O'Donoghue scores zero in patriot game

Tom Humphries LockerRoomThere's a part of our tribe who just love the sound of their own voices a little too much. What can we do? Can't live with them. Can't shoot them.

Even by the gabby standards of that herd who think too little and talk too much though, John O'Donoghue's decision to get up on his hind legs and call upon the GAA to open up Croke Park as a national stadium was a speech too far.

The shock of it. The triple brass neck of it. The sheer mind-numbing pathos of it. Hearing John O'Donoghue advising the GAA of what a "patriotic gesture" might look like was surely a landmark in this saga which has yet to produce a landmark.

After the prolonged national embarrassment which Fianna Fáil and their feeder fish in the Progressive Democrats have inflicted on this country in relation to the national stadium issue, the most patriotic gesture any of them could make would be to sit down and shut up.

For an amateur sporting organisation to have built Croke Park into the stadium it has become was a patriotic gesture. Full stop. End of argument. The GAA's ongoing commitment to the games and culture of this country is a prolonged patriotic gesture. Whether, as an amateur body, it decides to rent the house to two of the world's great professional sports is the GAA's business and nobody else's.

Any decision to open up Croke Park will be a business decision. Nothing more, nothing less.

The matter of National Stadiums and Patriotic Gestures is for those big talkers who have yet to produce either. Before tossing in his tuppence-ha'pworth John O'Donoghue should perhaps have spoken to his leader, who has been loquacious on the matter of national stadiums.

"If you believe soccer, rugby, Gaelic football, ladies' football and camogie and others sports can all be played on the same pitch then you have to be a bit of a nitwit," said Bertie a couple of years back, not knowing perhaps that his words would go vaulting through history to lance John O'Donoghue through his great patriot heart.

Of course that would be the same Bertie who said: "As a nation, not only can we afford this undertaking - we cannot afford to let this opportunity slip."

That was before the Government began reneging on promises to sports bodies, before the humiliation of the UEFA bid and before the poor IRFU - who have been treated as shabbily as anyone through all this - had to go and get their own report done on the feasibility of redecorating Lansdowne Road.

It's odd, isn't it, that anyone from the Soldiers of Destiny should choose to introduce talk of patriotism to the discussion so late in the day. As a nation we are embarrassed regularly when entertaining foreign teams at Lansdowne Road.

As a sports association the GAA was embarrassed but took the PR hits when the Government basically bought it out of a decision to open up Croke Park a few years back. Embarrassed and then hurt when the Government reneged on its part of the bargain.

Perhaps the mention of patriotism was a sly reference to that favourite topic of those talkative types who contribute freely to this nation's various civic forums for cranks. Letter writers, emailers and phone-in callers love the €70 million the GAA has received. They feel it entitles them to hold their weddings and bar mitzvahs in the large square at the Hill end; they believe that in the case of the GAA the acceptance of any public funding means that no more logic or fairness need be applied to the argument that Croke Park must be thrown open.

These people need reminding of various things: the National Lottery and all the fine talk about sport that accompanied its launch; the GAA's contribution to Irish life; the notion of it being worthy in itself to build a national stadium of national games; the GAA's obligation to make sure the GAA's stadium is available first and foremost for GAA players.

We are at a delicate stage. The GAA is tossing about the notion of opening up for business. Recent history in this matter is so spattered with blood and so filled with broken promises that people are still sore.

Those with a genuine interest in the matter tread carefully. Those who want to make a bit of capital out of the whole thing reach for the bullhorns and megaphones.

For sure the GAA has its share of hardliners. There are those for whom the memory of Bloody Sunday will never be erased, there are those who don't like soccer or rugby, there are those who see the opening of Croke Park as the thin end of the wedge which Mary Harney gave us a look at when she suggested a few years back that all GAA grounds should be opened up.

And the GAA knows there are quite a few people in the soccer community who hate the GAA with a passion that is reciprocated only by the craziest of GAA bigots.

Soccer, without a place of its own for now or for the foreseeable future, has resentments which have survived generations after the ban died and will go on surviving. It mightn't be the most comfortable tenancy arrangement.

So it's a tough decision that the GAA have ahead of them. But it's their decision. The GAA doesn't need to hear from John O'Donoghue about what would be "in the best interests of the country".

The Government John O'Donoghue represents has squandered more on the Bertie Bowl dream than Croke Park will ever cost. National interest?

At this moment in time the best thing John O'Donoghue could be doing would be sitting down with his Cabinet colleagues and wondering not what the GAA could do for them but what they could do for the GAA. A tax break here, a grant there, perhaps.

John and the gang should be considering the fact that right now, to borrow a phrase from another code, it is game, set and match to the GAA.

As Dr Jim McDaid, a predecessor of Mr O'Donoghue's, once said, "every other banana republic in the world has their own national stadium".

Fianna Fáil have failed to provide one for this country. If they want the GAA to do it for them, best keep the lips sealed, the fingers crossed and the wallet handy.