LockerRoom/Tom Humphries Really, you'd think that the guys with the keys to the executive washroom over at Catholic Church PLC would have more than enough to be doing just keeping their own show on the road. Not so. Bishop Dermot Clifford finds time every now and then to pull hard across the back of the legs of the GAA. The bishop is a patron of the association, and when he pulls hard with the old crozier it stings.
Rule 21? Swoosh! Féile? Smack! And again and again swinging hard on alcohol and the GAA. The Croke Park nabobs must wonder why they need enemies when they have patrons like Dr Clifford.
He's well-intentioned, I'm sure, but it seems to me that the bishop's urge to ban and prohibit and abstain and repress and censor is just the flipside of the national immaturity about drink.
Most of us live in this big and complex world. Our Government has no real regional sports policy. Catholic Church PLC has mightily betrayed its stockholders. Sport is one of the few good, reliable things that is left to us. If they could tax it or ban it or make it a sin they probably would.
Sport isn't like that. Drink isn't black and sport isn't white. Sport is not a goody-goody, squeaky clean, all-sins-absolved-while-you-wait deal. It's part of mainstream community life. Like drink is. If Guinness were to stop sponsoring the All-Ireland hurling championships tomorrow, hurling would be the poorer, the GAA would be the poorer.
The cleverest drink ads would still appear during Friends. The pub would still be the only place to go to watch big-time sport on the television. There'd still be rock 'n' roll and Witnness. Temple Bar would still be a year-round version of the Munich beer festival. A visit from an American president still wouldn't be complete without the Taoiseach bringing him to his local.
We'd still drink for all the usual reasons, hereditary factors, cultural factors, poverty, affluence, availability, tradition, depression, elation, the fact that the skies are never blue or You're a Star never bloody ends. A percentage of us would still drink too much.
And what would happen next? The puritans would move on. Drink licences for sporting clubs would be the next target. And soon it would be the 1950s again with no places to go other than the saloon bar or the boys' sodality. No thanks. I'd feel happier sending the kids to the bar.
Drinking did not start in this country when Guinness began sponsoring the All-Ireland hurling championships in 1995. Nobody came rushing out of their house and said that, bejaysus, the scales had just fallen from their eyes, all that stood between them and an All-Ireland medal was a good feed of stout. And drinking won't end when we have the Eat Your Greens All-Ireland Hurling Championship.
Alcohol sponsorship of sport is a trade-off. To me it seems worth it, not just in terms of the hurls and helmets or whatever the money buys, but in terms of placing drink in a context for kids. In the real world drink doesn't exist in a reservation over here while sport proceeds in a separate territory over there.
If we are going to meddle, well, let's meddle with the culture first. We are up to our beer bellies in deterrents. We have an advertising standards authority whose rules state that drinks advertising cannot suggest that consumption of alcohol even contributes to social success. We have temporarily closed over 100 bars so far for serving under-age drinkers. We have our Rules of the Road.
Good. Good. Good. We still drink though. Where are the positive re-enforcements? The sustained alcohol education campaigns? What are we doing when kids find out anecdotally and empirically that alcohol is a social lubricant? The Guinness All-Ireland? Get over it.
My kids play in a GAA club that has a fine bar. The adult teams there are sponsored by a brewery. If in a few years they start coming home spancilled by alcopops it won't be the GAA's fault. It will be mine. I'll want to know who sold them the stuff and why they felt they needed it and if the need for it is big and dangerous or if it's nothing more than what we all went through.
To fend that day off I'd be happier if their social life mingled with their sporting life; if meeting people in a sporting environment where drink is present just became natural to them, if they drank primarily around people who know them and will look out for them. I'd prefer if drinking is to be a phase that sport was a constant all through it.
Prohibition never worked. You'll never divide the world into the good children who play sports and the evil youths who drink. You'll never close off the influences which make people drink or banish the troubles which make them drink too much.
A moderate consumption of alcohol and regular sporting activity isn't a decadent lifestyle. It beats getting scuttered in the park. The problem, it seems to me, lies with shutting "youth" off to socialise and drink in their own ghettoes, in disengaging from their lives and always blaming someone else when they become adults with adult problems.
From when I was a kid I remember an awful accident when some kids from nearby were drinking cider or something on the railtracks near Fairview and a night train ran over them. Back then kids drank in parks and down laneways and in the dark corners at discos, and they threw up copiously before going home. It seemed glamourous and fun. It was never advertised as such. We were never educated otherwise. Nobody told us to recognise the role of alcohol or identify the warning flags when it comes to our own consumption. We never drank in adult company and it took the longest time for us to become mature about drinking.
If we have a huge cultural weakness when it comes to drink, well sport should be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Sport can be part of a healthy approach to drink. It's not an either/or situation.
Two million times when we were young we were told simply that drink was bad. It didn't work. We drank anyway. Most of us went through a phase of drinking more than was good for us. Some of us didn't pull out of it. I think we'd have had a better chance if we were introduced to drink in a different way rather than all together left to our own devices, furtively puking and giggling down laneways after discos.
Some brands become cooler than others through advertising, but I've never met anyone who drank because of ads they've seen and I have yet to attend a sports event sponsored by Vodka Mules or whatever. Nor have I ever met anyone who killed lots of people because they saw Bruce Willis do it in a cool movie. Kids understand media and advertising instinctively. Peer pressure and cultural conditioning is different.
You can mount a thousand pulpits and tell kids that drinking isn't "cool". You can shine a saintly light on the front pews where all the lads with neat partings and pioneer pins are kneeling and you can play celestial music and get those lads to thoughtfully rest their chins on the tops of their hurleys and then you can say "gosh kids, now that's God's kind of cool", but you'll be drowned out by laughter. Being an outlaw is always cooler and experimenting will always be cooler. And thinking that your generation are the first to drink like hogs? Excellent!
So do we ban alcohol-related sports sponsorships and happily stick our heads back in the sand, or do we do these things: monitor ads and sponsorships; put a fixed percentage of all alcohol-related sports sponsorships into sport for kids (with no branding opportunities involved); take a chunk of the tax take on drink and divert it to coaching and pitches and educational campaigns; introduce kids to drink in a rounded, healthy, adult context?
I suspect it's a battle the GAA hasn't much appetite for. The arguments against are too pat and shrill. Pity.
How do you get to be a patron anyway? Do they have their own bar? Free drink?
