D-day for GAA: are they sporting patriots or last-gasp partitionists?

AS Minister for Finance in the late 1960s, Charlie Haughey introduced a whole range of programmes that captured the public imagination.

He brought about free travel for the elderly, as well as free TV licences, free electricity and free telephone rentals for pensioners living alone.

None of these cost the exchequer very much, but they did provide some welcome help for a needy and deserving section of society.

Ultimately, people may begin to question Haughey’s gestures not because the recipients were undeserving, but because, like so much of his behaviour, the gestures could now be seen as lousy example. Ever since, people with only a fraction of his vision or ability have been trying to emulate him with crazy giveaways in which the taxpayers have been fleeced for causes that have been neither imaginative nor deserving.

Some of the gestures have looked like political bribes by ministers to purchase votes in their own constituencies.

Was it just a coincidence that Croke Park was in Bertie Ahern’s constituency, or that Punchestown was in Charlie McCreevy’s?

As minister for finance in 1994, Bertie announced £5m for the GAA to offset rebuilding costs at Croke Park. The gesture attracted national attention, but not much support. The GAA people would have us believe that this is because the media are biased against them, and they could be right.

The £5m may have seemed like a staggering sum then, but it was quite small when one considers that more than £100m was generated in tax from Croke Park renovations. In reality the £5m was just a token because the Government has since given the GAA well over €100m towards the renovations.

Bertie personally committed most of that money before even discussing it in cabinet, according to Mary Harney.

The whole thing seemed like a sweetener to soften up the GAA so that it would save the Government the necessity of putting up further hundreds of millions to help IRFU and FAI to build national stadiums of their own.

Last year an Irish Examiner/Prime Time poll, conducted by Lansdowne Market Research, found that an overwhelming majority of 78% of those surveyed expressed the opinion that Croke Park should be opened to other sports as well as Gaelic games, while only 15% were opposed to the idea.

Of course, nobody should expect the GAA to give up Croke Park when it is needed for Gaelic football or hurling games.

The soccer crowd have only themselves to blame for the pathetic state of their facilities.

At the moment we have a classic example of how greed has stunted the growth of that association with the travails of one of the country’s most famous League of Ireland clubs, Shamrock Rovers, which was undermined by some of it own officials selling the ground from under them.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that even before Bertie Ahern gave any money for Croke Park, Peter Quinn, then president of the GAA, was dismissive of the idea of allowing soccer to be played there.

“There is absolutely no possibility of the GAA changing its position,” he declared in 1994. “In terms of hyping issues like the playing of soccer in Croke Park,” he said, “there are far too many people who ignore the reality of the fact that this is a divided island and I think that we are in a position that we have to be very careful not to accentuate division any further on that basis.”

Instead, they are content to preserve the divisions. Linfield soccer club extended the hand of friendship by allowing the local camogie club to train on its floodlit facilities in Belfast. It is only by reciprocal respect that the barriers are going to be broken down in the North, and it is for the GAA as a whole to impress on their Northern brethren the need for mutual respect.

The GAA has promoted partitionism by its unwillingness to stand up to that bigoted minority from Northern Ireland within the organisation. For years they were looking for their human and civil rights, but now that these are recognised, many nationalists are just seeking revenge.

No decent person should be party to such machinations. Only a fool would think that one side is responsible for all the problems in Northern Ireland.

THE thugs and bigots are on both sides. It is so-called Republicans who are covering up the murder of Robert McCartney and engaging in the blatant intimidation of his brave sisters.

It was only in the 1950s that a Northern team began challenging seriously for all-Ireland honours. The official record attendance at Croke Park was set in 1961, when 90,556 paid to see the Down v Offaly final.

Northern teams brought great colour and excitement to Croke Park, but the late Michael O’Hehir used to lament their habit of booing, which he saw as an unwelcome development in the game. They behaved like a breed apart. Some of those coming down were compared to haemorrhoids. “They are all right when they come down and go right back up,” it was said, “but they can be a right pain in the arse when they stay down.”

Who will suffer if the GAA refuses to open its doors even temporarily to soccer and rugby? It won’t be the FAI. Ireland will be able to play its matches in Liverpool or Manchester and probably attract more people there than at Lansdowne Road. Many will grumble about having to travel so far, but they won’t blame the FAI. They’ll blame the GAA.

For some of the bigger matches, the Dublin economy could lose out on as much as €60m a game. That will effect the accommodation, food and drink sectors, and it will inevitably hurt Irish tourism, which could be in trouble already as we are pricing ourselves out of the market. Social partnership helped to turn the economy around since the late 1980s. What we achieved since then has been truly phenomenal, but in the present competitive world we need to work at it, and not allow greedy sectional interest to put everything at risk.

Gaelic football and hurling are great games that have served this country well. In Kerry, where the civil war of 1922-1923 was its most bitter, it was Gaelic football which brought the former enemies together. Men who fought on both sides joined together as a team in the quest for all-Ireland glory, and that probably helps to explain why football was so passionate and strong in Kerry.

The GAA is made up of team sports, but there seems to be little team support for the association’s president, Seán Kelly, among some of his predecessors.

This is not just about the GAA embarrassing or repudiating its own president; it is also about kicking the Taoiseach in the groin after he went out on such a limb to help fund the rebuilding of Croke Park.

The GAA will be deciding today whether it will do the patriotic thing in contributing towards the sense of social partnership. It is a question of whether the association will demonstrate responsibility and generosity, or greed and ingratitude.