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A Cork reader writes to ask if I am familiar with an expression used on radio recently by GAA pundit Colm O’Rourke, when previewing the All-Ireland football quarter finals.
He was discussing Clare manager Colm Collins and said, apparently as a compliment, that Collins wasn’t “the sort to go around taking bites out of stone walls”.
And no, Cork reader, I hadn’t heard the phrase before. But then, searching for it since in various archives, I have found only two other instances of its use. And one of those was also by O’Rourke, about 10 years ago, of another Gaelic football manager.
On that occasion, discussing hard choices facing Tyrone, he wrote: “Mickey Harte, who does not go around taking bites out of stone walls, has no such luxury.”
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This led me to wonder if taking bites out of stone walls was in fact something a GAA team had once done in training, notoriously. My bet would have been on Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry, circa 1979.
But intriguingly, the subject of the only other use of the phrase I found was the 17th-century cleric Cardinal Richelieu, a man not known for involvement with the GAA.
Reviewing a book about him on the Amazon website, an anonymous US reader wrote in 2015: “Despite being devoutly Catholic he wasn’t prone to taking bites out of stone walls when it came to realpolitik.”
This might have suggested the expression was international, except that elsewhere in the review, the writer also used the phrase (of some of Richelieu’s many enemies): “Lutheran Johnny Jumpup squireens”.
And whatever about the first three words there, the last is pure – or impure – Irish: a squireen, as defined by Terry Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English, being a “petty squire with pretensions”.
So the concept of refusing to take bites out of stone walls - by implication a mark of level-headedness – seems to be unique to Ireland. But is it only a Meath thing? Or is it from Leitrim, where O’Rourke’s family originated? Maybe other readers know.
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While searching vainly in Dolan’s lexicon, I was struck by the only reference to stone there, different but also GAA-related.
“Struck” is the operative word because the phrase in question was “stone-throwers”, said by the dictionary to be an “affectionate term for Tipperary team[s]”, another thing I hadn’t heard before.
It goes back, apparently, to the GAA’s neolithic period, the late 19th century, before the new ball games caught on. According to the Nenagh Guardian, it amused the residents of two side streets in Tipperary town then to face off periodically, 50 yards apart, and “lay into one another with paving stones”.
But strange to say, there is a separate – and it seems unrelated – story, from 1930s America, that also ties Tipperary to a tradition of petrological projection. On that occasion, it involved the erection of a traffic light in an upstate New York neighbourhood called Tipperary Hill.
Which, placing the colour red above the green, as traffic lights do, provoked the ire of immigrant Irish youths, who targeted the “British” colour with stones until city fathers reversed the alignment. The light has since become a monument and there is now even an affectionate sculpture of the stone-throwers.
GAA founder Michael Cusack would have approved. Although, as immortalised in Ulysses, it was a biscuit tin he threw at the perceived enemies of Gaeldom, launching it with such force from Dublin’s Little Britain Street that that, according to witnesses, “he near sent it into the county Longford”.
***
Getting back to Meath and stone walls, meanwhile, readers may recall (Diary, Wednesday) that I spent some of last weekend in Loughcrew, site of an ancient complex of megalithic chamber tombs.
They were built by local farmers 5,000 years ago. But there is a folk tradition for their origin too, involving a witch of great powers who, seeking even greater ones, accepted a four-peak challenge of leaping from hilltop to hilltop, succeeding with three jumps before falling at the last and breaking her neck.
In the process, she had scattered stones from her apron, creating the various cairns. Today, only Cairn T remains fully intact, thanks to her “hag’s chair”, a giant carved slab that may have warded off the superstitious while, over centuries, all the other cairns were gradually stripped of their stone by modern-day farmers.
The Loughcrew Hag could surely have taken bites out of stone walls. But if anything, she seems to have added to rather than subtracted from Meath’s mural infrastructure. On a hill opposite Cairn T, as pointed out by our guide, there is a great stone wall of 19th- or 20th-century construction, recycled from the ancient monuments that had not taken out supernatural insurance.