Bashing the GAA builds nothing

Dangerous times we Gaels live in. Every week some hardchaws from the media drag the GAA down an alley and give the oul gah a good kicking. You've seen it yourself. There was a cross word spoken at a GAA game in Ballydehob. Hold the front page! A pioneer pledge broken by a GAA man in Knocknagoshel! Call Joe on Liveline. An inter-county player double-parked in Termonfeckin last week. Well, Marion, the GAA makes a laughing stock of the country. You see the media bullying the GAA all the time. When that nasty, despicable, old bastard Mickey Feeney went to prison recently for his crimes, he was billed everywhere as a GAA man, even though he abused children in his capacity as a teacher. If he'd been captain of the golf club would we have seen "Golfer jailed"?

The dimbulb sectarianism of parts of the GAA membership is always front page news. But the sectarianism rife in Northern Irish soccer is one big yawn, as are the class politics of rugby or the economic politics of golf. A punch thrown on a GAA pitch is an unspeakable crime; eyegouging in rugby is a hoot. As for the pupils of rugby-playing schools laying into each other in a savage extra-curricular war . . . well, sssshhhhhh, that's all southside confidential.

Partly the GAA has itself to blame. It's grey and po-faced and imposing. Humourless too. Last weekend's televised draw for the 2001 championships was a fine example of the tedium which the association can produce if it puts its mind to it. A few blazers, a sprinkling of banalities and hey, presto, we-have-ways-of-making-you-sleep.

So the GAA ain't cool, but there are worse crimes. Yet the beatings continue. I had two examples of the genre brought to my attention last week. First a stomping from the Evening Herald columnist Ian O'Doherty, who brazenly showcased his intellect on Wednesday with a treatise on soccer in Croke Park. I have synopsised for your benefit.

"Every soccer fan would get an electric jolt of glee at the idea of their game being played at Croke Park" . . . blah . . . "absolute national disgrace" blah . . . "suck from the national teat" blah . . . "disgraceful decision to keep Croker for themselves" blah . . . "acceptance of public money meant they lost the moral if not the legal right to slam the door in the face of soccer." Blahdeblah ad infinitum.

An electric jolt of glee? Generous, eh? Suck from the national teat? By any measure, the GAA has given this mealy-bosomed little nation more than it has ever taken. A legal obligation? Wait! Should I not have been on the Irish Olympic team? I pay taxes. They take public money . . .

Then Cathal Dervan (faithful Boswell to Our Lady of the Chlorine) used his Irish Voice column to haul Christy Moore into the row. Poor oul Christeor is quoted as wondering what's wrong with "them GAA arseholes" that they won't let the poor craturs from the rugby and the soccer into Croke Field. Paul McGrath and Mick Galwey have as much right to play there as Neil Diamond, apparently.

Well, actually they've no more right to play Croke Park than the Jewish Elvis does. The only right involved is the GAA's right to use its property as it sees fit. Competitively, I'd say that Cracklin' Rosie is less of a threat than Posh n Becks and the Manchester United superstore which abuts the very building from which this column seeps each week. And competition is what it's all about. Do Paul and Mick deserve the chance to play at Croke Park? Nope. Paul was the greatest of all Irish soccer players and what he deserved was the chance to play his game in a great Irish soccer shrine. The aura of Croke Park is the aura of the GAA. That specialness is one of the few weapons left to the GAA in the Murdoch era.

SLAPPING the GAA across the face with all this nonsense about the rights of superstars from other sports certainly gets cheap cheers from the barstool bigots, but it's an insult, especially to soccer, a sport which should be allowed its dignity. Soccer wants self-respect, not another excuse to beat up on the GAA. The No Income Park affair is an embarrassing fiasco, but you have to acknowledge the idea that was behind it. Irish soccer hasn't got a home. Whining about Croke Park (which the FAI have never asked to use anyway) won't change that.

Prick up your ears, boys. Pompous as it may sound, the GAA is a sporting and cultural organisation. It sustains a couple of wonderful indigenous sports, and it contributes greatly to how communities in many parts of Ireland feel about themselves. To a lot of ordinary Irish people (who also play and enjoy soccer and rugby) the GAA matters deeply. The GAA has earned its right to lottery money. The GAA amateurs have worked hard for their premises. The stadium business is a question for soccer and rugby - two great professional sports having troubles in the Irish context. Take soccer. The Charlton era should have been a bonanza. Now officials state, off the record, that there was only £4 million to show for it all. Well, how is that the GAA's fault?

Soccer is the world's most popular and profitable sport. It has its own romance and beauty, and, personally, I love the game; but I concede that it eats everything. I don't despair about the countries where soccer hasn't conquered, I enjoy the difference. Baseball, Aussie Rules, Hurling . . . they should all be on preservation lists at the United Nations. Soccer has no superseding rights in our culture. The GAA inter-county programme is going to expand hugely over the next few years and the GAA needs Croke Park and likes to use its headquarters as a marketing tool. If and when it makes a decision to court soccer or rugby, it will be a commercial one, not a moral or legal decision.

I know of what I speak. Great is the excitement in this house about the pending appearance of Scoil Neasain of Harmonstown in the Cumann na mBunscoil finals at Croker next Thursday. We've been fretting about buses and rain and whether we'll be allowed walk on the pitch all week.

Now that's the Field of Dreams stuff that soccer would like to be able to offer, and all but the laziest bigots know that it's not the GAA's fault that soccer can't.