One cup win is not a revolution

There is a well-known quote attributed to Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic of China, about the French Revolution of 1789. When asked, not long before his death in the 1970s, to assess the significance of the revolt, he is said to have remarked: "It's much too early to say."

Any assessment of the effect Ulster's European Cup win last Saturday will prove to have had must await a similarly lengthy gestation. Certainly, to win the Continent's premier rugby competition was an incredible achievement, but one other thing is also certain: it will be easier to judge its legacy when all the hyperbolic media coverage has died down.

Within days of the semi-final win over Stade Francais early last month, it was abundantly clear that the media-fuelled juggernaut was starting to roll. When the arrangements for the public sale of tickets were announced, a feeding frenzy, with media assistance at every turn, ensued. At times you would have been forgiven for thinking that nobody from here had ever experienced the slightest problem in getting a ticket for a major sporting event.

But the story truly sprouted legs in the seven days before the game when the whole occasion was spoken of in those hushed, reverential tones of the "halcyon days of Barry McGuigan". The exodus, we were told confidently, would be "the biggest ever". The final, it was said, was an event that had "united everybody in common purpose". Some of the English broad-sheets hitched their wagon unquestioningly to this analysis, and last Friday one even opined in its sports section that "the Falls and the Shankill are emotionally as one for our boys". Some of the inhabitants may well have been, but it's a safe bet that many more would have been much more interested in the Irish League meeting of fierce Belfast rivals Cliftonville and Linfield at Solitude on that same Saturday afternoon.

If this European Cup was truly that rarest of creatures here in the North, a sporting event with no political baggage, why then did the Democratic Unionist Party make such play last week out of opening their constituency offices specially to sell Ulster flags? And why did so many people take such offence at that? Why did those people gather in Newry on Saturday evening to stone the coaches returning from Dublin? If all of this was as non-political as we've been led to believe, why did the emotions of all these people run so high?

The reality of this European Cup final experience is that it highlights once again the futility of attempting to imbue sporting events with a wider political or social significance. The minute you start to examine them in any rigorous detail they simple buckle under the weight of that inspection.

There is no disputing that this European Cup has been one of the greatest things to happen to sport here, and it is certainly the best performance by a team from here since Northern Ireland's World Cup run in 1958.

But the momentous nature of the occasion has only highlighted the weaknesses of those charged with reacting to it. When some kind of journalistic overview and reasoned analysis were required, we got instead fans with word processors and supporters with microphones.

There is a desperate need here for a tangible feel-good factor. Sport in general, and the European Cup in particular, have been a boon to those seeking to paper over the cracks elsewhere. Witness the three-card trick of the politicos - David Trimble, Seamus Mallon and Gerry Adams - present and correct at Lansdowne Road last Saturday. That's all well and good as far it goes, but those same cracks are simply relocated when attempts are made to draw too many unsustainable parallels and make too many fantastic conclusions.

Quick fixes developed in the few months of a European Cup run will have negligible long-term benefits. To this end, Michael Reid (the chief executive of the Ulster Branch and an administrator who could teach a few of his counterparts a thing or two about intelligent and progressive promotion of their sports) is to be applauded for his expressed desire to use the cash windfall in programmes to develop the game here. Reid has provided outstanding leadership in recent months, and the hope is that grand plans formulated amid the euphoria of a European Cup win will be put into practice.

Some groundwork has already been done. Willie Anderson's sterling efforts in Dungannon have been well documented, and in Derry City strong roots have been set down by the IRFU development officer for the area, Michael Black. His remit is to work with schools well known for their promotion of the game, but it also includes, he says, "getting in touch with schools that haven't played the game before". This includes Catholic schools in the Bogside and Creggan and Protestant schools on the Waterside.

Eamon Burns, a 1993 All-Ireland medal winner with Derry, is one of the teachers who has become part of the drive to encourage the playing of the game at Catholic, grass-roots level. "I played a bit when I was in England doing teacher training and I got involved in teaching it with the boys in St Joseph's in the Creggan last year," he says.

Burns has since moved to St Columb's College, a school better known for its soccer and GAA tradition than for its production of rugby players. But this year the college reached the first round proper of the prestigious Schools Cup for only the second time in its history and the game is flourishing among the younger boys at the school.

All the boys at St Columb's get a six-week introduction to rugby during PE lessons, and if they take a shine to it they can pursue their interest in organised sessions after school. The fact that the out-half is also on the school's Gaelic football team and is a star performer on the under-18 soccer side is evidence of the sporting ecumenism that Burns and others are attempting to foster. "A sport shouldn't be thought of as belonging to one religion or another," he says. "At that age these boys don't think about things like that. They just play and those that enjoy it go on, those that don't try something else."

The Derry experience, however, is atypical. Rugby here is still a Protestant game played in Protestant schools. And like everything else here, those patterns laid down during the formative school years have a profound effect on later life.

The guesswork about the potential spin-offs of European Cup glory is that it will be worth around £400,000. If even a fraction of that were directed towards development projects like the one in Derry, the game of rugby could really start to bed down right across society and we could start to talk genuinely about reaping the long-term benefits of its great adventure. Then, maybe somewhere down the line, we could realistically start to talk about a game for all the people.