GAA must be stirred by wind of change

Bit by bit and little by little, normality creeps closer. Last Thursday evening, just as President Clinton was completing his visit to Omagh, the senior gaelic footballers of the town were arriving in Carrickmore for their postponed Tyrone county championship semi-final against Donaghmore.

It was not the biggest sporting occasion the county had ever seen but it was one redolent with symbolism and importance.

Three weekends ago there was a buzz around the town about Omagh's championship run, the first time in a decade that the St Enda's club had been within sniffing distance of a county title. It was a young team but one with accomplished players who had honed their skills in the pressured-atmosphere of Ulster university football and had now returned to give something back to the club that had nurtured them as under-12s, under-14s and minors.

Niall McSorley was one of those. He had already been making a name for himself in the University of Ulster side this year and was one of the players around whom Omagh had been building their championship team. On that Saturday afternoon he had little else except Donaghmore on his mind as he tried to kill time around the town. The run-in to the club's biggest game in 10 years was passing far too slowly and everyone just wanted to get going, to get started.

When the bomb went off in Market Street, Niall McSorley was lucky. Hurt, but lucky. He suffered leg injuries from the flying debris and while it seems unlikely that he will play again this season there is always next year and the year after that. As the teams warmed up last Thursday night, Niall was there, in his tracksuit, with the rest of his team-mates for the pre-match kick-around. In the immediate aftermath of the bomb all GAA activity was suspended in Tyrone and Donaghmore acceded to the postponement of the semi-final against Omagh without even a murmur of complaint. In a county where inter-club football can be at times rancorous and internecine, the equanimity with which the postponement was greeted spoke volumes.

The semi-final itself was an eloquent statement of all that is good about football in the county. A very mobile and adventurous Omagh side scored a goal within the first few minutes and for the rest of the hour denied Donaghmore a single score from play before winning by a comfortable seven-point margin.

County star Ciaran McBride was the dominant figure on the field, scoring three points and constantly driving the team on from midfield. McBride has toiled long and hard in his club's black and white colours and a county final represents the high-point of that long journey. But even he had to look at the win in the shadow of the bomb. "It was very hard for us," he said afterwards, "because of the way the bomb was on the Saturday and we were supposed to play on Sunday. We all had to regroup and, in fairness to Donaghmore, they gave us all the space we needed to do that."

And if Omagh needed any more evidence of creeping normality it was there in the typical little Northern maelstrom that has now blown up around plans to stage a benefit soccer match in the town. Omagh Town manager Roy McCreadie was the first to moot the idea and it has since taken some shape with a number of Premiership teams, including Manchester United, agreeing in principle to play come to the town and play.

So far, so good. But then the journalistic mischief makers started to take an interest and it has all become a little unseemly. "Where would this game be played?" they shrieked, as they got the scent of potential discomfort for the GAA in their nostrils.

Omagh is a small town and its football team, Omagh Town, is a small club. Its St Julian's Road ground is positively spartan in its spectator comforts, with covered seating for only a few hundred hardy souls. By no stretch of the imagination could it safely accommodate the kind of crowd that, say, Manchester United, would attract.

So, naturally, eyes turned to the recently-renovated Healey Park GAA ground which, as a result of hard work by the host club and financial investment by the Ulster council, is one of the best stadiums in the province. Only last May, the home of Omagh St Enda's comfortably held 20,000 supporters for the Ulster championship meeting of Tyrone and Down.

Logic would dictate that Healey Park is the only viable venue for the proposed benefit game but that ignores some of the realities of sporting and cultural life here. Omagh, like so many other Ulster places, has always been a town beset by tensions between the GAA and soccer, the so-called foreign game. The antagonism, particularly from GAA circles, may seem archaic in these more relaxed times, but that makes it no less real.

When this "foreign games" debate emerges every few years, GAA officials quite legitimately point out that it is their association and their members that have made the financial efforts to make their facilities the envy of every other sporting body in this country. "Why should we," they ask, "spend all that money only for another organisation to waltz in and reap all the benefits?"

The official response of the Tyrone County Board has been that it will look at any request to use its ground for a game when it is made. But Joe McDonagh, the president of the GAA, took that a step further last week when he publicly criticised the "cheap shots" that are being thrown at his association. "Our rules prohibit the use of our grounds for any other games," he said bluntly, "and we will concentrate our efforts on making sure that as much money as possible is raised through our membership for the victims and their families."

Given that conservative estimates suggest the GAA will contribute £1 million to the Omagh fund, McDonagh's irritation that the Healey Park issue is being used as a stick with which to beat the GAA is understandable. But it may be that he has yet to detect the sea-change in hardened attitudes that Omagh has engendered here.

When committed and hardworking GAA members have spent four tortuous days shuttling between wakes and funerals, endeavouring to pay their respects to as many of the dead as possible, the issue of "foreign games" on their pitches can only be an irrelevant sideshow. Even the most entrenched positions have had to be re-examined in the aftermath of such a catastrophic event and if the GAA opprobrium towards soccer is one of those, then so be it. If politics cannot be the same after Omagh, then neither can sport.

Ciaran McBride spoke for many when he was asked the hard question about Healey Park, as he stood on the sideline at Carrickmore in the gathering gloom of last Thursday night. "When it is for such a good cause," he said, "I suppose people like me would have to bite their lip and say it should happen."

The GAA has so much to gain here with a one-off gesture. But if it fails to appreciate just which way the wind is blowing it is staring another public relations disaster square in the face.