History of O'Toole's is all our histories

Thank heavens for the plain old immutable tradition of the All-Ireland final. No matter what they do to us in the real world, hurling remains the same grand old game and no spiv in a suit can mess it up.

At the risk of sounding like some bitter old cuss expelling his bile while sipping his pint of plain in the snug, I'll say that there is a lot of messing and tampering goes on with things these days which diminishes the quality of the lives we lead.

Having been allotted only one life (little wonder I'm bitter), this is naturally of concern to me.

Most of these sins against the lovely soul of things are committed by spivs in suits in the name of money. I've nothing against money, but, to take a small thing, it makes my grand old stomach churn to see teams lining up for photos on big football or hurling days in Croke Park only for some PR weasel to come along and place a huge Bank of Ireland or Guinness billboard in front of the players. We know the sponsors cough up for the games out of their slender profits, and for that we are properly grateful and will desist from nationalising either company. There's no need to buy up the players' dignity, though.

(On the issue of All-Ireland days and attendant codology, the less said about the RoverDance caper with the big mutt in Croker yesterday the better, but Irish wolfhounds everywhere are owed an apology).

Amidst all the synthetic fluff, the All-Ireland hurling final lives on as a celebration of distinctiveness and uniqueness, a small, good thing in a world swamped by the Premiership and boy bands and global homogenisation and The Weakest Bloody Link. Sitting in the press box yesterday, looking at the back of the heads of Bertie Aherne and Jim McDaid, one couldn't help wondering why the Government boys don't do more to make sure the culture of our games survives.

Is all the distinctiveness to be sandpapered off us? It is all very fine to treat all sports equally, and it raises no hackles among those narrow-minded voters who despise the GAA, but the games themselves and hurling in particular are cultural artefacts and should be promoted separately and nationally.

I thought of all this while reading through a club history this week. Not many people know Seville Place on the near north side of Dublin, and indeed not much is left of it since the financial services centre began eating away at an old community. The strongest strand left of the place is the history of O'Toole's GAC.

When I was a kid, my grandfather, who grew up in one of the avenues in Seville Place, used to take me to play snooker at 100 Seville Place, then the home of O'Toole's hurling and football club. He would introduce me to the caretaker, Mrs Fitz, as his grandson who played for a certain other Dublin club. There would be dark mutterings between the two of them to the effect that I was a medal hunter. A loathsome insult, but given the number of medals I had I considered it hugely flattering.

If you grew up in my house (and you didn't because I'd remember), you grew up listening to stories about O'Toole's, about the All-Irelands which fell to the tiny parish of St Laurence O'Toole's, Seville Place, in the early 1920s. The various McDonnells, Synotts and Kavanaghs, etc, who played and who escaped from those days to become part of the Dublin folklore.

It hardly seems like 25 years since my grandfather came out to our house one Tuesday morning with a slender, pocket-sized book which had been issued to commemorate the 75th anniversary of O'Toole's club.

Yet it is. And this week a rather more hefty tome arrived in the post to mark a century of the club. Jimmy Wren has done a wonderful job placing O'Toole's in the context of their times and their community. The club story weaves in and out not just of the history of the northside of Dublin but of the early making of this State. When Bloody Sunday occurred, there were nine O'Toole's players on the pitch playing for Dublin. The fleeing Tipperary players were taken to the streets of nearby Seville Place and hidden in the houses of O'Toole's players.

I'd heard that story told many times, but Jimmy Wren has other nuggets to add. When Johnny McDonnell arrived home, his death having been announced to his mother some time earlier, one of the first things he did was remove from the house a kitbag of revolvers and other weapons. Apparently Johnny and his brother Paddy were the receiving point for weapons smuggled in at the North Wall from points like London and Glasgow. And I'd always just thought of Johnny, who was by then a veteran of Frongoch, as "the Man in the Hat".

There's another story told within which bears repeating. When he joined the Army, his fame was already well-established and it was decided that perhaps the Army might enter a team into the Dublin championships. Johnny McDonnell was personally asked to play by Major Tom MacGrath. He asked for 10 minutes to think about it and then came back with his resignation from the Army written on a sheet of paper. He would sooner have given up his career than quit O'Toole's.

What amazes me is that O'Toole's aren't unique. GAA clubs all over the country have their own stories, little tiles in the national mosaic. It is the overall picture which is unique. Where else in the world would you find sporting clubs so defiantly insisting on being part of history and living culture?

Since those days, when O'Toole's mingled football glory with a prominent part in the national struggle, the club has been through many changes, bobbing and floating with the fortunes of the community which spawned it. A while back, their hinterland having been eroded and depopulated by suits and their doings, O'Toole's shifted their operation to Darndale, further out in the northside. They are a splendid club still, devoted like few others in Dublin to hurling.

The thread they provide through Irish history and through the GAA itself is one of those things worth remembering on days like yesterday's, when the whole big shiny world outside stops for us and we get a rare chance to be the people we are meant to be. Tipp and Galway in Croke Park. A repeat of the 1887 final no less! These histories, big and small, are the fabric of what we are.

I watched Bertie and Jim depart, two men in grey suits, and wondered what they would do to make sure these histories stretch as far into the future as they do into our past.