GAA CONFERENCE:PRESIDENT MARY McAleese yesterday spoke of a "systemic solidarity" at the core of Irish society, which had held firm despite the murders of three members of the security services in the North.
Moments before the President addressed a conference in Armagh celebrating 125 years of the GAA, participants watched a brief video of Gaelic games highlights set to the tune of U2’s One.
The emotive song, a celebration of harmony and fraternity, ends with the coda, “One life, with each other, sisters, brothers, one life, but we’re not the same, we get to carry each other”.
The music had been chosen by the Uladh Cumann Lúthchleas Gael, but it gave poignant accompaniment to Mrs McAleese’s opening remarks, two hours after PSNI Constable Stephen Carroll was laid to rest 30 miles away in Banbridge.
“It should have been a very happy and very joyous occasion today,” she began, “but not so far away, a family and a community and an island had to grieve the death of Constable Carroll.
“It is important that we just reflect for a moment on a tough week, a week of the kind that we thought we had put behind us,” she said. “Through it all, one of the most remarkable things that has happened has been the evidence of such systemic solidarity, which starts at the top and cascades all the way down to the bottom, but is not fractured or fragmented in ways we might have seen in the past.”
She added that reaction to the killings, both North and South, was “evidence that there is a core, a centre, and that the centre holds”.
Mrs McAleese said the GAA had played its part in the creation of this solidarity in Northern Ireland.
She commended the association for its “generosity of purpose and its commitment to peace-building”. This amounted, she said, to a “huge outreach to those from whom the GAA would traditionally have been seen as estranged, or who would have been estranged from the GAA, particularly our friends from the unionist and loyalist traditions.”
Confessing herself to being a “Gaelic groupie”, Mrs McAleese said the GAA had given Irish life “colour and texture” over the past 125 years.
On a personal level, Mrs McAleese thanked the GAA for an “extraordinary kaleidoscope of memories that are just inexhaustible.” She told of growing up supporting both Down and Roscommon, home counties of her mother and father respectively, and said the glory days of Down in the 1960s were etched as a “sea of red and black” in her memory.