There has always been a strain of thought within the GAA which leaves its grassroots faintly incredulous about the fact that its games aren't better known and celebrated throughout the world. That is probably one of the underlying reasons behind this weekend's ambitious jamboree in Abu Dhabi.
There is an exotic element to the idea of GAA teams converging from all corners of the globe to play games which have, over the last 100 years, become an elemental and inescapable part of Irish identity.
But then, the GAA was no sooner off its knees than it was on the move, spreading the word and raising funds through Maurice Davin’s American invasion of 1888. A party of 51 arrived in triumph for that barnstorming tour. At least 17 decided against coming home again.
One of the best things about the GAA is that it has always been a bundle of contradictions and throughout the decades when it harboured a deep hostility and suspicion of foreign games, it was busily promoting itself as the best foreign game of them all, having the chutzpah – and the pull– to stage its 1947 All-Ireland final in the Polo Grounds, perhaps the most romanticised sports ground in the history of New York.
When Christy Ring appeared at the same venue in 1966, 30,000 people showed up to watch him play in an exhibition game. But that Cavan versus Kerry game became an enduring fable. It was a dazzling acknowledgement that emigration, the recurring theme in Irish life since the foundation of the state, meant that the GAA community extended far beyond Ireland.
Mother country
In the cities of America and Britain, the GAA had a ready-made Irish community. Forming clubs was easy: it was a matter of naming a committee, finding a field and starting to play. The GAA in America has had a turbulent relationship with the mother country but it is has a rich tradition and is authentic in that it came from a primal need to recreate sounds and rhythms of games that had the power to transport participants and audience alike.
You will meet hundreds of emigrants in the traditional calling points who will admit that the GAA became far more important to them after they left home than it had been in Ireland. Everybody knows that in cities like Boston or Chicago, the local GAA clubs are like a back-door entrance to the mechanisms of the city. It opens everything up and helps people to learn how the place works.
The same is true of watching the All-Ireland championships: it is about connections. There is something absurd and magical about walking along a street in Melbourne or in Liverpool or Beijing and happening upon a chalkboard sign outside an Irish pub advertising Mayo v Galway or Tyrone v Armagh. No further explanation needed.
Keeping in touch with the championship was important for emigrants even in the years when they had to make do with checking the reports in the Monday newspapers or ringing home to get the result. It was never a diversion or a pastime.
It is a language, a way of retaining something in common with home. Wear a Knicks shirt or a Chelsea top in any city in the world and you could be from any city in the world. Wear a St Vincent’s or Melvin Gaels top on the high street, or carry a hurl through the corridors of the underground or the metro, and you are telling those in the know a fair bit about yourself.
Sport has become globalised, tailored for a worldwide television audience. It is easy now to follow decide yourself a fan of baseball and follow the Tigers without ever having to set foot in Detroit or even the United States. A monthly subscription does fine.
But baseball, for instance, has a genuine world following. Association football, for decades the sport demonised by all right- thinking Gaels, has an extraordinary pull on the human imagination. Rugby is slowly but surely extending its fan base.
Incongruity
Gaelic games are in a very different realm. One of the least known but very best GAA photographs of recent years captures Ciarán McDonald, the laconic Mayo footballer, about to strike a free off the ground. The skyline of Hong Kong, rather than Crossmolina, is in the background. It was the incongruity of the image that made it so special. It was the definitive meeting of East versus Wesht.
The Mayo man was there as part of the GAA All Stars team, the annual tour which has, for the past 15 years, tried to incorporate “new” GAA cities into its schedule.
So, in 2002, the hurling stars of that year played an exhibition in the Hurling Club of Buenos Aires, a city which bears an oblique but unmistakable Offaly influence – and not just in its fondness for tango dancing, psychoanalysis and the exceptional glamour of its residents.
Argentina was in the midst of a savage recession then. Unemployment had soared and house prices were through the floor. The visiting party pitied them and recalled – wistfully –about how emigration used to be part of the Irish narrative. On a tour of the Boca Juniors stadium, some of the hurlers knocked a sliotar around the field. It felt like a salute. But football was the sport in Buenos Aires. Hurling was unknown.
The idea that hurling or football could somehow catch fire across in foreign countries is tantalising. There are a few significant voices who believe it possible. It is easy to understand why. Evidence from all the foreign clubs suggest that when introduced to Gaelic sports, people with no prior knowledge of the games enjoy playing them.
And everyone has heard the stories about how stunned foreign visitors are when they are shown Gaelic games in its full All-Ireland technicolour glory. The speed, the scale of Croke Park, the amateur ethos, the unusual passion of the crowd, the hitting: it possesses all the elements to make people want to watch a little longer, to find out more, to see who wins.
Still, the leap between casual appreciation of a distinctive sport and a cultural phenomenon and actually wanting to learn that craft and coaching it and having it bloom, really bloom, in countries with no connection to Ireland, is gigantic.
The main problem is that practically every corner of the earth has found its sport. Rugby union is the chief source of pride in New Zealand and that won’t change, regardless of how many Olympic medals they win in the fringe sports. England is and will always be a football country. In the flatlands of Kansas and Indiana, basketball found a home because it suited the long frozen winters. Texas football is a religion in that state. The Scandinavian countries – in fact, the frozen belt across the Northern Hemisphere – is hockey country. And so on.
Virtues
All of the people in these places can see hurling or Gaelic football and instantly appreciate its virtues. But they can’t really care about it. The genius of the GAA is that the core at which it really matters – that level beneath the importance of the game or the result – is about place.
It is about where you are from. Take away the club and county tradition from the GAA and the whole thing dissolves. The friction of club and parish rivalries gives Gaelic games a national heat and the century tradition of the All-Ireland championships gives any calendar year its rhythm.
A big GAA Sunday remains the sound of summer – and as Michéal Ó Muircheartaigh was the first to really understand – it can be heard anywhere in the world. On All-Ireland days, Ireland seems to expand on the globe.
Trying to replicate that on an international scale may never be possible. These World Games are a tiny step in that direction and that the organisers are already talking about a 2016 event is positive.
This weekend in Abu Dhabi is both a nod to the past and a glimpse of the future. That so many teams are gathering from all continents is a reflection of the fact that Irish people are still emigrating. But it is important to recognise that at least some of the participants have emigrated by choice and to pursue professional opportunities.
Others, of course, are living abroad because Ireland could not provide them with work. The familiarity of a GAA club – and the network of social and professional contacts contained within – makes it easier to settle into a new country.
Ask any of the lifelong volunteers in the British or American clubs, where there is a long tradition of GAA teams, and they will assure you that it is difficult just to keep it going. In fact, keeping it going might well be the real triumph.
Playing a bit of GAA — just the simple act of passing a ball around a field – keeps people in touch and makes the thousands of miles which may separate them from family and loved ones seem less significant.
That, more so than the actual games or the final score, is what makes this weekend in Abu Dhabi worth shouting for.
