‘Without a vision people die’

When Fr Harry Bohan was approached about writing a book, he agreed on one condition: that there’d be some value to the exercise, rather than sketching one man’s vanity.

That’s no surprise to anyone who knows the Clareman. In many ways his decades as a priest and activist have been a search for value, and when we sat down in his front room for a chat he didn’t dawdle looking for the value in the Banner’s All-Ireland win.

“We’re at a crossroads in Ireland and we need to define where we want to go. The kinds of things that brought us into the era of the Celtic tiger will not work into the future, though we’ve already begun to talk about house prices. Will we ever learn?

“We need to unleash the energy within people. Something Davy [Fitzgerald] was able to do with the Clare players this year was to give them the freedom to play. They didn’t have to look over at him, ‘where will I go next, what’ll I do next’.

“When you see that energy in 19- and 20-year-olds... It touches something deep in us in Clare, something to do with identity and belonging and pride in the local place.”

He rummages around on a table near the couch.

“Look at that,” he says, fishing out a leaflet from the mountain of papers. It’s a team photograph of the Clare 2013 team, but along with the autographs there’s a three-part message for the children of Clare.

Nutrition. Sport. Respect for others.

“It was great to win the All-Ireland. Of course it was. But this has been very powerful, the message this has given to the children of the county. It gives them something to aspire to but it’s not just about winning All-Irelands.”

Sending out a message like that – from the grassroots up – appeals to him as the way forward: “More of the same top-down, centralised authority won’t work into the future. Organisations and institutions will fail if they don’t connect with the real people.

“The health system is getting a fair amount of criticism. I asked two great nurses recently if they were ever asked for their opinion, and they said that never happened. Big centralized organisations have removed themselves from the people and therein lies the problem.”

The GAA is a big organisation, of course, but Bohan sees it as having a different approach.

“Of all the organisations we have, the GAA has been bound up with sense of place and belonging more than any other. It has bonded people together and given them stability.

“By that I mean in our path to progress, becoming a debt-ridden society, we built big housing estates, high-rise flats, but we seriously undermined the meaning of community. We came to a time inIreland where people didn’t know their next-door neighbour. A neighbour came to be defined as someone who lived in the same area — there’s something wrong with that, because we had a different kind of Ireland.

“The GAA bonded people but today we live under a cloud of instability and confusion and we have witnessed a loss of trust in institutions, spiralling unemployment, the continuing collapses of a culture shaped by consumerism and borrowing, the undermining of family and community and the erosion of values which connect us to our inner selves.

“We have to rediscover the sense of place and take pride in who we are and the culture that shapes us. Without a vision people die.”

Bohan doesn’t hand the GAA a free pass, though. When he says organisations have to look at themselves, that’s all-inclusive.

“The GAA itself needs to look at itself because while we have a lot of training programmes for coaches and so on, but I’ve said to Liam O’Neill that in all those training programmes they need to build in a section on the ethos of the GAA. What does it stand for? Why is it there?

“It would be dangerous if a generation of people grew up without understanding what the GAA stands for. In the book I stress ‘the value the GAA has placed on the native place’. Where are you from? Feakle, which has a hurling team. The ’Bridge, the same.

“But it’s imperative that the GAA rediscovers its own ethos and spirit both for its own sake and for the influence it can have at a time of instability and insecurity. For the emigrant in London or New York, Boston or Brisbane, the local team or parish still gives them an identity. For me the GAA needs to prioritise the club over the county team: that needs to be done as a matter of urgency. I felt it was appalling that a county could get away with saying that it would have no club matches until after the county team is out of the championship. That would be a stepping-stone towards destroying the whole ethos of the GAA. Where are they going to get people? Themajority of people would stop playing. We only had one game played in the ’Bridge in May, and then we were out seven weeks out of eight, winning the county championship.”

It’s a concern to him that the “current trend would seem to be in the opposite direction” to looking after the county, he says: “The club or parish team has been the foundation on which the organisation was built. The wonder of the GAA for well over a century has been the manner in which small communities and people of humble backgrounds have become household names all over the country and beyond.

“Small rural parishes like Ballyhale, Kilmurry-Ibrickane, Loughgiel, Crusheen, Clarinbridge have taken on the dimensions of greatness through their achievements on the GAA playing fields. Small can not only be beautiful, but successful, proud and independent.”

