Irish team that will show the pride and passion our rugby side lacked

I DECIDED last Saturday night, listening to the experts talking, that I finally knew what has been going wrong with the Irish rugby team.

I’ve never heard so much jargon and gobbledegook in one discussion.

Eddie O’Sullivan was being interviewed by the panel on Setanta Sports about the preparations for our do-or-die match with Argentina, and in the course of a 10-minute discussion I heard the following: “we’ll be looking for go-forward ball from get-go”; “I don’t expect him to be peppering the trams with bombs; “I’ll be happy with ball off the top from two and four”; “they’re superior in the tackle zone.”

There was lots more in that vein. There was a time when the secret to a good performance on the rugby field, especially by an Irish team, was predicated on three things. They went out with as much heart and passion as they could muster. They fought as hard as they could to win the ball when they hadn’t got it. And they trusted each other to move the ball up field when they had it.

Now, you can hear their coach on television, when he isn’t talking incomprehensible jargon, telling us that they’ve done a lot of work in the past week on “nuts and bolts”.

This is a team that has been together now, effectively, for six or seven years — and they’re still working on the nuts and bolts. No wonder that even some of their senior players have spent so much of this World Cup looking almost bewildered on the field.

There is another team preparing to do battle for Ireland this week. As you read this, they are getting ready for the opening ceremony of the greatest competition of their lives.

They’re all amateurs, but one thing I can absolutely promise you: this team will go into competition with incredible pride in their country, and with the sort of passion and heart that we’ve almost given up hope of seeing among our professional sports people.

In fact, I can promise you more than that. The team won’t just perform with passion. They will bring an amazing amount of concentration, skill, courage and class into the competition. This team isn’t worried about getting the nuts and bolts right. They’re here to win.

Here is Shanghai, the largest city in China, with a teeming population of nearly 17 million people. With that many people, it might seem hard to imagine that a thousand people coming from Ireland could make much of an impact. That’s the number of us who have travelled here to support our team, and I’m ready to bet, if you see the opening ceremony on the television news tonight, you’ll also see more than a fair share of green, white and gold flags. If our team is here to win, we’re here to back them all the way.

The team, of course, is Team Ireland, the 143 athletes who will represent their country in the 2007 Special Olympics World Games.

The games get under way today, and for the next 10 days or so our athletes will be competing with the best in the world in their 12 sports. And there are athletes from all over the island of Ireland on the team — including Claire Joyce from Inis Mór on the Aran Islands, Emma Jamison from Enniskillen, Timmy Dorgan from Mallow and Kathleen McMeel from Bruff, Co Limerick. I could list them all, but maybe I’ll wait until the end of the week when I can tell you how many medals the Irish team has won.

For this team, mind you, medals aren’t what it’s all about. Every athlete on the team takes an oath — and many of them can say it by heart. The oath is “let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt”. It sounds corny when you hear it first, but when you see their bravery in action, it begins to really mean a lot.

All athletes and sports people have to overcome obstacles in order to get to the top. If you want to represent your country, there are hills to climb every day — new levels of fitness to be reached, new skills to learn, new strategies to absorb. If you want to represent your country and you have a disability — or a number of disabilities — the hills become mountains. It takes a lot of courage to keep going, a lot of determination to go all the way.

And the athletes we’ll be following for the next week have all that in abundance. Those of us who have come to support them will leave here inspired. And humbled by the courage of people we never thought could make it, but who are now representing their country with distinction.

There are more than supporters here. There are also nearly 200 volunteers, young and not so young. Some of them have an intellectual disability, too, and they all raised money to come here and work. In some cases they will be working with the organisers of the games themselves, and some of them will be helping out with the Irish team.

But many of them have volunteered to work with teams from other countries, especially countries from the developing world that don’t have the resources to fully support their own teams. And in their off-time, the Irish volunteers will be doing what they always do. They’ll be coming to cheer on their own athletes, and they’ll be teaching the Chinese people the meaning of the word “craic”. These games, of course, are the first World Games since they were last held in Ireland in 2003.

THAT was an event that opened the eyes of thousands to the abilities of people with disabilities. In seeing Team Ireland off to Shanghai, President Mary McAleese said the 2003 games were the single greatest highlight of the 10 years of her presidency.

I think those games were more than a highlight.

They changed the debate about disability in everything they revealed about ability, and they demonstrated a degree of goodwill throughout our community that the political system has yet to live up to.

The 2003 World Games also raised the bar, in different ways, for the Special Olympic movement in Ireland. Then, we had 7,000 athletes in training. Now we have more than 11,000. We’ve introduced more sports, and our National Games last year in Belfast was a huge event.

The chief executive of Special Olympics Ireland, Mary Davis, and a small but dedicated and talented team, are hell-bent on using participation in sport and competition to enhance the lives of every single person with an intellectual disability in Ireland, to help them grow and develop to their full potential. And they’ll get there.

That’s the challenge that lies ahead. Next week will hold challenges enough for now. Many of our athletes will be supported throughout their events by their families, who have in some cases sacrificed a lifetime to help them get to where they are today. One thing I know from experience — the work, the achievement and the pride of one week in Shanghai is going to make all that worthwhile.