Tommy Martin: The Ulster championship is Gaelic football’s great constitutional dilemma
For this week’s proof of how things are different Up There we have the curious case of the Queen’s biscuits.
An outraged reported that Her Majesty’s subjects in Northern Ireland who wished to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee by scoffing from specially produced souvenir tins of Walker’s Shortbread would not be able to do so thanks to red tape caused by the pesky Northern Ireland protocol.
According to the Telegraph, Walker’s had decided it was not cost-effective to ship Liz-branded goodies to the North, withholding from some of the monarchy’s biggest fans their right to snack on jubilee-related nibbles.
“It is not acceptable that patriotic people in Northern Ireland wanting to celebrate 70 years of Her Majesty’s reign will be denied access to a range of jubilee food and drink products,” harrumphed Theresa Villiers, the arch-Brexiteer who was Northern Ireland secretary at the time of the Brexit vote and who therefore bears some responsibility for the sad lack of royalist shortbread in the Six Counties.
It appears the Jubilee has heightened existential pangs within the Unionist community about their place among the happy and glorious. As well as the shortbread fiasco, all three Unionist parties this week questioned the loyalty of Tesco’s Cookstown branch, after it failed to stock any royal tat in advance of the jubilee celebrations. Ulster Unionist MLA Tom Elliott wondered if Tesco was “embarrassed by her Majesty’s 70 years of service,” seemingly unaware that embarrassment packed up and left town quite some time ago.
There was no sign of royal biscuits in Clones last Sunday either. Although the County Monaghan border town is but a length of Union Jack bunting away from Her Majesty’s territory, enthusiasm for the Jubilee was in short supply. For all that, Ulster final day provided a sense of otherness of its own, though maybe nothing as weird as Tesco being accused of treason.
Three long years since it last hosted an Ulster final, Clones had its raison d’être back. Big smiles on the faces of the farmer’s daughters taking the fiver off you for parking in their field. Chippers heaving pineapple topped pizzas out the door. Pubs spilling their contents out onto the worn, boarded up streets, awoken and splashed with colour: green and gold, yes, but red and white most vividly.
On Fermanagh Street and around the Creighton Hotel, Derry girls and boys owned the town: that heady pheromone cocktail of a boisterous young GAA crowd on a big one. Fake tan and hair gel, skin fades and extensions, aftershave and eyelashes, tight jeans and jerseys, jerseys, jerseys. The sound of broken glass, shouted conversations and excited laughter between big gulps of cider and lager. Most of these kids weren’t born when Derry last won an Ulster title, most of them were snotty infants the last time they were even in a final.
The Donegal crowd – 10 finals in 12 years – looked on at the arrivistes with no condescension. They had been there before themselves, a decade ago, fired up and hungry. And now here was Rory Gallagher, consigliere for Donegal back then, Derry’s capo now, doing it again. “He has the whole of Donegal sweating,” said the man with the tickets outside the Gerry Arthurs Stand.
It always felt like Derry’s day. The Donegal team were out doing their warmup for what seemed like an age before Derry burst onto the pitch, horns blasting and flares smoking red over on the Hill. Their body language never wavered from that moment, nor did that of their manager, prowling, goading, barracking from the sideline, spitting in his hands: meaning business.
The Ulster championship is Gaelic football’s great constitutional dilemma. Like how Northern Ireland is an awkward obstacle on the road to Brexit’s sunlit uplands, the GAA can’t dismantle its broken-down championship contraption when one part keeps whirring ferociously at its own speed.
The sense of a place apart is never greater than in Clones on days like Sunday. Where other provincial finals are flaccid and perfunctory, in Clones the air hangs heavy and the tension is tight like a drum. The cautious, fear-laden manouevres of the two teams sap away the minutes and the crowd falls silent, roaring and honking their horns only on those occasions when a player bursts past the opposition 21-yard line, like a fireman storming into a burning building to save a crying baby.
We hear later that the rest of the GAA nation is appalled by what they are seeing. We’ll watch that night and Des Cahill will complain that he was bored and Ciaran Whelan says it’s back to the bad old days and Gooch will say that’s all well and good up in Ulster but it won’t work in Croke Park, no way Jose.
But in Clones no one boos nor does the cry go up to let the ball in. Ulster football fans know the terms of engagement. They even have their own media ecosystem, distinct and self-contained. By royal charter, BBC Northern Ireland serves the people of Ulster and they talk of the Ulster final in an Ulster way: it is tense, it is tactical, it is compelling and anyone who says otherwise will get a death stare from Mickey Harte.
Watching it all unfold you cannot but think of Gaelic football in Ulster as its own unique biome like just about everything else in the province up to and including the missing royal shortbread tins. Did the GAA’s message of patriotism through lusty physical endeavour get crossbred with the dark energies of the Troubles, during which the association and its activities were tied in with the bitter struggle for identity? If the football can seem hard and joyless and laden with suspicion and fear, is that entirely surprising?
They reckon the North is slowly changing and maybe the Ulster championship will too, shedding its flinty exterior and adopting to southern norms. Clones will soon lose the final if the new Casement Park gets built and its streets will lie quiet and colourless like the Jubilee section in the Cookstown Tesco.
Until then things Up There will remain strange and mysterious, just like the case of the Queen’s biscuits.
