LOCKER ROOM: As the economy goes belly-up, all our guff about being a nation of sports-lovers is about to be put to the test

SOMEBODY CLAPPED their hands and suddenly we are returned to the Dark Ages, a time where every grim day brings a wind of visceral rawness. Back in the early 1980s, when last the skies seemed so black and when we were convulsing ourselves with referendums and hunger strikes and Ann Lovett and the Kerry babies, we seemed somehow better equipped for the sheer bloodiness of Irish life.

We had endless protests and vented an inchoate anger at the gods. We protested. We emigrated. We forgot. We had a Christy Moore with fight in his belly and Moving Hearts with more and Gaybo telling us daily that the place was banjaxed.

And from all the failings of our banana republic there seemed to grow a defiant creativity.

Now we look like people who have received bad news while drunkenly blowing out the candles on a cake at a fancy dress party, sunbathers caught in a hailstorm. There is some awful pathos about our blithe unpreparedness. Once upon a time we railed against the institutions that propped up our septic isle. Now those institutions have the standing of piles of rubble and we text each other uncomprehendingly about it all on our iTouch phones.

And the band plays on. Or rather, the band has stopped and fled the building but some of us are still dancing. It’s odd, but the dissonance between Irish sport and the world around it has never seemed more pronounced. This past week of distress ended with the Heino and quickly segues into the visit of the Volvo Ocean Race to Galway and on into the gaiety of the championships.

In one sense we can’t but be grateful for any diversion, but you wonder sometimes when sport will get back in touch with us. Will the magic evaporate? Now that the money is all gone and we have no magic beans brought home from the market, will we go scudding down the rankings of various international sports?

If you found the intersection between the vectors of joy and excitement arising from Barry McGuigan’s world title, the Stephen Roche/Charles Haughey Tour de France and Ireland’s qualification for either Euro ’88 or Italia ’90, you would find the source of the good times which came along first as a trickle of money in the 1990s before exploding into a white-water torrent of silly vulgarity in the past few years. You would find the point where we became painfully addicted to the rush of the big occasion, the notion of ourselves as big players at the high-stakes table.

Before that our wins were narrow, our misses were close and heart-breaking and most sport took place under the tupperware grey skies of our childhood. Croker, Dalyer and Lansdowne vied with each other for the title of dowdiest venue.

Sentimentalise all you wish, but the experience of being carried up and down the terracing of the Hill, the School End or the Havelock End in a sweaty sway of beery and anoraked humanity, carried along with your arms pinned and your toes skimming the ground – it was equally terrifying in any of those venues.

Back then we thought premium level was what you experienced in the stinking al fresco toilet just before the frothy flood underfoot reached the depth at which it would pour over your platform brogues and soak your socks.

The best moment we had, perhaps, was John Treacy, rail-thin and grimacing through the mud and rain in Limerick in 1979. Such an attritional victory, he was like a running metaphor for the whole bloody country.

The rest of sport from that time till the source of the boom was awful. Dublin and Kerry had folded the tent on their famous rivalry. Relief came only with Séamus Darby’s quick revision of unfolding history in 1982 and the dozen desperadoes from Dublin the following year. In-house celebrations.

The glitzy stuff that filled our TV screens and our imaginations in the fleeting days of summer took place without us and that seemed to be the order of the world.

And then suddenly, unbelievably, we became a Zelig-like presence at major events. And God help us but we loved it, we craved the pats on the head, the favourable mentions, the external validations, the guilty thrill of catching glimpses of ourselves in the mirror while at play and at fun.

This is us, we’d say. Greatest fans in the world. We can hold our drink. We can sing. We don’t raze your gaff to the ground. We are effin’ charming is what we are, a nation of effin’ charmers. Yup, we’re your new best friends. Do you love us? No, really, do ya?

Sometime after we had gotten rich – or thought we had gotten rich – we began to take it all for granted and that innocent delirium went out of it. We could go to a stadium which looked as good as anything on the telly whenever we went to Croke Park. Pádraig Harrington has won three majors, but we are coping with it. The land is necklaced with posh, bespoke golf clubs and championship courses and Tiger flies in to do JP’s charity thing. Sure we’re players at that level.

Stephen Ireland won’t play for our expensive Italian manager? No drama. The cricket team makes another World Cup? Three paragraphs. The excellence, from a Brian O’Driscoll to an Aidan O’Brien, is pretty much taken for granted.

Have we the resilience now to stomach a sporting recession? As we slash and burn to try to erase the economic howlers of the past few years, sport will feel the pain. The grass roots – not exactly fed and watered with care at the best of the times by successive administrations – will be first hit. And that will percolate through to the elite levels.

We lost our innocence somewhere along the way to our imaginary wealth and by the time we experience such a sustained period of sporting glory again we may well have regained it.

Meanwhile, all our guff about being a nation of sports-lovers will be put to the test. Does this nation of sports lovers have the belly to get out and fill the gaps volunteer by volunteer, mentor by mentor, committee member by committee member?

Do we love sport enough to make it a therapy, an escape, an education, a foundation of community, a way of genuinely getting in contact with each other again? Can we find that old exuberance and innocence?

For the sins we let be committed to previous generations of children, that’s the least we owe the children of tomorrow.