From the vicinity of Croke Park this afternoon there will evince a lot of thunder, some heat but precious little light.
Even if the delegates to the GAA’s annual congress had distinguished themselves over the years for the sparkling quality of their debate (they have not) there is scarcely an original word left to be said about Rule 42 and the business of excluding certain other sports from Croke Park. Nothing new to be said. No hearts and minds to be swayed.
That’s the way of things. The last _lingering lines of controversy in the GAA rule book, a document drafted in a _different time for different needs, will be erased in the end by means of too many fingers running over them, parsing each word. There will be no blinding revelations or sudden access to a higher _consciousness.
The GAA has been debating the protectionist ethos behind Rule 42 for over more than a century now. And always it seems that the congress has lagged along behind the will of the broad membership of the GAA.
The current argument has been trimmed with clumsy reminders from third parties that the GAA has unique patriotic obligations. Nothing new. As long ago as the Ccongress of 1920 a delegate, Dan McCarthy, a future president of the Aassociation and a former political prisoner in Knutsford Jail noted that among his fellow inmates "90 per cent of the _persons were soccer players and 10 per cent were Gaelic. That showed that they had not got a monopoly of patriotism in the GAA".
It may indeed have shown that, but the shiny-suited men of Ccongress were more concerned about those figures. Ninety per cent!!!! Without "The Ban" – which barred GAA members from playing or watching any foreign ball sports _ – it might be one hundred100 per cent. The Ban, or Rule 27 as it was, remained intact until 1971.
It’s removal was relatively painless in the end but the passing of The Ban begat what would become Rule 42, namely the current provision protecting the GAA’s property from contamination by other sports. The notion was to provide a sort of methadone withdrawal for the hardliners who felt they couldn’t live without mainlining the politics of TThe Ban.
It was a clumsy instrument, which the GAA felt was necessary for survival and unity. Nobody knew just how quickly the world (or the (property portfolio of the GAA) would change in the decades immediately afterto follow.
Change has been radical. This week the monumental tedium on offer by the endless rehashing of the Rule 42 debate has unfolded in tandem with the tawdry story of how Shamrock Rovers became the vagabonds of the Irish soccer world.
In microcosm the two stories explain why the GAA has been so slow to movein moving to modernise its rule book. Misplaced nationalism is part of it, of course, but an impatient bafflement with soccer’s prodigalism is another.
Back in 1971, when The Ban ended and Rule 42 blossomed, Shamrock Rovers were a sturdy outfit. They owned and played out of Glenmalure Park, a southside jewel of a ground befitting the best-supported soccer team in the country. Rovers were just coming off the back of a decade of epic rivalries with Waterford and Cork Celtic. Their most recent FAI Cup final appearances against those two sides in 1968 and 1969 had drawn crowds of 39,128 and 28,000 respectively .
Today Glenmalure Park is buried under houses. Dalymount Park is a rusted shambles. Flower Lodge (which hosted a Cup final replay in 1973) is owned by the GAA. Tolka Park is going to be sold for apartments. The FAI has no ground of its own on which to play international matches on. Shamrock Rovers have no pitch of their own and play away with one eye always on the shifting slag heap of debt which overshadows their existence.
What the GAA can’t understand is why all of that should be any of its concern.
The Association works endlessly on facilities, ploughing money into clubs and stadiums. Indeed it’s a common complaint among members that so much of the energy of the GAA gets dissipated into fundraising, while soccer which, the lament goes, "does nothing for itself" runs its games with ruthless efficiency.
And that is the nub of the issue. A clash of cultures and priorities. Land and property and pitches are symbols of well-being and security in the GAA. Members wander into rival clubs and compliment the members sincerely on the "grand set-up" they have.
Meanwhile, soccer clubs in Ireland are often nomadic and seldom housed in grandeur but they have an undentable confidence in their own futures and in the product they sell. They put teams on pitches week after week, not really caring who owns those pitches.
None of the great disasters into which the FAI unerringly steers the game into affects the grassroots. Rugby, on the other hand, has been slow to expand from its catchment of fee-paying schools but has begun marketing itself aggressively in recent years through the employment of coaches and development officers..
Essentially, the state of soccer and rugby should be no special concern of the GAA’s, but the GAA makes it so by dint of a crippling lack of confidence in itself, which sometimes manifests itself in the need to relate to the country as if it were still a quasi-public body instead of a sports organisation. Then there is the ceaseless habit, which the GAA has had since it’s inception, of making comparisons between what it does and what the other major field sports do.
You set out your stall like that and you invite trouble. Ever since the whole stadium debate became an issue again, the GAA have undoubtedly been treated shabbily: They Association it has been bullied, bribed, betrayed and beaten down by this incessant clamour to do something about the plight of two other sports.
By closing in on itself like an anenome the GAA has managed to sink itself into a public relations hole over Croke Park, the very edifice which is by any measure a triumph for the aspirations of the men and women who built the GAA.
