Eimear Ryan: Might a post-pandemic GAA world see a rural revival?
Kilcar GAA Club's Towney Park pitch pictured during a Donegal County Divisional League Division 1 Section B match against Killybegs last July. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
‘Just want to play camogie, don’t want to do anymore burpees in my room. GO AWAY COVID.’
So tweeted Niamh Donnelly of McQuillan camogie club in Ballycastle, Co Antrim last month. At the time of writing, it has 564 likes; Donnelly’s words struck a chord.
We are getting restless. Clubs around the country are doing sterling work by organising home training programmes, skills challenges, and Zoom meetups for various teams. This is vital for both morale and fitness — my own mental health has perked up considerably since we began remote training — but it’s not quite the real deal. With the spring forward last weekend and the evenings stretching out before us, our body clocks are telling us we should be back out on the pitch. We are gasping for the field.
In a way, those of us involved in the GAA had a relatively easy go of it last year. We went back training by July, just as we were coming into perfect hurling weather. My own season lasted until mid-September. That was more than three months of routine and regular life in the midst of 2020, a plank of normality that I know not everyone got to experience.
In 2021, we’re still a little unclear on when we’ll be back. Like the vaccine, we know it’s coming; we’re just not quite sure when. (It’s been frustrating, to say the least, to see my peers in the US and the UK on social media getting their first shots, while many of our parents and grandparents are still waiting for the call.)
There was white smoke earlier this week, however, with news that we are opening up again — albeit with cautionary words like ‘gradual’ and ‘staggered’ sprinkled liberally through the discourse. Intercounty training starts from April 19, and underage training will be back underway towards the end of the month.
Still no definite word on adult club teams, but it’s just a matter of sitting tight for another couple of weeks and waiting for the go-ahead. Clubs across the border — including Niamh Donnelly’s McQuillan — will be back in action even sooner.
Hopefully, this has been the last big lockdown. And maybe this coming winter, with another season behind us, we’ll have time to reflect on how the pandemic has changed us, our lives and our games. We might be unpicking the trauma of the pandemic for years to come, but are there any beneficial changes we can bring with us too?
As Aoife Lane astutely pointed out in these pages, in a conversation with Michael Moynihan: “Would the split season have happened as quickly if it weren’t for Covid forcing us into it?”
Even though players had been calling for separation of club and county duties for years, and even though everyone agreed in principle that it was a good idea, the GAA’s hand had to be forced by a seismic worldwide event before it did anything about it.
It has been equally interesting to see how quickly and easily many offices pivoted to working from home as soon as they had no other choice. For years, disabled people, parents of small children, and plain old introverts had been asking for flexible work-from-home arrangements; but it’s only now, when their hand was forced, that many employers have to admit that it was doable all along.
As technology has developed to the point where many people’s personal devices are as powerful as office machines, it no longer makes sense to treat an office like a factory floor. Office culture prized virtues like smart presentation and punctuality, sometimes above the work itself; WFH culture only cares about the work (says she, typing in her pyjamas).
It goes without saying that not every job can be done remotely; if we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that most of the jobs that are essential to the functioning of society have to be done in person. But if even a proportion of office workers opt to keep working remotely once we’re all vaccinated, it could bring about an organic decentralisation.
News broke in early March that former Mayo player Enda Varley is transferring back to his home club of Garrymore, after five years spent working in Dublin and playing with St Vincent’s. Dublin has long been a poisoned chalice for rural graduates; it’s a great city in which to socialise and it’s where most of the jobs are, but rents and house prices are oppressive (I myself was priced out of my Ranelagh box room in 2013).
I’ve witnessed the rural drain first-hand; I’ve been part of it. Where I grew up in Co Tipperary, almost everyone had to move away for college. As a result, our camogie team wasn’t able to train midweek, since almost all the players were scattered to the winds in Dublin, Galway, Cork, Maynooth, or Limerick.
After college, many of us found work in the cities in which we studied, making coming home to play for the club a costly and time-consuming undertaking. It’s so different for city clubs, whose young players can study and find work locally, keeping teams together and making training schedules much more manageable.
Dublin’s vibrant grassroots GAA, particularly at underage, is brilliant to see and is clearly paying dividends, but has had an inevitable knock-on effect on rural clubs. In the brave new post-pandemic world, let’s hope for a rural revival.
