GPA must drop-kick this political football

INTERESTING to see a suggestion during the week that GPA members might stand as candidates in next year’s General Election.

Certainly if you were thinking of a way to prepare players for next year’s International Rules clash with Australia — if there is one — then a few months in the Dáil would be the ideal preparation for off-the-ball tussling, name-calling and retrospective justification.

In all seriousness, however, sports stars contemplating political life, idly or not, should take their time with a decision. Even for men seasoned by hand-to-hand combat in front of 80,000 people in the heat of July and August, politics is fearsome.

For one thing, there’s the workload. Top inter-county players are accustomed to juggling a full-time job and exhausting physical preparations, but even they’d be daunted by the demands of public service. One politician of our acquaintance remarked that it’s 25/8, not 24/7; another statesman — and no bad footballer himself in his day — once recounted his introduction to political reality. After years of trying, he finally made it to the Dáil, whereupon he was flattened by the incessant grind. As the recess approached he booked a couple of weeks in a remote part of the Spanish coast, and on the first day he made it to the beach and stretched out. A time before mobile phones, he closed his eyes for a well-earned rest.

Hardly had his eyelids met when a shadow fell across him, literally and figuratively. “Well, oul stock! Any joy with that planning permission I was looking for?”

The other consideration hurlers and footballers should bear in mind is the rather delicate issue of teamwork. Broadly speaking, when you throw on a jersey you can count on the support of those wearing the same colours. Frankly, that isn’t always the case with political teams; in fact, casual observation of the political beast in its natural habitat of Leinster House will bring home to the watcher that friendships exist across political boundaries rather than within them.

That difference would be a significant one for any GAA player. Most hurlers and footballers have enough to do getting to grips with their immediate opponent without simultaneously worrying about a substitute pouring poison in the porches of the selector’s ear all the way through a game (“I mean, I could do a far better job than he’s doing; I know we’re all on the one side, but if you want something done I’m your man. Don’t forget me on the day now and mind how you go!”).

Then there’s the popularity issue. If you’ve never accompanied a top GAA player across any public space, then you should try it at some stage. It’s very good for the ego to look at people turn and stare, even though naturally enough the admiration is collateral, and based on the person immediately in front or behind you.

That changes, of course, when a sportsman nails his political colours to the mast. The adoration from the terraces may remain undiluted, but in the realm of real life, going to the shop for a newspaper or paying the phone bill isn’t quite the path of roses it was. The distressing thing about democracy is that everyone has an opinion, and declaring yourself politically inclined one way is to invite the enmity of those inclined the other way.

That’s worth more consideration than might first appear to be the case. Politics being a profession held in such low esteem, you have your pick of withering putdowns (we’ve always liked Gore Vidal’s etymology of the word itself — politics coming from “poly”, the Greek word for “many” and “tics”, the English term for blood-sucking insects).

The GPA may be keen to simply split the Government vote in order to gain leverage in negotiations, but what happens if one of their members actually wins a seat? If any player shudders at the thought of slogging around a muddy field in the dreary cold of January, consider the prospect of hours transposing European Union guidelines on drainage pipe width into Irish legislation, with many and plentiful examples of drainage pipes in Tourmakeady, Templemore and Tournafulla being cited to advance the case for those widths being expanded from nine millimetres, which is crazy, to a far more sensible 11 millimetres, which would give freedom to . . .

Sorry. Bit of a flashback there to a previous life. The GPA should be careful for what they wish for, given the reasons above. Then again, what do we know? The immortal Gore also said he believed half the American people never read a newspaper, and half never voted; he hoped it was the same half in both cases.

Maybe the same applies here.

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