Tommy Martin: Are we only truly alive when we are in the grip of an Irish sporting scandal?

REMATCH? Kilmacud Crokes' captain Shane Cunningham lifts the Andy Merrigan cup after the AIB GAA Football All-Ireland Senior Club Championship Final. Pic: Daire Brennan/Sportsfile

Is there anything like a good Irish sporting scandal? Doesn’t it get the blood racing to pick up the paper in the morning for the next twist? To twiddle the dial on the wireless for the latest turn? To hear the scuttlebutt of the street and the tuppence-worth of the bar room?

Are we only truly alive when we are in its grip – riding on the high horse, swimming in moral outrage, in deep in indignation?

And does anyone do it as well as we do? The controversy. The fiasco. The farce. The saga. The debacle. The mess. The shambles. The ability to turn an administrative drama into a national crisis. Where would we be without it?

Where would we be without the phone-ins lighting up? Without the heavyweight columnists trading blows? Without camera crews outside late-night committee meetings? Without dramatic U-turns and final ultimatums? Without Kieran Mulvey being brought in to knock heads. Without Bertie Ahern coming on Liveline? Without Fintan O’Toole telling us what it really means?

How empty our lives would be...

How empty without Newbridge or Nowhere. Without the Thierry Henry handball. Without Pat Hickey in the nip. Without 1998 and all that. Without Cian O’Connor and his hepped-up horse. Without the Cork hurling strike. Without the Limerick hurling strike. Without the IABA. Without the UCI. Without the FAI. Without John Delaney, the scamp!

Without the time Brian O’Driscoll got dropped from the Lions by Warren Gatland. Without the time Brian O’Driscoll got dropped on his head by the All Blacks. Without Rory McIlroy and the Olympics. Without Rory McIlroy’s court case. Without Rory McIlroy’s wedding. Without the Tony Keady affair. Without Gerbrandt Grobler. Without the Henry Shefflin and Brian Cody handshake. Without the Davy Fitz and Brian Lohan non-handshake.

Without Roy Maurice Keane! Saipan! Shergar! Michelle Smith!

You can subdivide the great Irish sporting scandals. There are the international incidents. There are the national disgraces. There are the local disputes. But the great thing is, you never know where the next one is coming from. Well, it’ll probably be the FAI, but still.

The GAA provides its fair share, but who saw this one coming? All-Ireland club finals are of gargantuan importance, but to a tiny group of people. Major events in the history of two parishes, footnotes for everyone else. Like the birth of a child – the biggest day of your life, but hardly anyone else is really bothered.

And yet here we are, five days in and counting. Five days of delicious intrigue since Kilmacud Crokes sent an extra man onto the pitch for the closing seconds of their All-Ireland win over Glen of Derry. The sub heard round the world. One sub to rule them all. The sub that launched a thousand headlines.

As the old saying about academic politics goes, Irish sporting scandals are so bitter because the stakes are so small. It rarely matters greatly to the overall health of the nation which way these things play out, yet it seems to matter so much. Think of the children!

Take this week’s competing scandals. The story of Paschal’s posters is clearly very important given his political office and the accompanying whiff of cronyism but most people start drifting off when they hear someone droning on about SIPO. And Enoch Burke is clearly an insufferable pain in the hole but he’s not even most people’s least favourite Enoch.

Yet the scandal of the Kilmacud 16 cuts through. That image of the sixteen players, numbered like courtroom evidence. It appeals to the basic instincts of fair play. Hey, they have one more than us! That’s not fair. You don’t need an Oireachtas investigation or a High Court judge to understand that.

It’s like the famous scientific study where one capuchin monkey lost his shit when he was given a piece of cucumber and his mate was given a delicious grape, demonstrating that even our primate cousins have a basic grasp of fairness. The capuchin monkeys could do a job on the CCCC. The capuchin monkeys would be calling for a replay.

Crucially, the great Irish sporting scandal also provides a safe space to talk about what’s really bothering us without actually talking about what’s really bothering us. So, amidst a loss of national innocence, along came Michelle Smith. During a period when the country felt hard done by, along came Thierry Henry. At a time of seismic social change, along came Mick and Roy going at it like tectonic plates.

And so with Kilmacud and Glen. When people feel let down by ruling institutions not dealing with big problems, let’s have a go at the GAA for not dealing with the problem. At a time of concern about the impact of rural depopulation, here’s the big city club with literally more players on the pitch than their smalltown opponent.

On a more primal level though, it’s a chance for a good row. It feels good to have it out, to point the finger, to shake the fist. It cleanses the soul. It’s invigorating. You can pick a side. It doesn’t matter which. There should be a replay, but equally, there shouldn’t. If sport is war without the bullets, then this is war without the sport or the bullets.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter to anyone how it pans out, unless you are one of the unfortunate people caught in the middle of the great Irish sporting scandal of the day. In which case, not to worry, there will be another one along soon.