A time to celebrate - GAA shows what real unity can do

EVEN if you want to believe that Ireland’s glass is half full it’s likely that, just occasionally, you’ve been disappointed or angry with the institutions or individuals who have done so much to damage our country.

The Catholic Church has been humbled and more or less sidelined because of sexual and child abuse scandals. The mind-numbing hypocrisy of vocal churchmen did untold damage too. However, it seems as if all the good the Catholic Church has done has been forgotten in a tsunami of anger and indignation. Time may redress that imbalance.

Too many leading bankers have been shown to be self-serving and immoral. They have been judged corrupt though not even one has been arrested. In their case respect has been replaced by contempt.

Some politicians have justified the most cynical assessments. Too many others, the decent but silent majority, have been drowned by acceptance and conservatism. They have lost ground because they are indecisive and unable to change the inertia of public life.

We have sometimes been angry with ourselves too. Angry that we were so susceptible and naive.

Through all of these dispiriting changes one organisation has stood tall and shown what can be achieved if the motives are of the highest order, if community is put before self. This weekend the Gaelic Athletic Association celebrates 125 years in existence and it is certain that this would be a very much poorer country if the GAA did not exist.

In a society where our political system is still divided by a civil war that ended almost a century ago, the GAA has shown, time and time again, the power of unity of purpose. It has shown what we can achieve if obsolete divisions are put aside, if the future, rather than the past, sets the agenda.

It may be fanciful to imagine that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael might yet recognise that they have far more in common than separates them, just as GAA activists from different backgrounds decided generations ago.

It is hard to imagine that there will ever be a better time for that truth to be reached than right now.

There are many monuments to GAA teamwork and one has come to symbolise what Ireland might be. Croke Park is as fine a stadium as exists anywhere, it is a statement of confidence and intention. Yet, when the time came to show a commitment to community and country the organisation were generous hosts for sports once regarded as the enemy.

That evolution was not easily achieved. Nor was it the path all members of the GAA would have chosen. It is a tribute to them that once the decision to open Croke Park was democratically reached that they accepted it; they saw the bigger picture.

That decision, one that challenged the founding principles of the GAA, stands alone in Ireland today. No other institution so central in our culture, no political party, no church or bank, so radically reshaped itself to ensure that Ireland might be a better, more unified place. Apart from peace deals in the North opening Croke Park was probably the greatest political achievement in this country in recent decades.

This is indeed an indictment of our political culture but it may not be fair, after all the GAA is concerned with the community and the common good, not power and the privileges that it confers.