Patrick Holland - the curious case of the WW1 Tyrone GAA pilot

The curious case of Patrick Holland – the former Tyrone GAA county secretary and prominent referee who left the GAA world behind to join the RAF to fight for Britain in World War 1.

This month, a new book 'Memories: 1900-56' by the late Tyrone historian Joe Martin, brings the Dungannon man's life to a wider audience, after the initial research carried out by historian Dr Dónal McAnallen.

With the GAA’s ban on members of the British security forces from membership in effect throughout the 20th century, the association wouldn’t seem like a hotbed for potential recruits, but as McAnallen has discovered over the years, that simply wasn’t the case.

What makes Holland’s case so unique though, as McAnallen explains to RTÉ Sport, was the prominence he held in GAA circles at a time when the county secretary was an all-encompassing role.

"The case of Patrick Holland stands out because he held a vital role in the GAA and then he turned away from that quite suddenly," said McAnallen, who won a GAA MacNamee award in 2019 for his publication, 'Forgotten Gaelic Volunteers', which examines GAA members who fought in the war.

"As I discovered, there were dozens, scores, hundreds probably, of GAA members who fought in the First World War in one guise or another.

"It’s impossible to put a number on it because they were generally men of lower ranks whose enlisting wasn’t reported. They didn’t go to secondary school, they didn’t go to university, they didn’t advance to high ranks in military terms and a lot of their sporting participation might not have been high level.

"I traced 150 players from all across Ireland through various sources, but there’s probably a lot, lot more who went to fight but we’ll just never know.

"The reason why Holland is