Relevance of GAA dying in Dublin

Watch the TV tonight. True Lives on RTE. There's something to be learned.

Not long ago two young fellas from my old school came to see me. They had inquiries to make about the glamorous world of sports journalism. How did it compare with life on Devil's Island? Was the community service option not a better choice? Was that a bottle of liquor in the brown paper bag hidden in my drawer? Why is literacy "an advantage but not absolutely necessary?"

Anyway, after a while I ceased my ego-driven discourse and grumbled that we'd had enough about me. What about them? They began speaking about life in the old alma mater, Fairview's principal academy of learning and still folks, yes, still the only school to have produced two Taoisigh.

One aspect had changed critically. Being on the school hurling or football teams was no longer sacred. Being on the team (or not as was mostly the case) had been an obsession for most of us. We had a one-word definition for someone who didn't play Gaelic games: Waster.

Now soccer rules. If you don't play soccer you play Gameboy or PlayStation or watch your 59 channels with nothing on. One of the young fellas complained severely that his life had been blighted recently by having to play on the school Gaelic football team. "I don't really like gah," he said.

This all came back to me when I watched a preview of Donald Taylor Black's wonderful, sympathetic documentary to be shown tonight on RTE. Clongowes Wood, The Greater Glory tells the story of the life of this year's Leinster Schools' Senior Cup team. Their season is filmed through the prism of life in the school, an old-style boarding institution which has housed characters as disparate as Joyce and John Bruton.

The film surprises in many ways. The boys and their parents are drawn from that precise segment of society I expected them to come from, yet their lives and their passions don't quite nourish the easy prejudices I have about rugby schools. The characters have an earnestness and a discipline which was unexpected, particularly given the excesses which surround the Leinster Senior Cup hoopla. Watching this period in the boys' lives is like intruding on a solemn rite of passage.

The pressure is extraordinary. When they lose to a crack Terenure team the Clongowes players weep freely. All that tradition, all the sessions with the Springboks skills coach, all that media coverage, little wonder something cracks in them when it all finishes.

It would have been easy to set Clongowes College up and play the thing for laughs, hammering the oddness and the privilege. The passion and zeal for schools' rugby is absurd yet it's hard to watch the film and not be wistful for the innocence and passion you had at that age yourself.

And at least the rugby schools have remained rugby schools. Culturally distinct and defiant. So many great GAA schools have been swept away by the Sky-driven wave of cultural homogeniety that is soccer. Is it possible to lament that loss without being accused of being bigoted about soccer? I hope so.

Leave aside Bertie's £60 million, which we have said over and over again the GAA deserves merely for what it does. The point at issue recently was how best to defend the games in those places, like Dublin, where they are no longer vested with any especial significance.

We don't live in Dungiven where the hurling club is named for a local martyr and the games are an expression of nationality and the community is small and tight and we can afford the luxury of keeping ourselves to ourselves. We live in great urban sprawl where Sky television is never off, where old GAA schools can't fill out teams, where we have to send a combined colleges team into the Leinster Schools' Championship, where kids get drink, drugs and distraction as easily as our parents got aniseed balls.

The GAA is nothing special here, in either cultural or sporting terms. Other sports smell its vulnerability. And if eventually the games die in Dublin, you can measure in less months than it takes to make a lifetime how long the games have left in the little towns and parishes.

The Rule 42 debacle left the GAA looking haggard and frightened. If you want kids or sponsors you shouldn't look like that. Not in Dublin anyway. The alternative was easy. Earn rent and showcase Croke Park. Hey presto! No stick to beat the GAA with.

It's about confidence. We don't have GAA schools left whose confidence in their culture is as robust as in Clongowes College. We've lost. We aren't selling icons like Roy Keane, Keith Wood, Robbie Keane, Brian O'Driscoll . . .

Conservatism has failed the GAA: In its rules, its prejudices, in the way it presents itself, in the way it competes and the way it structures its competitions. Failed utterly.

I came to Donald Taylor Black's Clongowes film expecting to see another world where they did things the way they always have been done, where they could see no reason for anything else. Instead they've moved with alacrity. Their bright young coach is a GAA man, they go on tours, they bring in specialists and they keep the kids interested by presenting the Senior Cup team as stars. The kids didn't look jaded, bored or cynical about their world. That's an achievement in this world.

In most old GAA schools in Dublin it's soccer first, PlayStation second, detention third, homework fourth and GAA fifth in the list of after-school preferences. Meanwhile soccer hasn't stopped colonising kids' imaginations. We've only ourselves to blame. When Dublin's Con Ryan, Sean O'Mahony, Noel Murphy and our mysterious under-21 delegate changed their votes at Congress they missed the point entirely.