PM O'Sullivan The Ciotóg SideWhere were we? An aspect of the DJ Carey legacy, was it? Some such measure. Which or whether, this space is going to disclose a quarter-secret about how GAA matters at present get discussed.
Last week's column mulled over Carey's stature in the most beautiful game. There were many accolades, formal and informal, even though the response was never entirely positive. Amidst the tributes, insistently, dissonant notes sounded.
This key is ha'penny noise to commotion in another sphere. The most fervent hurling debate now occurs in an online context, via discussion boards. Having, in a sense, come from this arena, The Ciotóg Side can attest to its singular nature.
It is a world in which partisan loyalties are just as intense as they were on any sweltering Sunday afternoon in the 1950s. Bleariness from a PC screen is the present's sunburn.
Invariably, inevitably, Carey features. Nothing really to do with the man himself. A cipher for county-centred antagonism, his career has occasioned more crank than the windlass for a 500-foot well.
Actually, you could be very fancy about it. You really could. It is a dear maxim of sociologists that technology is the agent of modernity. Here, technological progress eases difference, tribal and otherwise, to the point of virtually erasing it. The Internet makes the world smaller. Remember that nostrum?
Not so in cyber-fora. Hell, no. The scarting do be fierce. The scarting do be quite as bad as any faction fight in benighted centuries. Your place of origin is still the marker that counts and then some.
Carey's prominence was always going to provoke ire in one quarter. A poster on a Tipperary-orientated website recently offered a spreadsheet of his championship goals. Seemingly, the net implication was straightforward - the Kilkenny man had garnered an insufficient number of major scores against Munster counties. Ergo - he is a media creation, overrated and over there.
Fair enough, fair enough. But there was more, much more. The same poster declared Carey "a cheat". Why? Because of his alleged penchant for carrying a sliotar longer than the rules permit.
At least these observations stayed within the protocols of sustainable meaning. This bind was not to last. Our statistician also let it be known that the allegation of cheating in no way sought to diminish said hurler's standing ("his status in the game"). A fierce pancake, as the title of Stump's LP has it. A right puzzler.
First off, a sliver of corrective fact. While the Gowran native landed nary a goal in 2002's All-Ireland championship semi-final, a meeting that involved - if memory serves - a Munster side, he did manage quite an impact on this contest. Choose your method with care. Circular positivism is a handy vessel for decanting bias.
Other elements are no less odd. Motive is a tricky yoke to parse, save with acts such as the filling of a kettle followed by the opening of a tea caddy.
Still, statistics' wink hardly accounts for so bizarre a posture. Where logic departs, nonsense minds the gap. It is as if we were privy to a discarded script for some hybrid TV show: "He's a cheat, Podge. Yes, he's a damn fine fella, Rodge, and he'll always be president of Killinascully Golf Club while I'm around!"
We are certainly lodged in the upside-down world of Through the Looking Glass. Lewis Carroll's novel contains a famous passage in which a bluffer is challenged: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."
Cyber-sunstroke has made its mark. If the plain meaning of words departs, if arrant scorn reigns, we may as well relax and let the bluffers off. Listening to such ráméis, we may as well picture a supremacist fastness, Idaho-style, at Slievenamon. Just a wry tweak does it.
The compound is full of lads togged out, David Icke-style, in county tracksuits. Pointy of head and peculiar of beard, they froth and burble to heart's content about secret government by 12-foot-tall, black-and-amber lizards.
Hilarious be the contradictions. Hell, yes. But it is a pity that self-elected cranks should mar perceptions of a rich and rightfully proud GAA culture. And these individuals can be strangely sensitive where their own are concerned. By God, they can.
Item - a recent Sunday Tribune article about Babs Keating.
Perfectly rational in its perspective and entirely incorrect in a match prediction, this piece prompted outrage on the same website. One latchiko even urged sending virus-ridden emails to the journalist in question. Not a peep of admonition came from the board's moderators. For all the touchiness, it appears anything goes so long as the figure concerned is not a fellow countyman. Technology, eh?
DJ Carey has retired. Fact, quartzite fact. Yet a glint endures. His status as a symbol of hurling's beauty ensures he will continue to attract comment more grinned against than grinning. They will be going to that well, that windlass, for a while more.
Humpty Dumptys must take care they do not topple off the brim.
PM O'Sullivan is an academic and a hurling writer, whose column The Stubborn Nore appears on www.kilkennycats.com
