Doing time the county team way

Yesterday the crowd scurried out of Walsh Park like startled mice. A strange, furtive phenomenon, several thousand people with their heads down, their feet moving in a busy blur. Channel 4 were showing The Shawshank Redemption later on.

The Shawshank Redemption is a GAA cultural artefact. It is our Birth of a Nation, our seminal artistic moment. Week after week after week in the Evening Herald GAA section, players on the Dublin GAA scene (I'm told the same is true of non-scene players) are vox popped. Week after week after week they reply that their favourite film is The Shawshank Redemption.

That's the thing about Scorcese. He doesn't play to the GAA crowd. Ditto Woody Allen. They'd give you nothing for his gilded ironies up in Parnells. And, as they say in Thomas Davis, you can take your Francis Ford Coppola and stick him up your ****. In the two years or so in which I have been keeping records, no player surveyed by the Herald has yet submitted that his "ideal partner for a desert island" would be Tim Robbins or that his "transfer choice" would be Morgan Freeman. There is a rich variety of answers to be had in all other sections of the Evening Herald census, but the Dublin GAA population seems strangely hypnotised by The Shawshank Redemption and its message of enduring hope through incarceration, bad dialogue and forcible sodomy.

The profound influence of the movie on Dublin GAA culture finally became blindingly evident on Friday last when I approached The Sports Editor, (an Erins Isle man, but still) with an expenses docket.

"What is your malfunction, you fat barrel of monkey spunk?" he drawled, and before I could answer he added that if he heard "as much as a mouse fart" out of me for the rest of the day "he'd have me in the infirmary".

When someone who once played for Erins Isle speaks to somebody who once played Junior B for St Vincent's in those tones the implications for society and the rule of law are grave indeed.

As such, I have been asked, informally, by the Dublin County Board to examine the social implications of the movie's popularity, to investigate if there are any organised Redemption Rings within the GAA in Dublin and, if there are, to perform the Elia Kazan role and squeal about them.

I have been asked by the management of the county teams to establish a Tribunal of Inquiry into the question of whether the popularity of The Shawshank Redemption is preventing Dublin from developing good full backs and decent scoring forwards.

You will remember the bare bones of The Shawshank Redemption story. Andy Defresne (Tim Robbins) is charged with the murder of his wife and with having a pretentiously silent "s" in his surname (Dufresne, not Robbins). He denies the first charge, but to no avail, and he goes to prison where he meets Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman). It's an ill wind . . .

It is 1946 when he starts his porridge, and of course prison is no picnic, especially if you are caught mixing metaphors. A good looking man like Andy Dufresne is not granted the courtesy of foreplay or candlelit dinner by his many suitors. Red looks on impassively at the repeated violations of the guy he describes early on as "the tall drink of water with the silver spoon up his ass", but the two become friends and as the music swells Red and Andy become inseparable. That is until Andy escapes, having spent 20 years digging a tunnel with a little rockhammer.

Andy gets out in time for the 1966 All-Ireland. He is still young, certainly young enough to play Junior B football, but he's seen enough horror on the inside.

I began by combing the structures and subtexts of The Shawshank Redemption for clues. It is the classic candide structure, a traditional story of impermeable, naive optimism and good looks overcoming adversity in the form of humourless wardens, irritating orchestral music and the clumsy use of the narrator device.

Nothing unusual there, nothing to seduce the casual GAA follower. In some of the rougher shower scenes some may read a searing indictment of certain incidents in Tyrone club football over the past few years, but the other points aren't hammered home. Andy Dufresne's suffering is as nothing when set against, say, the plight of attractive Mayo teams who come to Dublin to play in All-Ireland finals.

Andy's defiant 20-year dig, progressing inch by inch with just a little rockhammer until he finally makes the big breakthrough, is an easily read message to county players everywhere: don't get banged up for something you didn't do.

I have watched The Shawshank Redemption many times now and it was only last night that the specific resonances which director Frank Darabont built in for Dublin GAA began to shine through.

The Morgan Freeman character's narration provides most of the sign posts. "The first night's the hardest" he says of prison/joining the county team if you have been playing for Leitrim (Declan Darcy) or Roscommon (Niall O'Donoghue). "They march you in naked as the day you were born, skin burning and half blind from the delousing shit they throw on you."

There are so many layers to this statement that it is impossible to peel them all in the space of a column. "Delousing shit" is a complicated metaphor for the suave cosmopolitan air which a Dublin player will affect within a few weeks of immersion in a Dublin county team. Newcomers must "delouse" themselves of their rural hickness, must remove one by one the little tics of hayseed simplicity they carry about.

Others, like Vinny Murphy, just move to Kerry, but The Shawshank Redemption hasn't the necessary complexity to deal with that. The script grants but a passing reference when Red notes wisely that "some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are too bright".

The key scenes in terms of Andy Dufresne's absorption into the culture of prison life comes when he challenges a screw and wins two cases of beer for his work crew. Later on (eerily redolent of Jayo's performance in the 1995 Leinster final against Meath), he blasts opera music out over the prison tannoy "and for the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free".

Of course the screws burst in and jerk the needle from the record, there are the muffled sounds of struggle and Meath win the 1996 All-Ireland.

Shawshank was made as a metaphor for Dublin. The city, nay citadel, imprisoned on one side by the sea and on all others by brutal warden counties.

Yet we keep hope alive. Like Tim Robbins we have our standards. But let me tell you something, "hope is a dangerous thing, hope can drive a man insane".

On the other hand of course, "hope is a good thing and no good thing ever dies".

Clear enough?