GAA has adopted winning ways to become a major national asset

I WAS born into a rugby family and reared on the exploits of Jack Kyle and others. The memory of watching Mike Gibson play his first game for Ireland is still implanted on my brain, though it was more than 40 years ago.

His selection led to controversy in our house because my father was a great fan of the man he replaced (I think his name was Mick Quinn, regarded as a great and reliable kicker of the ball).

Indeed my dad’s judgement seemed to be vindicated when Gibson dropped his very first pass. “There you are, now”, I remember dad saying, “didn’t I tell you no good would come of this sort of experimentation?”

But that was before Gibson cut the English defence open in the middle of the second half with one of the most beautiful dummies I’ve ever seen. His searing run and immaculate passing led to one of the great tries, scored by Kevin Flynn, and to an amazing 18-5 victory in Twickenham of all places. From that moment, there was never a doubt in our house about who was the greatest rugby player we’d ever seen.

All my daughters have grown up with the same passion for the game — although, of course, they never had the privilege of seeing Mike Gibson in his prime. Three of them banded together last year to buy tickets for the Heineken Cup final long before they knew who was likely to be playing in it. Their memories of that incredible day in Cardiff, when Munster won the cup simply because they wouldn’t allow themselves to be beaten, will last as long for them as some of mine will for me.

With that sort of background, I hope I’ll be forgiven for saying the GAA never meant much to me when I was growing up. The great Kerry and Dublin clashes went over my head, and I was never able to feel the thrill of great games.

To me, September never meant that we were heading for the climax of the football and hurling seasons, only that we were approaching the start of the rugby year.

As I got a bit older, and especially as I became politically involved, I came to see the GAA as representing something that was entirely backward. The intransigence of the organisation, and its apparent preference for a time-warped brand of nationalism, seemed to me to reflect a culture that ought to have been long gone. I equated the GAA ban, which expelled players found guilty of playing soccer, with the ban imposed by the Catholic Church on young men and women entering Trinity College.

And as the cauldron of Northern Ireland erupted, my view of the role played by the GAA hardened.

The organisation seemed to be infused by an ethos that was not just anti-British, but dangerously sectarian as well. I worked over that period with several governments all of whom had difficult relationships with the GAA. And these relationships were based on the fact that the GAA had become a powerful lobby, unwilling ever to take no for an answer, reluctant ever to offer a bit of give in return for a lot of take, and willing always to squeeze the last drop of public money from whatever government they dealt with. In many ways, it seemed to me, the GAA had copied the authoritarian model of the Catholic Church. Even those few proponents of change within the organisation always seemed to be harshly dealt with.

I don’t know whether those attitudes were based on fact or fiction. I know I was far from the only one to share that sort of view of the GAA.

But whatever about the past, hasn’t the GAA become a remarkably indispensable part of our national culture? It’s hard to imagine a voluntary organisation anywhere in the world that makes such a contribution to national life. As the old cliché promoting the Irish language used to say, it’s a vital part of what we are.

Speaking of the language, GAA matches and commentary are almost the only place you’ll hear it used now. And used, especially by the remarkable Michael Ó Muircheartaigh, in ways that most of us can understand and appreciate.

But it’s so much more than that. The revival, if such it was, of the hurling and football championships has ensured that never a year goes by without some new bit of sporting romance entering our folklore.

THE rebirth of Clare and Wexford hurling in recent years, the emergence of tough mountainy men from Northern Ireland who seemed to frighten the lives out of even the hardest footballers down here, the stories of individuals who have made huge personal contributions to an amateur game. Men like DJ Carey, for instance. He would have been a multi-million star in any of the professional codes elsewhere in the world. Add all that up, and you have the phenomenon of a small country that can support and participate in four national games, rugby and soccer alongside the GAA. No other country in the world can say that.

But it’s more than that, too. This is an organisation that runs amateur sport, but they have the skill and know-how to build one of the finest stadiums in the world, a stadium that over the next couple of years will help to showcase all of our national games. Sure, they drove hard bargains with successive governments. They weren’t the only organisation in the country to do that — but uniquely, with the GAA every penny of public money they got is on display. With all the billions that have been wasted in futile and mismanaged projects over the years, the GAA can genuinely claim to have given real value for money. But it’s more even than that. We talk a lot nowadays about social capital, that strange force that binds communities together.

We know that the collapse of social capital in our towns and cities has contributed to a range of problems — depression, suicide, anti-social behaviour, crime and alienation. We hark back in Ireland to the days when young people had values other than the quality of their iPods.

And we seldom realise the GAA is more active than almost any other organisation in building communities and community spirit. In every town and village, if there is an amenity for young people and volunteers willing to staff it, the chances are it has been put there by the GAA.

We can mock and be cynical, but the truth is that without the GAA, we would have an awful lot less social capital to share.

So whatever one’s view of history, the modern GAA deserves to be saluted, even cherished. A genuinely national movement that has stayed true to its ideals and become indispensable, in a dozen different ways, to all of us.

In all sorts of ways, the GAA is one of our true national assets. Now, if only a couple of tickets to the hurling final, to watch Cork capture the treble, were possible to come by…