Much more than just a spectator sport

Seán Moran On GAAIs sport the medium or the message? The idea of pure sport is notional because it is experienced at different levels from the participatory to the vicarious. From kids running around with proud (or edgy) parents beaming to armchair-bound global television audiences there's a world (literally) of possible meaning in the simple declaration that you're "interested in sport".

Within that world, sport is used to so many different ends. The soccer industry in Britain has recently been strangely convulsed by the reminder - hardly a revelation - of commerce's propensity to prioritise profit and of the need for a long spoon when supping with uber-capitalists.

Yet, professional sport is business and subject to the same rules as any other business - in this case that any plc is wide open to acquisition and exploitation.

A century previously, British sport was the means to a different end but no less manipulative. Organised games were an effective tool of imperialism in the colonies and even at home through the insistence on a form of amateurism that reinforced the class system, a method of social control. As outlined by Roger Hutchison in Empire Games (1996): "The Victorian British did not introduce cricket to their empire soley because they enjoyed the game. They took it with them because they felt they had a duty to do so.

"Just as it taught discipline and honour to their own young officer cadets, so those qualities might rub off on to some of the subject peoples. Just as it delivered a moral lesson to Englishmen, so might it have a missionary effect upon Asians, native Australians and Polynesian islanders."

In the context of the late 19th century, the origins of the GAA and its attachment to cultural exclusivity are all too plain to see. Faced with sports that were unapologetically instruments of imperialism, Cusack and his fellow founders organised games, which would take the struggle for independence to the playing fields.

No one could argue with the success of the consequent sporting counter-culture.

It's exactly 40 years since the following frequently quoted tribute was paid to the GAA: "More than the Gaelic League, more than Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin, more even than the Transport and General Workers' Union and, of course, far more than the movement which created the Abbey Theatre; more than any of these, the Gaelic Athletic movement aroused the interest of large numbers of ordinary people throughout Ireland. One of the most successful and original mass movements of its day, its importance has perhaps not even yet been fully recognised."

The source is Conor Cruise-O'Brien in his book Writers and Politics (1965). A lengthy passage is quoted in Brendan Mac Lua's vigorous defence of the old ban on playing and attending foreign games, The Steadfast Rule (1967) mainly for the purpose of taking issue with Cruise-O'Brien's contention that the ban marked a turning point in Irish nationalism.

"But then one of the significant facts about the period we are considering," writes Cruise-O'Brien, "is that while many Irishmen were passionately concerned about freedom, few gave any thought at all to unity - except, of course, as technical term meaning party discipline.

"One is reluctant to invoke the hypothetical reactions of the great dead, yet perhaps may be forgiven for doing so in this instance; Thomas Davis, who was concerned for unity as well as for freedom, might well have felt that, here in the seemingly not very important episode of the GAA Ban, nationalist Ireland first departed from the spirit, though not from the letter of his teaching."

Mac Lua's defence of the GAA isn't so much to refute the thesis as to argue that without the ban the acknowledged successes of the association could not have happened.

Even during the recent debate on Rule 42 - the last of the GAA bans - there were references to the importance of Gaelic games not as sports in themselves, but as statements of national identity.

Times change and just as sport has mutated in Britain from an instrument of public policy to a cash cow, here in Ireland just as one of the more aggressive statements of national identity disappears, albeit temporarily, from the GAA's Official Guide the importance of recreational games were given a newly urgent context by the publication of the national task force on obesity report.

Amongst its dismal findings is the fact that "childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions in Europe, with body weight now the most prevalent childhood disease".

One aspect of the GAA's activities that gets infrequent attention - particularly when there's a row over public money spent on Croke Park - is the development of the country's only significant recreational infrastructure.

The purpose of the association is to promote the games (and through them to strengthen the national identity).

The most potent marketing weapons are the top-class intercounty schedules, which generate huge public interest as well as major revenue streams from gate receipts and broadcast rights.

But the intercounty championship schedule is only the apex of the pyramid. Interestingly, one of the iconic figures of Victorian Britain, Sir Robert Baden Powell - founder of the Boy Scouts movement, a sort of imperialist Neverland - was unimpressed by the first stirrings of soccer as a mass spectator sport, describing it as

". . . a vicious game when it draws crowds of lads away from playing the game themselves to be merely onlookers at a few paid performers. Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunched up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan and cheer in panic in unison with their neighbours."

The provision of recreational facilities for an increasingly sedentary child population is a major resource in the fight against weight problems and obesity.

Without the Gaelic Athletic Association, the state of the nation's children could only be imagined.

Properly supported, the association's infrastructure could achieve so much more and maybe in so doing fulfil Dr Cruise-O'Brien's prophecy by at last underlining the full importance of the GAA in a very modern context.

smoran@irish-times.ie