like the Gaelic Athletic Association the organisation served as an occasion and cover for nationalist recruitment. Seán T. O'Kelly recalls that, as early 1903, as a travelling manager for An Claidheamh Soluis, he was in a position to recruit young men for Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in every one of 32 counties. It was through the League that many future leaders of the independence struggle first met, laying the foundation for groups such as the Irish Volunteers (1913). "While being non-political", Michael Collins saw the League, by "its very nature", as "intensely national". Under a system of foreign rule that made the people "forget to look to themselves, and to turn their backs upon their own country", it did "more than any other movement to restore national pride, honour and self-respect". Arthur Griffith had been similarly dismissive of the League's political neutrality of the League. Popular support for the revival of the language, he argued, sprang precisely from its role as a mark of Irish nationality. As the nationalist impulse behind the League became more obvious, and in particular as the League began to work more closely with the Catholic Church to secure support for teaching Irish in the schools, Unionists withdrew. Hyde's effort to leave space for unionists was lost. They were themselves moving toward a distinct Ulster unionism which rejected any form of Irish cultural identity. Increasingly Republicans were blunt about what they saw as the League's place within the nationalist movement. The paper, Irish Freedom, declared:The work of the Gaelic League is to prevent the assimilation of the Irish nation by the English nation [...] The work is as essentially anti-English as the work attempted by Fenianism or the Society of United Irishmen [...] The Irish language is a political weapon of the first importance against English encroachment.The issue of the League's political independence was decided at its Annual General Meeting held in Dundalk in 1915. Rumours circulated that John Redmond's Irish Parliamentary Party were seeking to take over the League as they had earlier attempted to take over the Irish Volunteers. Diarmuid Lynch of the IRB mobilised Brotherhood members positioned throughout the League to secure the nominations and votes required to appoint a new Coiste (executive) that "was safe from the IRB viewpoint". Northern Protestants The first Ulster branch of the Gaelic League was formed in east Belfast in 1895, a year after the death of