Rural life falls into the lower leagues
Dublin’s footballers will win Sam Maguire in Croke Park again for a fourth successive time in just a couple of weeks.
They might even hold on to Sam’s silvery neck again next year.
The victories, however, are a powerful hallmarking of a far deeper and more vital social and economic reality that touches all of us in rural Ireland everywhere.
And when one comes to think about it on all the sidelines of the four provinces that again is a pure truth.
Here is another one.
The splendid Dublin panel assembled and led astutely by Jim Galvin and now equipped with the strutting confidence lacked for decades by Dublin’s footballers when they faced up to rural teams from the likes of Kerry and Galway, are now capable in the views of many of beating not just Tyrone but probably the pick of the three other sides which contested the semi-finals.
They are that good indeed. And there is a far deeper context than a mere sporting one to that situation.
Our modern reality in the New Ireland on the socio-economic front is that successive native governments in Leinster House have done far more than the Vikings ever did in expanding the power of the Pale to a truly shocking extent. All of them have followed policies, recently accelerating, to virtually beggar the outlying territories.
All of us should be aware of the truth that 90% of the jobs and career opportunities for the younger generations are being created within a few congested miles of the said Leinster House.
The young countrymen and women have to go there for that reason. Many of them, because of their backgrounds in rural Ireland, bring their boots and kits with them, join Dublin’s many GAA clubs, and, in time, the best of them become star members of the Boys in Blue and indeed the equally formidable Girls in Blue.
Meanwhile the little home clubs they would and should have provided the new blood for often either fold or have to amalgamate with the similarly plundered team from the next parish to fill the traditional jerseys.
That, surely, is another sadly pure truth.
Another poignant and revealing truth is that Dublin of the modern Vikings in Leinster House is in the process of robbing from us the waters of the Shannon to sustain its expanding population of thirsty citizens.
Meanwhile, badly necessary flood protection schemes in rural Ireland are routinely wound around the long finger and reduced in effective scope and scale.
There is much Brexit discussion currently about the implications of a hard border around the Six Counties.
But is it not also our rural reality that, through relatively high motorway tolls, we provincials now have to pay through the nose just to gain access to the Pale? Answer that one yourselves.
It is the Silly Season in this trade but I honestly think I’m not being silly here, just a bit more serious than normal maybe on a Clare night when the summer is ending in gloomy mist and rain from the apt direction of that empowered Pale.
Having worked there in my youth and knowing it quite well from then, it is my modern custom to only visit when it is absolutely necessary and then for as brief a period as possible.
For me, it has changed utterly in the past 20 years or so and is no way as welcoming and warm as I remember. That is a personal truth which may well not be shared by many of you. Such is life and living it.
Going back to that strut now possessed by the formidable Boys in Blue towards the end of a season when Kerry are no longer to be feared in the latter stages of the championship I hazard the prediction that eventually — as happens with so many champions across so many sporting disciplines — they will eventually be beaten more by their own complacency and sense of superiority than by any opposing team in Croke Park on the big day.
But that is not going to happen anytime soon inside the new and powerful Pale that now controls all of us in the provinces in so many ways almost beyond comprehension.
A final probably pure truth for now.