As an organisation top-heavy with democracy, the GAA has never had shown much alacrity suppleness when it comes to floating out of such PR traps. A few years ago, back in 2001, delegates to Congress almost surprised themselves by uncontentiously coming within a whisper of shifting Rule 42 altogether. News spread, though, of the arrival of a large tranche of cash from the government, who were was at the time inordinately aroused by thoughts of the grandeur of Abbotstown. The GAA keeping Croke Park to itself would, it seemed, hasten the building work in Abbotstown – so, struggling to affect the dignity of a cat who discovers a pile of catnip under it’s nose, the GAA, by the flimsiest of margins, left things as they were.
What is curious about today’s debate is the fluidity of the world around the GAA and how heavy-footed the GAA can appear in dealing with it all. In the course of just a few years that government money has served many purposes. It was an instrument to keep Croke Park closed while Abbotstown was viable. Half of the money (¤38 million) was subsequently withheld froem the GAA as the government pronounced itself shocked to the point of swoon, at the thought of an instrument of exclusion remaining on the GAA’s books. Lately the money has been paid up, as it should have been, with a rider stating that the GAA’s business is just that.
Other things have changed too, isolating the conservatives within the Association. Back in 1971, when The Ban was removed from GAA life, another contentious instrument was also down for excision. The debate on Rule 21, which precluded members of the crown security forces from playing Gaelic games, was somehow taken off the agenda, giving the rule almost three decades’ worth of prolonged life.
What kept Rule 21 alive for so long was the claim by members in the six counties (and their good friends in Cork) that boozy southerners never quite understood the harsh culture of the North. That line provoked sufficient guilt for Rule 21 to survive long past what should have been it’s expiry date.
Today in Croke Park the sides are the same but the nuance is different. The "southern" element of the GAA can perhaps justifiably state that their friends in the North do not understand the world they live in.
The GAA of the twenty six counties doesn’t exist within enclaves of cultural and political nationalism. That GAA works shoulder to shoulder, cheek to jowl with rival sports. It has come to realise that the market is a finite thing. No sport will ever win the hearts of all the young people. If it did, it wouldn’t know what to do with them. No sport will even win exclusive access to the hearts of a good chunk of those kids, but if you organise yourself well, you’ll always get enough kids playing Gaelic games at any given time.
They’ll drift and they’ll sample, but the reality is that, in a world where professional sports such as rugby and soccer have huge access to large chunks of television time, the GAA is doing very well indeed. What those people on the ground doing the work need is for the GAA not to be painted (unfairly perhaps) as a symbol of bigotry. and they also require the association to bring oin streams of revenue which will help with the appointment of the full-time coaches who are belatedly replacing the teaching professions as the main evangelists for Gaelic games.
The debate, and the long and often bitter manner of it, has been more bruising to the membership of the GAA than any possible outcome today could be. Many of those voting Yes today will do so out of weariness.
They won’t be under the illusion that the suspension of Rule 42 will mark an end of exclusion in all Irish sports by virtue of _economics, class or gender, or that on Monday morning there will be an end to sectarianism in Northern soccer, or that the Irish rugby team will adopt the national anthem again. They won’t be expecting pats ion the backs and fireworks. They know that ecumenism is an exclusive GAA responsibility because the GAA has let it be so. motocross team will be entitled to practice on the dunes of Portmarnock Golf Club. They won’t vote Yes thinking that the junior hurlers of Naomh Mearnóg will be permitted to do stamina training just off the fairways of Portmarnock Golf Club or that women will suddenly be allowed to become _members of Portmarnock Golf Club that club. The argument has panned out in such a way that the issue is at the GAA’s door only.
So, they’ll be voting Yes just to hear the end of it, just to remove the last _barrier to the GAA seeing itself as simply a unique sports organisation. They’ll be voting Yes for a bit of peace and because they realise that after a decade of vaudeville from the governments and the FAI on the issue of stadiums, the big gesture from the GAA is all that will sort it. They’ll be voting Yes so that they can return to pouring their energy into football and hurling.
Some will raise their hands because the GAA needs the rent money, if not to pay off the debt on Croke Park, well then to develop the games. Hurling in particular struggles for attention in those six Northern counties where the antipathy to opening Croke Park is at its strongest.
They’ll vote Yes knowing that there’ll be a little twinge of sadness about Croke Park no longer being solely the GAA’s own place, but that there’ll also be a little twist of pride, too, about the stadium’s increased centrality in Irish life, about the idea of images being flashed from there all over the world with explanations as to who owned and built the place.
And if they lose and Rule 42 survives, perspective demands that we acknowledge that it won’t be the end of the world. Lansdowne Road is still a long, long way from redevelopment. The GAA is so jaded by the argument that Rule 42 will surely pass away quietly from sheer exhaustion within a year or two.
We could use the intervening time to examine the difference between what our politicians say and what they do when it comes to building a sports infrastructure for Ireland. And why so often it has fallen to the GAA to fill that gap.