Razzamatazz on missing list as final goes unnoticed
O’Connell Street, the quays, Grafton Street, St Stephen’s Green and a fair wedge of the city’s Georgian area were all traversed as press conferences and other dealings were crossed off the list, while the journey into town itself involved a train journey through the north side’s western approaches.
Crawling by Croke Park gave rise to the sense that something was missing. While passing over the bridge on the North Circular Road just adjacent to Quinn’s pub, the thought struck that this most frequented of thoroughfares on big match days was more or less bare of colour relating to Sunday’s All-Ireland football final. The only sign of note relating to the GAA was a bank’s advertisement that hung down from a lamppost.
The city centre was more of the same. Here we are just days before the biggest game of the GAA calendar — with all due respect to the hurling branch of the family out there who will beg to differ — and the country’s capital city is going on about its business with ne’er a nod of the head towards Sunday’s set-to.
The media is doing its bit, so too are some of the association’s sponsors, who have launched the usual campaigns and competitions to win tickets and increase their visibility, but the game itself is all but absent from the public consciousness and the fact Dublin themselves are involved only deepens the conviction that something is seriously wrong with that.
Look at it another way.
Last May the Heineken Cup final was held across the Liffey in the Aviva Stadium and you couldn’t avoid the game if you tried. Visitors to Dublin Airport – Terminals 1 and 2 — were greeted with a barrage of branding that spread like graffiti over lifts, walls and throughout the concourse outside the buildings themselves for the week leading up to the fixture.
Match day brought with it the ‘European Champions Village’ in Merrion Square which opened five hours before Toulon and Clermont Auvergne kicked off and offered a focal point for fans where food, drink, photo ops with the trophy, face-painting, live music and merchandise tents were laid on before the game was transmitted on a giant screen.
This is nothing new.
Major sporting events around the world do this sort of stuff as rote and the mind recalls the previous occasion the Heineken Cup final was held in Dublin, in 2003, when the route from town to stadium was transformed with paraphernalia associated with the final, the tournament and the clubs involved.
Even that is shunted into the ha’penny place compared to the efforts gone to by our American friends every year when the Super Bowl spawns a weekend of infinite attractions, exhibitions, concerts and business conferences in whatever city is lucky enough to be awarded the hosting rights. It usually takes time for new stuff to cross the Atlantic but it is puzzling that such a festival feel hasn’t been aped by the GAA, who are aware of the possibilities.
Two years ago, the association launched their FeverPitch Festival, an indoor event at HQ on the night before the football decider that featured musicians, comedians and a number of GAA legends. Stadium director Peter McKenna spoke optimistically about taking the idea beyond the stadium and into the city itself in due course.
“We are trying to do something here,” he explained to this newspaper.
“I’d really like to see this in two or three years’ time develop into a really large festival in the city where we may get a weekend of Gaelic games and celebrate everything about it.”
The GAA have, it must be said, adopted the idea of a family funzone in the Davin Stand car park on match days, but the ambition to spread wings and conquer the capital has failed to materialise. More’s the pity because,whatever about your thoughts on ‘The Gathering’, this surely should have been the year to use the blue riband events to target the diaspora.
Many of them are here already. Time and again during yesterday’s potterings around the city it was necessary to deviate from the footpath to find a route past lines of tourists entering and exiting Trinity College or the National Library, all of them probably utterly oblivious to the beautiful madness that will descend on Sunday.
Vast tracts of John Hinde’s picture-perfect Ireland these people seek have been lost to the natural passage of time.
What transpires this weekend in Croke Park remains one of the few links to our past and will amount to a far more authentic celebration of our culture than the Paddywhackery that subsumes Dublin and the world at large on St Patrick’s Day.
What a wasted opportunity.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
