Ard Bó Uí Dhonnabhain Rossa

Club Name and Crest

Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa

Ardboe O’Donovan Rossa Gaelic Football Club is titled after the Irish Patriot Jeramiah O’Donovan Rossa. The Club name adapted in the 1940′s is used be many G.A.A. clubs in Ireland and abroad.

Jeramiah was born in September 1831 at Rosscarbery, County Cork and at the youthful age of twenty five set up the Phoenix Society which in 1858 amalgamated into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. It was this which lead to his first imprisonment at the hands of the English in Cork Prison.

After serving his eight month sentence he married and in 1862 took over the running of the Fenian weekly newspaper, ‘The Irish People’. In 1865 his offices were raided and Rossa and his workers were jailed for six years for challenging the right of British rule in Ireland. On his Release Jeramiah, banished from his own country for life, spent the rest of his days in New York, where he expressed a wish to be buried in Ireland before his death on the 29th June, 1915 but he was buried in St. Peters Cemetery on Staten Island.

Rossa’s body was exhumed, when his wish to be returned to his homeland was realised on the 1st August, 1915. The Funeral of O’Donovan Rossa to Glasnevin Cemetery was one of the greatest manifestations of national resurgence witnessed in recent times. All Ireland seemed to be present, listening to Pearse extolling the merits of a man who would have his country “not free merely but Gaelic as well, not Gaelic merely but free as well,” and many who listened as the future leader of the Easter Rising declared that while Ireland held the graves of her Fenian dead, Ireland unfree would never be at peace, pledged themselves there and then to the task of achieving Rossa’s unfulfilled objections.

The club crest is focused around the most famous monument in the Parish, ‘The Old Celtic Cross of Ardboe’ which is dominant in the centre of the crest. The 18ft. high cross is Ulster’s finest carved cross and dates back to the ninth century.

Ard Bó, which is Ardboe in Irish is at the top of the crest with the ‘A’ in a Celtic design while Tír Eoghain, Irish for Tyrone is at the base of the crest.

The hand represents the red hand of Tyrone and the symbol of the ‘dR’ inside a circle is an acronym for the club name, ‘O’Donovan Rossa’.