Caid (Irish pronunciation: [kadʲ], meaning "stuffed ball") is a collective name used in reference to various ancient and traditional Irish mob football games. Caid is frequently used by people in Gaeltacht areas of Ireland to refer to modern Gaelic football.[citation needed]
The word "caid" originally referred to the ball which was used. It was made out of animal skin, with a natural bladder inside.
Caid may have been taken around the world by the Irish diaspora.
Caid is believed[by whom?] by some to be connected to the modern sport of Gaelic football[citation needed] the rules of which were officially first written in 1885 and is now organised and governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) as an amateur sport. Most Irish historians, however, reject such a connection.[1]
It was a popular assumption in the late 1980s that Irish football is the basis for Australian football and this was based primarily on the premise that Ireland is older than Australia and the two games look similar. B. W. O'Dwyer[2] and Richard Davis[3] have used correlation between Gaelic football and Australian rules football to infer that caid played some part in the origins of Australian rules football. Such a connection was first debunked by Leonie Sandercock and Ian Turner;[4] however, the first thorough investigation into a link was conducted by Geoffrey Blainey in 1989,[5] concluding that it was nothing more than a myth. Subsequent historians have cited questionable cause as a reason for the assumption, though contemporary historians are suggesting reverse causation as a possible scenario. Nevertheless, the relationship of Irish football to Australian football and a hypothetical role in the Origins of Australian rules football remains the subject of debate. While there are some mentions of Irish playing football in Australia (English and Scottish foot-ball were far more common) prior to the formation of the Melbourne Football Club, there is no specific mention of either "caid", "Irish football" or "Gaelic football" in Australian newspapers of the time. There certainly is reference to Caid being played in Australia as early as 1843 in Adelaide, where Foot-Ball in its Australian sense began to develop through the 1840s and 1850s under a variety of rules; being "Adelaide Rules", "Harrow Rules", "Kensington Rules" amongst others, all these Foot-Ball games were played with remarkably similar style, look and rule sets that would eventually become "Victorian Rules" or actual codification of rules to a game that was well in existence in Adelaide from the 1840s. The first recorded game of "football" in South Australia was an Irish game called "caid". Some believe that this game was an early form of Gaelic Football. The game was played in Thebarton, by people of the local Irish community in 1843 to celebrate St Patrick's Day. The Southern Australian had an advert published on 17 March 1873 on page 3, last column, 3rd advertisement, promoting the game ( https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/71616441 ).[6] The earliest mention from an Irish source in Australia in 1889 was that the old mob football had very little in common with modern Gaelic football which upon first appearance in 1884 was received as more a hybrid of English and Scotch football.[7] Patrick O'Farrell[8] and Chris McConville,[8] along with Marcus De Búrca,[9] have used similar logic to postulate that hurling (which was documented in Australia) was the influence; however, modern hurling was not codified until 1879.