Belief and zeal are their drugs of choice

LockerRoom: People keep calling me up and asking me what I think of Michelle Smith de Bruin's showing in the recent Marian Finucane Show poll to find the woman, who in the opinion of many of the MF Show Listenership, is the Greatest Irish Woman Living or Dead, Clean or Unclean.

On the one hand, I am perfectly indifferent. Certainly Michelle (and Erik) have done much to promote cheating (aren't those matching his 'n' hers bans so cute) and those within the cheat community must be extraordinarily proud of them both.

We can understand that, so if the listeners of the MF Show want to esteem and exalt a topline drug cheat above somebody like, well say, MF herself, who has made a huge contribution to Irish society, well than surely MF just deserves a better demographic.

On the other hand, I care deeply. I am outraged. I am frightened. Let me tell you about last weekend. It will explain all. I spent the weekend in Cork in the company of the Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women, or the St Vincent's under-14 camogie team, as they are collectively known. We had the weekend of our lives. In fact, we had a holiday from life.

If you've never been to an All-Ireland Féile competition you should cleanse your palate of the faintly sour whiskey taste of congealed Smith de Bruin and hightail it to Limerick next weekend to refresh yourself at the football Féile. Restore your faith in sport.

The trip comes with guarantees and recommendations. As part of my indentured slavery I have been forced to work at World Cups and Olympics and heavyweight title fights and golf thingies and at all manner of sporting shindigs. I've never enjoyed anything remotely as much as I have enjoyed being immersed in a Féile. I never will.

Anyway you'll be wanting the lowdown. What happened. And why. And how it all ties up. Well. The Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women began the tournament in stately fashion. That is slowly and taking care to preserve their immense dignity.

On Friday they drew a game with our generous hosts in lovely Inniscarra. It was a game which they might have won, but really should have lost. They withdrew to lick their wounds and to perform remarkable and scandalous syncopated samba routines in the Féile Parade through Cork that evening.

Saturday is a long, happy blur. A soft dream of a time. The most fun any group of people have ever had in a field in Ballincollig. You'd have to know the Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women for as long as we, their noble mentors/caddies, have, to feel the curious mix of confidence and trepidation with which we travelled early in the morning.

See, The Fab Twenty-Four can be both erratic and brilliant. They can die for each other or they can just be not in the mood for anything except the bartering of gossip with each other. They play and function as an aggregate of their two dozen separate personalities. They are beautiful and wild and basically nuts. Somedays, they are just collectively hormonal and we are afraid to ask them to do anything in case they rage at us.

An example: On Friday, The Grand Chief Agitator (Howya, April), who had a wonderful weekend, incidentally, had sought to initiate a robust debate on team selection during the half-time team talk. This was like moaning about somebody's second-hand smoke as they drew their final puff when lined up against a wall to be shot.

Nevertheless, we knew the Grand Chief Agitator be most peeved about the curtailment of her highly valued right to free speech, even at such an inopportune moment. Discontent can spread quickly among the Fab 24. We had no certainty about how Saturday would unfold.

The Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women set into a pattern early though. They'd take a lead on a team, then let them back into the game and then finish them off. Or else, they'd take a lead on a team, then let them back into the game and then battle like lunatics to prevent the others finishing them off. Whatever, it was a pattern of sorts.

Against Ballincollig, we looked condemned to another draw when Gillian Smith (if MF Show listeners had to vote for a heroic Smith, well here was one) scored a goal with just about the last poc of the game. We hugged and danced and asked them what the hell they were thinking of, leaving it so late.

Not long afterwards came the final group game. Toomevara of Tipp. Fortunately, The Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women are no great respecters of reputation and Toomevara of Tipp might as well have been Tooting of Timbuktu for all they knew.

The game was one of those great epics which deserved a nationwide audience. The one and only Meltem Yazar thumbed her nose at the aristocracy with a hat-trick of goals, each one more wondrous than the previous one. Then a great big generous dollop of eight minutes of injury time got added, an allotment which the Fab 24 mistakenly took to be time added on especially for Toomevara's benefit.

The 24 went into injury time three points ahead. They then conceded about 6,000 frees and watched about 17,000 balls whistle wide. They reached the final whistle two points ahead. And knackered.

There's always at least one moment in a Féile weekend that you'll remember forever. For me there were two. The first came maybe an hour and a half after the Toomevara win. The girls were getting ready for an All-Ireland semi-final. They were drained, emptied, shattered, wrecked. You name it.

So the Mill Lodge Hotel became an army field camp. Twenty-four bodies lay around one end of the restaurant fast asleep in the middle of the afternoon. Legs getting massaged, wounds being tended too, words being whispered, the smell of liniments. The sight of them there, all huddled like a scattering of dropped commas, will stay with me forever.

As will an image from the end of the semi-final, a moment that has burned itself into a perfect picture in my head. The Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women beat Glen Rovers. Beating the Glen meant getting into an All-Ireland final to the girls.

To the rest of us, reared on the legend of how the hurlers of St Vincent's beat Glen Rovers in a famous challenge in December 1953, a game which half-filled Croke Park, it was something even more special. A gang of kids from Marino beating the Glen! I mean, jaysus, that was The Glen!

We were gathering up the sticks and the water bottles and the Fab 24 had paused 40 yards away to clap the Glen girls as they passed out the gate on the other side of the field. Our heroes stood in one long, spread-out line before the distant hill and as we paused our tidying all we could see were these kids whom we've known for half their lives, and beyond them their smiling, clapping parents and fans. There were Vincent's jerseys and flags everywhere. The sun was going down on a postcard day.

There in the crowd, clapping, was Mark Wilson. Mark is our club president and was corner forward on that team that beat the Glen half a century ago. He was a great mentor to me as a kid. That little moment in Ballincollig brings tears to the eyes nearly a week on.

Sunday and an All-Ireland final. You have no idea. Those faces drawn and nervous sitting on the benches in the tiny dressingroom beneath Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Hearing the familiar names called out on the PA. Saying the familiar words to them. Sending them out with hope in the heart. Watching these heroes, one of them your daughter, out on the famous turf.

We were hammered by a brilliant side from Douglas. No complaints. Regrets maybe that we never got to show that we can play a bit, but hey, we shed our tears and we hugged each other and we moved on. Nobody said that they'd get drugs the next time and use them to cheat those wonderful Douglas kids.

On our way out we passed Pauric McDonald and the amazing Kilmacud Crokes hurling side who were just about to win the Division One title. Their journey was as stunning as ours was emotional.

And all those young, keen faces in Páirc Uí Chaoimh last Sunday and around Cork last weekend were the only fitting rebuke to a certain proportion of the morally challenged MF Show listenership.

So to the Twenty-Four Greatest Living Irish Women, to Ais, to Claire H, to Clairo, to Happy Gilmore, to Ciara O'L, to Niamh (Yo Foxy), to JoJo, to Jessie G, to April F, to Meltem Y, to Gillian S, to Shauna O and to Irene D, to Jenny R, to Leanna B, to Johanna C, to Fionnuala J, to Carol Mc, to Róisín D, to Eimear M, to Kate P, to Orla Mc, to Jodie C and to Molly in da house, love ye all, long may ye run and please don't ever become MF Show phone-in types, or Michelle S de B sports-cheat types.

You're better than that. A million times better. May you stay forever young.