the influence of English public school football games. More recent evidence primarily from Irish and English researchers including Tony Collins, Joe Lennon, Geoffrey Blainey and Aaron Dunne point to the GAA creating Gaelic Football as a hybrid of existing football codes (codifier Maurice Davin in an effort to differentiate from rugby has been found to have been making extensive notes on Association Football (soccer) from which some of the rules were based), and the Victorian Rules of 1866 and 1877 (which the modern Australian rules is based on), which were popular and widely distributed. More recently direct references to the published Victorian rules have been found in the rules of the founding gaelic football club in Ireland, the Commercial Club of Limerick from the 1870s indicating a strong possibility that Australian football found its way to Ireland even earlier than this, perhaps in a similar fashion to the way it was introduced to the colonies of New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand. In 1967, following approaches from Australian rules authorities, there was a series of games between an Irish representative team and an Australian team, under various sets of hybrid, compromise rules. In 1984, the first official representative matches of International rules football were played, and the Ireland international rules football team now plays the Australian team annually each October. Since the 1980s, some Gaelic players, such as Jim Stynes and Tadhg Kennelly, have been recruited by the professional Australian Football League (AFL) clubs and have had lengthy careers with them. Aside from game-play, a social difference between the codes is that Gaelic football is strictly amateur, whereas Australian football offers professional (Australian Football League), (AFL Women’s) and semi-professional (VFL, SANFL, WAFL, etc.) levels of competition, providing a strong financial lure for Irish players to switch to Australian football. Origins Gaelic football The earliest record of a recognised precursor to the modern game date from a match in County Meath in 1670, in which catching and kicking the ball was permitted. The earliest recorded inter-county match in Ireland was one between Louth and Meath, at Slane, in 1712, about which the poet James Dall McCuairt wrote a poem of 88 verses beginning "Ba haigeanta". Gaelic football was codified by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1887. GAA founder and Irish nationalist Michael Cusack wanted the rules of Gaelic football to differ from rugby union, which was making headway in