Tommy Martin: Flaming galahs of AFL strike at GAA's utopian ideal
NEWEST GALAH: Kobe McDonald celebrates Tommy Conroy's decisive late point in Mayo's All-Ireland SFC Final win against Kerry. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
If the post-All-Ireland period in the GAA calendar used to be all about All Star talk, now it’s more about AFL star talk, as in, which of the glory of our young manhood the Aussies are planning to steal away next.
The current Aussie scare has flared up following the news that AFL club Richmond set up their stall last weekend in downtown Athlone, in broad daylight, brazenly organising a so-called ‘combine’ in which to sell the best of our strapping Gaelic football stock on a life of professional sport, beach-based lifestyle choices and, if this week’s AFL headlines are correct, boozy romps in Melbourne hotels.
Slabs of Victoria Bitter, microwaved meat pies and glossy photos of Alf Stewart and Harold Bishop were distributed in order to educate potential recruits on key Australian cultural touchstones.
Like farmers at a cattle mart, the flaming galahs of the Richmond recruitment department measured the muscularity of our boys’ rumps before returning down under plot their next larcenous move.
According to John Fogarty in this paper, greedy Aussies are hovering over not one but two of Kerry’s All-Ireland U-20 midfielders in Evan Boyle and Daniel Kirby, with an unnamed AFL outfit reportedly “close” to offering contracts.
One thinks of an oligarch’s wife in a luxury jewellers considering which of two priceless pieces to pick, then thinking “I’ll take both!”
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Boyle and Kirby were reportedly among those attending the Athlone affair, along with Dublin’s breakout star of 2026, Charlie McMorrow, fellow Dublin panel member Tim Deering and young Leitrim buck Barry McNulty.
In all, 15-20 of our best and brightest reportedly had their vitals measured by the cork-hatted human traffickers of Van Diemen’s Land, ready to be plucked away for a life of sun-drenched servitude.
It gets worse: the Sydney Swans held a similar shindig in Roscrea earlier this year, and they are reported to be getting ready to tuck Dublin minor Cian Raftery into their pouches and hop off back from whence they came.
All of which, of course, was preceded by the long, glorious farewell of Kobe McDonald, who basically had to go and win Mayo the All-Ireland for the first time in 75 years before he would be let off to St Kilda without the whole county pulling at the hems of his tracksuit bottoms as he tried to drag himself through Dublin airport security.
And, like any good raiding party, they came for our women as well. 46 – forty-six! – Irish women are signed up to play in the current AFLW season, including six of the starting players in the 2025 All-Ireland final between Dublin and Meath.
There are so many Irish girls down under that they were able to organise an Australia v Ireland Aussie Rules international, running it the same weekend as the LGFA finals, as if to rub the noses of folks back home into what they were missing.
Sure, Australia whupped Ireland by 50 points, but the fact that they were able to play meaningful game against another country in a sport which no-one outside of Australia ever plays sums the whole thing up. Seriously, it’s like taking on Hogwarts at Quidditch.
Like any issue in Irish life, this only seems to become a real problem when it affects the men, so the latest outbreak of AFL combine harvesting has ignited familiar debates about the subject on the part of those left to watch as their prized assets are whipped away to a life of sun, sand and chasing a bobbly ball around a cricket pitch.
These talking points can be summed up as follows: good luck to them, sure you wouldn’t begrudge the young lad (or lassie!). But Jesus it’s desperate.
And isn’t Kerry the worst hit. And Mayo! And there should be some sort of compensation for all the training and time invested in these lads (and lassies!). But sure, they’re amateurs, what can you can do?
The GAA (and LGFA!) should do more! Jobs? Cars? Houses? Social media followers? Ah, but is there really that many when you look at it over the years? 46 women! And a lot of them come back.
But sure, the weather is desperate, why wouldn’t they go? It’s the way they do it, the Aussies, sneaking around, I don’t like it. And them up there in Croke Park trying to organise International Rules matches with them?
And so on and so forth. I’m sure the same sort of discussions were taking place when the Vikings were making off with our mutton and bejewelled chalices and whatnot. They’ve been well rehearsed and still, whenever a flurry of headlines like this week’s comes up, the sting for GAA people at the potential loss is no less felt.
That’s even though the GAA loses talented young players to other codes all the time. When Republic of Ireland defender Dara O’Shea was putting Ronaldo in his place last year, few in the GAA were crying about how he used to be an underage stalwart with St Jude’s in Dublin.
Or wondering what might have been when a picture of Mason Melia lining out in Croke Park in a Cumann na mBunscoil match in 2019 emerged a few weeks back.
Irish rugby academies are full of one-time GAA stars choosing to spend life at the bottom of a ruck rather than climbing the steps of the Hogan Stand. And I for one have often wondered how even Mark English legging it up and down the pitch could have helped his native Donegal plug a few holes against Kerry in last year’s All-Ireland.
It’s probably that these athletes are still somehow part of the GAA person’s understanding of the community, even if they are plying their trade, say, in the commercial behemoth once lovingly known as the Barclays.
They wear the green jersey with pride, they play in recognisable codes that you might see in the playing fields of this non-sceptred isle, and in timezones that don’t require 3am alarm calls to watch them in action.
When someone goes off to Oz, for all that you wish them well and congratulate them on their achievements, they may as well be going off on a manned space probe to retrieve alien amoeba from the Andromeda galaxy, for all the meaning it has for the Irish sporting consciousness.
News that Kobe is excelling at St Kilda would be of as much consolation to the Mayo GAA fan as if he had discovered a rare, endangered species of newt in the rain forests of Borneo.
Their success and fulfilment are (save for the justified pride of their immediate circle) entirely their own, so their loss is not just material but also in some way contradictory to the collective ethos by which the GAA community believes itself to be motivated.
To see this in action, just look at the sore heads and bleary smiles still knocking around the byways of Mayo, celebrating a success that felt like it belonged to generations living and dead, not just the cohort of elite athletes in the middle of it all.
To be clear, no one in the GAA thinks any young lad (or lassie!) shouldn’t go off chasing their dream of bumping into Margot Robbie on Coogee Beach while wearing a sleeveless guernsey, if the offer is there.
Like Sean Fitzgerald going off to Love Island rather than throw in his lot with the Galway footballers, everyone wishes them well and is down with the concept of doing what’s best for your personal brand.
But, even on a subconscious level, it still feels like a disturbance in the force, an invasive species taking root in the GAA’s utopian communitarian ecosystem, like smallpox being introduced to primitive tribes by boatloads of European colonisers. And the flamin’ Aussies would know all about that!
