The Poor Old Miserable Mayo Institute was officially formed last weekend, with this column being its life chairman, secretary and treasurer. Family records reveal that not a single haemoglobin in the various bloodlines concluding at this columnar point had Mayo as its origin. No selfish hubris, no baseless egomania, no debt to a dwarfish, muscular ancestor in Kiltimagh prompts this move: it is pure sympathy.
Why was Croagh Patrick put there? For Mayo people to step up onto whenever there was a high tide. Some idiots say that Atlantis is a myth, but it's not: it's Mayo, which every now and then surges out of the sea and lies gasping on the Atlantic seaboard before another huge wave washes over it, and everyone is scampering up Croagh Patrick or Nephin once again.
Though to be sure, it's not very obvious whether the deluge falling on you in Mayo is rain or a wave. To a non-Mayo person, rain and sea taste different, but in Mayo both brands of water are usually put in a thermonuclear blender which God has hung from the clouds, and so it's usually difficult to say what is what.
Mayo is like Florida without the heat, alligators, grapefruit trees or Governor Bush. It doesn't even bother naming the hurricanes which spread ruin and havoc everywhere. They're all called Pee. But the saddest thing about Mayo is that by a cruel nominal coincidence it is known internationally as the primary vector for food poisoning. Foreigners don't queue up to go to holiday destinations called Green Hot Dog, or Old Hamburger or Whiffy Cheese Dip. Why would they go to Pee-lashed Mayo? Well, there are reasons. Thackeray called Clew Bay the most beautiful spot in the world, and he was not far wrong. And Westport remains defiantly, doggedly, heroically cheery, come tsuanami, tidal wave or flood. There was no rain last weekend and the town glowed. Everything seemed freshly painted and prosperous: Switzerland in the bogs. Except this: nothing, not even the return of William Tell, could cause the Swiss to be reduced to the gibbering excitement with which Westport and the entire county of Mayo awaited the All-Ireland Final.
This is truly a triumph of hope against reality. Mayo have not won an All-Ireland since 1951. That's a long time ago. Joe Louis was still a professional boxer, Winston Churchill was back as British prime minister and the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst finally died, some 10 years after he had cinematically done so in Citizen Kane. Not many men have ever seen their own end on film. It might possibly never happen again.
Fifty-three years on, and the same is true of Mayo ever beating Kerry in an all-Ireland final. If Mayo is Atlantis, Kerry is pre-Gaelic Ireland. It produces TDs such as Martin Ferris and Jackie Healy-Rae, whose particular electoral charms defy translation into the political idiom of any other democracy. Moreover, generation after generation, as prolifically as hens churning out eggs, Kerry produces brilliant footballers, Brazilian Fir Bolgs.
What explains the differences between the counties? Why do the drumlins of Cavan and Monaghan produce such mathematical geniuses? A Cork wino whose wife has run off with his grandfather and whose single remaining shoe has no sole is so chronically depressed that he thinks he's only twice as good as the rest of us. Tipperary produces strange ferrety little men whose first language is horse.
Clare midwives are famed for their ability to extricate the fiddles or the uillean pipes with which most babies are born. Smack a new-born Clare baby's bottom and it doesn't cry, but tunes up.
Mayo, however, has two distinct species. There are the goblins of Kiltimagh, who were once the backbone of the building sites of London. Despite their size, they could carry a cement-mixer under each arm, and they understood land non-verbally, the way Tipperary men understand horse.
If you analyse the DNA of the top dozen property developers in London, most - even those of apparently Semitic origin - will have a Mayo ancestor. But what nice Jewish granny is ever going to tell her millionaire grandson what she got up to with the jobbing builder who was the height and width of an armchair and spoke a form of English with which she was entirely unacquainted? So Solly will never know that his thinning red hair and his business acumen derive from not the stetl, but from a bog near Balla.
There is the other kind of Mayo man, the one that used to be the backbone of the DMP and An Garda in Dublin. These were giants - vast men upon whose northern slopes snow would form in the winter months. Yet as a species they now seem to be extinct.
Possibly, while they were being lofty and civic-minded, smiling affably up there amid all the clouds, the short, squat armchairs from Kiltimagh were busily mating with their womenfolk.
Maybe that's the problem with Mayo teams. The Brobdingnagians who were so busy playing GAA in the stratosphere in the 1950s produced no natural heirs, for their wives at home were shrieking beneath the davenport or the couch, which were also pretty nifty at building walls.
So what is to be done? Is there some undiscovered glen, some isolated bog, where the ancient Mayo giant gene lingers on, and where the women have not yet been systematically seduced by a sofa from Belmullet or a settee from Cong? Otherwise, the next half-century is going to be as depressing for us in POMMI as the last one was.