about the experience of a Mount Sion hurler of the Thirties. (Mount Sion is Waterford's leading hurling club, with more than thirty county championships notched up and is the home of some excellent hurlers of more recent vintage, like Tony Browne and Ken McGrath). By all accounts, thia particular hurler a fine strapping lad. Like many a good Waterford man before and after him, he joined the British Royal Navy and rose to the rank of Petty Officer.

Sometime in the Thirties the hurler was returning to duty in Britain on a vessel known as ‘The Great Western'. It was owned by a company called the Clyde Shipping Company and plied between Waterford and Britain until the mid-Fifties. The passengers that particular night included General Eoin O'Duffy. Shortly after the vessel debarked from the quayside at Waterford, and slipped its way along the silent waters of the River Suir, a scuffle broke out on deck, and a man was seen to fell the portly General with a single punch. Most of the onlookers assumed the row was over a political difference. However, An Fear Rua's Waterford informant tells him the real reason was – as he pu of which there was no shortage at the time. As our source put it – ‘O'Duffy tried to rub him up the wrong way ....'

An Fear Rua wonders what on earth the good General might have tried his hand at if he had been present in Nowlan Park the day the famed Kilkenny hurling star, Lory Maher, took the field in a tattered brown overcoat, only to cast it off dramatically as soon as the sliotar was thrown in, to reveal a well-pressed blue shirt ....

These latest revelations about the blue shirt O'Duffy, taken with other revelations about the former Fianna Fáil Taoiseach ‘Charvet' J Haughey's penchant for French hand-made shirts – paid for indirectly, allegedly, by the Irish taxpayer – must mean there is scope for a Ph. D student in an American university somewhere to do a thesis on ‘The Role of the Shirt in the GAA and Irish Politics 1932-1992'.