He moves out of sport to apply the GAA model across the board.

“That’s the future economically and socially as well. For a small nation, from the ’60s on we put all our eggs in the one basket, the big multi-national companies.

“We ignored the local — the local settlements became suppliers of labour to big places, Dublin being the arch-example.

“The Tiger was great in terms of the housing and employment, but we forgot that a debt-ridden society cannot survive.

“We also forgot that a house is one of the basic needs: shelter, food and clothing are the basic necessities, but we priced houses out of existence and seriously damaged young families.

“In many ways the GAA — providing it takes a good look at itself — has much that the rest of the country can learn from.

“But it must be careful it doesn’t move away from its own ethos, and the emphasis on the local, the club.”

He can point to experience where others see theory. In the ’70s Bohan got tired of hearing experts say that small villages were dying because nobody wanted to live in them; more to the point, he and others decided to do something about it.

“We got together in an organisation and built 20 houses in Clare, and we ended up building 2,500 houses in 13 counties from Cavan to Kerry.

“We got little industries springing out of them, and schools expanding, and there was new life in the villages instead of people moving into the big estates.

“The other thing I saw that time was we only did that to demonstrate people would do it — live in the villages — when people said they wouldn’t. That’s what I’m saying in the book, to give the country back to the people. We need vision and imagination to re-imagine Ireland. And the GAA has a huge part to play in that.”

There are other examples. Other victories against the head.

“There was a hospital back in the nineties here in Clare which was closed. At a public meeting a few of us — myself, Brian McMahon and Frank Counihan — came up with the idea of a community hospital. We convinced the nuns who owned the hospital it was on if they’d sell it to us, nobodies without a shilling. We bought the hospital and 13 acres for €650,000. We collected the money community by community and we now have a hospital, a clinic, 14 consultants coming there, a unit for the elderly and a hospice. It’s struggling, but it’s there, and it’s going. The mart in Sixmilebridge was closed by Golden Vale, never to be opened again, and we got the farmers into the GAA hall and convinced them to look at buying it ourselves. We struggled a bit because Golden Vale weren’t inclined to sell it to us to be reopened as a mart. We now have a mart with 650 shareholders, people who own their own business, and it’s flying.

“I met a man the other day involved in light engineering and he employs 37 people. Nobody ever hears of him. If those jobs were created by the IDA, though, you’d hear all about them.”

The other key word he uses is vision. Not only as a prerequisite for those who make the plans, but for those who are looking for leadership.

“It’s not about houses only, or factories only, or about the game only. People need vision. I have a section in the book on a different concept of priest, or of church. The most important part of the church is the local church, not the Curia in Rome.

“The other thing is the community of people. In Sixmilebridge we call ourselves a Christian community and we try to put it into practice, going out to the people.

“From May 1 we go out to the hills, the lakes, the housing estates, weconnect with the local history and we have a gathering we call the mass, but it includes everything that reflects what goes on in the local area, fishing, farming or whatever.

“After that we have music, storytelling, we try to rediscover the old Celtic spirituality, rather than the way we’ve gone. It’s the people’s church. Not the bishop’s, not mine. We’d have 500, 600 people on the side of the hill. And we connect that back to the GAA like this — we used to say that the GAA was strong because of the parish, but it goes lower than that, down to the townland, where neighbours met each other and worked together.”

Bohan stresses that notion. The local, he says, was never as important as it is today: “The global economic market and its values, which shaped Ireland in recent years, has nothing to do with community. We’re saying the real challenge for Ireland is to rediscover the local in all its forms and stories, and there isn’t an organisation in the world with more of those stories than the GAA.

“It’s not about going back, by the way, or being old-fashioned. Those values are for every age. Contemplation, for instance. Looking into ourselves.

“When I had the Clare team I’d get them in a circle in the dressing-room for that. Someone said in the Independent that I had them praying. I didn’t.

“I’d ask them to dig deep into themselves, that they were on their own when they crossed the line and had to depend on themselves in front of 50,000 people in Thurles.

“It didn’t always work, mind you, but we must nourish our inner strength, connect with our inner selves, as crucial.”

When we finished chatting we strolled outside, and he pointed to the man mowing the lawn nearby.

“Did you ever see the like?” he said. “Cutting the grass in December?”

Strange enough. But then if you’re used to looking for green shoots you’ll find them any time, anywhere.