Road Bowling has become the most endangered of Ireland’s national sports

CHANGED TIMES: North Cork Region treasurer Willie Murphy wipes the bowls with sanitising wipes before a match last June. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach

A sport whose identity is woven of social contact is bound to be gripped in a state of shock, disbelief, and bewilderment as a consequence of the prolonged lockdown.

Road bowling lives on the social interactions of those that play and watch the game. It is perhaps more of a cultural phenomenon than any other Irish sport. It draws on oral memory in a globally connected online world, stubbornly holding values and traditions that are not easily moulded by current trends or fashions. A resilient entity, but also the most endangered of Ireland’s national sports.

Covid has interrupted the thread of tradition in a more existentially threatening way for bowling than any other sport. It is a self-governing sport, hugely dependent on family and community succession.

Four voices from that community give us an impression of how the pandemic is impacting a sport that feels like family to them.

Gretta Cormican is a lighthouse in bowling. She is the woman that reshaped the sport through winning every national and international title on her horizon and being the first to win several of them. She’s also one of the organisational powerhouses, running competitions, coaching children, compiling books, recording videos, taking photos.

No part of bowling has not benefitted from her hand.

“This is something we used to do all our lives and it’s suddenly taken away from us,” she says.

You can feel the anguish in her words.

“We are a tiny sport that’s never mentioned in the roadmap.”

For someone who has spent her life changing the world, that sense of helplessness is very difficult.

Things are especially difficult for her now as the days start to lengthen.

In winter bowlers had only to endure two days of deprivation, now added daylight almost taunts them seven days per week.

Teenager Michael O’Donoghue shares her sense of loss. He comes from a family steeped in the sport, back as many generations as anyone can remember.

He hasn’t played a bowl since his Munster quarter-final tie at Macroom in September.

“Before, I’d come home from school and maybe go to a score in the evening. Bowling means everything to me, it makes me happy, it makes my grandfather happy and my father.”

He misses the conversations, “to talk to people about the scores, we have a long line of history in our family”.

O’Donoghue is on the eastern fringe in Cahir, while Claire O’Sullivan is close to the western end of Munster bowling in Kealkill in West Cork.

As much as the bowling, she misses “the people we only meet at bowling, to catch-up with everyone”.

The disruptions of 2020, means she has not played a competitive score since July 2019.

Last year she came down from Dublin every weekend to win her place on the Irish team for the European championships in Germany. That was cancelled. Now her bowling activity is reduced to practicing with her younger brother on a boreen at home.

David Murphy missed a chance to become the first man to win four successive European gold medals in 2020. He’s also the national youth officer.

He feels sorrier for the U18 team he trained than he does for himself.

“They totally missed out, they only get one chance to go,” he says.

Some of those players may now never wear the green jersey.

The void left in all their lives is palpable.

“What can you do to fill in the space?” asks Cormican.

The fear is that things may never get back to what they were like before the pandemic.

“It will never be the same again, the crowds, even the bowling, everyone is after losing their touch,” says O’Donoghue.

On top of all of that there is the nightmare of unfinished business from 2020 and at best a huge delay in 2021.

Some competitions are almost finished, some hadn’t begun.

David Murphy is the only player to have won a first round of the 2020 Munster senior championship. Will clubs have enough money to pay for insurance? Will older players give up the game after two years absence, will a generation of young people also be lost?

O’Sullivan strikes an optimistic, if cautious note, that captures the mood at every level of the sport.

“I think it will come back the same, not much change, not much of a difference, but I’m hoping more than knowing.”

In the meantime, the season is turning to prime bowling time. But as Murphy says, “we’ve nothing to aim for or when to aim for”.

For people who are conditioned to always aim for the sop and to let it rip now, that is an existential conundrum.

With fewer supports and resources than most sports, Ireland is in danger of losing one of the jewels in its unique sporting heritage.