A new vision shouldn't be beyond the pale

LOCKER ROOM:If the GAA is to fail as a presence in the burgeoning new communities which pen Dublin in, the experience of being Irish or living a life in Ireland will be diluted, writes Tom Humphries

AW, THE season is up and running and full of surprises already. It seems Leinster football is in just as dire a situation as Leinster hurling. Who knew! On the Hogan Stand side in Croker for the football double-header last week we huddled together for warmth as an entertaining Wicklow beat an oddly enfeebled Kildare and Meath gave Carlow an old-fashioned thrashing which meant nothing but was interesting to watch.

And that's it really. No sure signs of a team about to make the great leap forward. Next weekend the Dubs (diminished, but not fatally, by suspensions), play Louth. There will be a good crowd and the usual drumroll of excitement that accompanies any Dubs game in the summer. Dublin may go back to ratcheting up the theatre by doing their slow walk to the Hill. The Hill may repay the compliment by getting there on time. Either way it means nowt. Leinster is a phoney war.

Dublin haven't had to go beyond a trot to win the last three phoney wars staged in the province. Those wins have amounted to less than a significant hill of beans. In all likelihood they will win again this year, but unless the current side surprises a lot of people and make September and the premiere of Sam and The City, Pillar Caffrey may be the first Dublin manager put out to graze and branded a failure having won four titles on the trot.

That there were a little over 20,000 of us rattling around in Croke Park for last week's double-header says a lot about the troubles Leinster is seeing. Meath, Carlow, Wicklow and Kildare are, in terms of population, swelling to the point where they are suburbs of Dublin. Presumably in all the years of the Celtic Tiger, when people were forgoing quality-of-life issues here in the city which epitomises the best of modern western civilisation (I mean, a dimly-lit spire on the main thoroughfare! The world is still gasping!) for the thrills of daily commuting, there must have grown up a generation of young folk who associate themselves with the traditional GAA values of the counties their parents went to live in. And then there are all those people who never went away to do their national service on sites in London or Birmingham or Noo Yoik. They are all knocking around.

And, well, we just thought there might be some signs of them, if not wearing the jerseys on the field, at least getting excited about going to Croker to see the jersey worn.

Leinster, for all the prosperity and wealth of the last 15 years, has become a wasteland. The battle for hearts and minds is being lost in the new territories. Look at Dublin next week. If you discount St Brigid's, who administratively are from Fingal but who are within the Pale of the M50, Bryan Cullen from Skerries is the only representative of GAA life in the true north county, a huge wedge of population which would exceed any other Leinster county.

There is mass swooning in ranks of the GAA in Dublin whenever the prospect of sundering Fingal (or any other population bulge) from the rest of the city is mentioned. But Fingal has a population which will exceed 250,000 soon, if it doesn't already (the last census put the area just 10,000 off that figure, over 5.6 per cent of the population of the Republic). And the population of Fingal has an average age of 32.2 years, about three-and-a-half years younger than the national average.

And though there is good work being done by clubs from Wild Geese to Fingallians, it is an uphill battle. Commuting is time-consuming and counter-productive to the building of community pride, and Fingal, like the dormitory areas of Meath, Carlow, Wicklow and Kildare, doesn't seem to view itself through the prism of a GAA identity.

All that is bad news for the GAA. County board administrators are expected to cater for the vibrant demands of traditional clubs who have embedded themselves into the administrative structures of the boards while also anticipating the needs of nascent clubs in areas of burgeoning population. In some areas these things all work well because, by chance, good people move in and revive slumbering clubs.

Ratoath in Meath, for instance, or Celbridge in Kildare are clubs the complexion of which is heavily freckled with blow-in Dubs (and others), but who have great infrastructural set-ups and have thus kept themselves at the core of the community.

In lots of other places, however, the GAA has yet to figure out the best way to tap into the new type of population, a business which includes reaching out to non-nationals. It's an expensive business. A recent report from the ESRI points out that individual sports like swimming and jogging and just working out in the gym have grown hugely in popularity in recent years while the numbers playing GAA have remained stagnant. This is hardly surprising. Commercial gyms and pools are built into the infrastructure of communities now, as GAA clubs once were.

This leaves us at a crossroads. Economics, being a dismally dry and unsentimental business, tends to look at the results of participation surveys and relate it to the sports capital programme accordingly. Thus, if lots of people are swimming, well, then swimming should get lots of money. Currently the Sports Council devotes lots of resources to the GAA and to soccer, but it is pointed out that the former is no longer increasing in popularity in quite the same way as individual sports are.

The Leinster championship and its decline might have told us that anyway. What must be decided, however, is what we want. The GAA is part of the cultural flavour of this country, part of what makes Irish communities different from their counterparts just about anywhere else. As the surface appearance of those communities changes, we have to decide on what they will feel like inside. A swimming pool and a gym are easy to plant in a community, and desirable too. They are magnets for little individual filings, however. People come and they go, leading their own privatised existences.

A GAA pitch needs more land than its soccer or rugby counterparts, and in this time building a decent clubhouse is a massive expense too. But if the GAA is to fail as a presence in the burgeoning new communities which pen Dublin in, the experience of being Irish or living a life in Ireland will be diluted.

Yet we are shy about making the distinction between the GAA and other sports, reticent about pointing out that hurling and football and camogie, etc, are as distinctive and vital as language and music and, in terms of Irish culture, far more alive and relevant just now.

The Leinster championships in football and hurling are struggling. The demography of the province which hosts those championships is changing rapidly. Leinster can become a wasteland or a targeted area for renewal and growth of the GAA.

Let's see what the man from Offaly thinks.