Thursday, March 25, 2010
ERICH SEGAL died recently, classics professor and author of ‘Love Story’.
He’s best remembered for that mawkish book, which was made into a movie that inflicted Ryan O’Neal on us – enough said – but his life teaching in Harvard gave us one of his wittiest putdowns: the reason academic fighting is so vicious, said Segal, is because so little is at stake.
There’s a lot at stake in Limerick at the moment – the future of one of the few counties which takes hurling seriously, and that’s not overstating it. But it’s certainly vicious.
Over the weekend, we had allegations about jobs being withheld from people due to the positions they’re taking in the stand-off between the Limerick senior hurling management and last year’s panel.
That takes the whole row into a particularly sensitive area, given the way the economy is going.
However, there’s something particularly galling about the sequence of events in Limerick in the last few months: its predictability. Thanks to recent events in Cork, you know that player-management disputes follow a distinct pattern, and certainly last year’s stand-off on Leeside has had some uncomfortable echoes in Limerick.
For instance, heavy national league defeats for what’s practically a brand-new panel are spun as business as usual, or even progress.
That’s true up to a point, particularly if you’re examining the evidence with a calculator rather than a heart: if the new Limerick team loses to Tipperary in the league by 22 points, as they did last Sunday, then that’s progress because last year Limerick lost to Tipperary in Croke Park by more.
You could go deeper into the looking glass by pointing out that the new Limerick team, given its inexperience, is progressing merely by playing a sequence of games; that by definition it must be more experienced at the end of that sequence of games than it was at the start.
That counts as progress within some kind of definition, but progress in the context of a county which contested an All-Ireland final three years ago?
Another recurring theme in the Cork strikes was the constant suggestion that the absent players weren’t united or, in a slight variation, that certain characters were driving the disaffection.
There isn’t an exact equivalence in the Limerick situation: one of last year’s players has returned to play this season, which gives some credence to suggestions that the 2009 Limerick players will splinter and return to the fold, one by one.
Or does until you read what one of those players told this newspaper yesterday: "As for returning – I’d rather shoot myself than go back."
Finally, the fact that the Limerick County Board have declared that a decisive vote was tantamount to drawing a line under the whole affair will also draw a wry smile from observers in Cork.
How many times was a county board vote held in Cork which was supposed to herald "the end of it", to use Limerick chairman Liam Lenihan’s description of last night’s proceedings in Claughaun?
If Lenihan was referring to Justin McCarthy’s position, he may be right, given the support the manager received in club votes on Tuesday. If he was referring to the stand-off between last year’s Limerick players and their manager, then clearly he wasn’t.
All of the above are recognisable milestones in this kind of conflict, and so is the resolution, if previous experience is anything to go by.
Despite maintaining its distance early on, Croke Park got involved in the two recent Cork strikes.
It appointed Kieran Mulvey of the Labour Relations Commission to resolve the 2007-8 edition, while GAA President Christy Cooney and Director-General Páraic Duffy held discussions with the players in an attempt to find a solution.
On both occasions, GAA headquarters had indicated earlier in the proceedings that it would not be getting involved, only to... get involved at a later stage. Last month Cooney outlined his reasons for not getting involved, saying he believed, based on talking to various parties in Limerick, that it was a matter for the Limerick County Board to resolve.
Yet that attitude didn’t hold when his predecessor Nickey Brennan appointed Kieran Mulvey to thrash out a resolution two years ago; or even last year, when Cooney and Duffy met the players in a hotel near Cork Airport.
Those on Shannonside who are justifiably angry with all sides in this dispute are entitled to ask one simple question: why was there such a rush to resolve matters in Cork compared to Limerick?
The dispute looks as vicious in the midwest as it was on Leeside.
If Croke Park doesn’t intervene decisively there may not be anything at stake for much longer, to paraphrase Erich Segal.
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