 |
The All-Ireland
Fifty years of age (almost) and never been to an All-Ireland final. Having said that, I’ve never been to an All-Ulster (minus Cavan/Monaghan/Donegal) Unionist Council final either - in Croak Park, a hotel somewhere in South Belfast.
When I was a kid earlier in the last century, old people - that is, anyone with dodgy hormones - used to listen to the All-Ireland final on Radio Eireann, delivered in the inimitable voice of Micheal O’Hehir, who, incredibly, did his first broadcast of the match as a teenager in 1938.
Broadcasting was made possible because around 1870 Annie Jameson from County Wexford married Giuseppe Marconi and they had a son called Guglielmo who invented wireless telegraphy, better known as radio. In those days Irish people invented everything: Michael Collins, guerrilla warfare; James Joyce, literature; John McCormack, opera singing; Val Doonican, folk music; Eamonn Andrews, ‘This Is Your Life’.
When I grew up, and out, we would watch the All-Ireland every year on television. So popular is the final that in 1983 prisoners in H-Block 7, Long Kesh, postponed their mass escape by a week in order to see the match. Well, that’s what Bik McFarlane told the GAA when he went looking for final tickets.
In recent years my family has tended to go out to a club and watch the match on a big screen and cheer the underdog. The atmosphere is electric and there is pride in knowing that the players are out there for the love of the sport, their club, their parish, their town, their county and not because Elton John or Mohammad Al-Fayad has beguiled them with a fee of £90,000 pounds a week, or whatever. It’s great to think that only four Gardai, two of whom are playing opposite each other, are required to supervise 84,000 peace-loving people.
The championship cup is named after Sam Maguire, a Cork Protestant who went to work in London where he played for the GAA. He worked in the post office and there he met and recruited to the IRB a sixteen-year-old Michael Collins. Sam Maguire was in charge of the IRA unit that assassinated General Henry Wilson, security advisor - that is, chief securocrat - to the first unionist government, outside his London home at a time when the IRA was on ceasefire.
After last year’s final, DUP councillor Nelson McCausland telephoned Radio Ulster’s ‘Talkback’, outraged that the premier trophy was named after ‘a terrorist’ and he linked Sam Maguire, who has been dead seventy five years, with Sam Bin Laden and Al Quada.
Even our cat shook her head in disbelief.
Probably, the best work on the history of the GAA is ‘Green Fields’ by Tom Humphries. In that brilliant book he got to the heart of what makes Irish people tick: fishermen from Killybegs practising football while docked in wintry Norway; a blanket man in the H-Blocks risking a beating and solitary confinement to smuggle GAA results to news-starved comrades; Niall Cahalane from Cork, who had his leg broken twice, a cheek bone shattered, the ligaments to his knees and ankles shredded, his shoulders dislocated, his fingers broken, continuing to play for the love of it. Or Limericks’s Dave Clarke, who’ll never be allowed to forget saying, “I’d sleep with my hurleys before I’d sleep with my girlfriend, you know.”
Seven men sat down in a billiards room at Hayes Hotel, County Tipperary, on 1 November 1884 and formally founded the GAA. “When all other forms of Irishness had been stamped out,” says Humphries, “the spirit burst out of captivity in the form of play” in a game that became “a passionate and rugged expression of a people’s soul.” Because of those roots, the GAA never quite managed to become merely a sporting organisation. Gaelic games are politics and culture, recreation and entertainment.
Every club is named for a place, a saint or a republican martyr - or a GAA martyr. The goalposts of his local GAA club frame the little white monument dedicated to the memory of Aidan McAnespie, shot in the back by a British soldier at Aughnacloy in 1988. In recent times, Rule 21 has been amended, allowing the inundation of members of the state forces in the North to play.
The world of the GAA is a world of talk and stories, laughter and passion, common ground where Irish people can celebrate themselves and each other, a non-violent expression of a cultural and obliquely political ideal, a crossover from nationalism into sport.
Armagh has gone crazy. It hasn’t been in an All-Ireland final in twenty five years. A woman was interviewed on the radio on Friday and said that when she came home from work she couldn’t find her house until she realised that it was the one painted orange and white by her son in the team’s colours! Even the sheep have been dyed orange!
On Thursday night my wife phoned me from work. “Would you like to go to the All-Ireland final?” she asked. What! “I got a phone call from my friend Pat in Dublin,” she said. “She’s got two spare tickets.”
On Saturday, on the radio, I hear that David Trimble at a press conference in Croak Park Hotel has pulled out of the all-Ireland ministerial council and has given the GAA three months to clean up its act.
“Time has now been called,” says Jeffrey Donaldson. “The game is up.”
Cares I, aged forty nine and nine months heading off to Dublin in the green, in the green, with our Ray Bans glistening in the sun…
[ back ]
© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison