Seconds after Joe Brolly completed his j'accuse moment in the RTÉ studios last Saturday, the highlights of his outburst were passed to Colm Parkinson, the hipster footballer from Laois who moonlights as an entertaining sideline reporter for Newstalk radio.
Parky has a Paxmanesque zeal for the tough question and minutes earlier had gravely annoyed Mickey Harte, the Tyrone manager, by challenging him about the Seán Cavanagh tackle. The tackle, later punished by a yellow card, had brought Conor McManus of Monaghan to the ground and prevented him scoring a probable goal at a crucial moment. It had roused Brolly into a fit of indignation about what he saw as Cavanagh’s cynical use of the rules.
At the final whistle, Harte had been visibly thrilled at guiding yet another Tyrone team to the last four of the All-Ireland championship, constructed from rising stars and the veterans of his thrilling teams that won three All-Irelands in the past decade.
Harte is arguably the most innovative football coach in the history of the game. Yet all summer he has found himself answering questions about Tyrone’s cynicism. Here was the latest.
“What do you expect him to do?” he snapped at Parkinson. “Hadn’t we players pulled down . . . across the pitch? Of course we did.” Then he walked away in what Dave McIntyre, the commentator, noted was complete disgust.
“Well, Colm Parkinson has that ability with people,” said Darragh Ó Sé, a co-commentator, with a laugh.
Cavanagh, who had just been named man of the match, was talking on air with Parkinson when Brolly’s comments were put to him. In the tidal wave of opinion about the incident afterwards, Cavanagh’s response was probably the most reasoned and dignified.
“Yeah, you know, I don’t make the rules of GAA. Most football teams are brought up with the fact that if a man is going through on goal, you stop him in whatever way necessary. In my career I have probably received more punishment than I have given out.
“It is cynical play. It is unfortunate. I don’t want to play football like that. I would love to play football wide open and attacking, because that is what I do best. But when a man is going through on goal, unfortunately the rules of GAA dictate that a yellow card doesn’t make a massive difference to you, and you have to accept you can do these sorts of things.
“And I would be the first person to advocate bringing in the black card, because I have probably been pulled down more than any player in my career. I have never been sent off in my career for club or county, so it is not as if I have ever struck or played dirty football.
“But I felt Conor McManus had a chance of scoring a goal, and I did what I did. And probably 99 per cent of others, if they are honest with themselves, would do the same. I am delighted to see the GAA bring these new rules in. Bring it on.”
Touched a nerve
The barrister in Brolly would have to acknowledge the eloquence of the rebuttal. Nonetheless, the Derry man's outrage seemed to touch a nerve across the country and people saw in Cavanagh's tackle a cynicism rife not just in the GAA but in Irish life.
Within 48 hours the world, its mother and George Hook weighed in with an opinion on the matter. Eamon Dunphy, RTÉ’s chief sporting provocateur, summoned his indignation in a newspaper column. “Remember how irate people in this county got after Thierry Henry’s handball? Rightly, sport vilifies drug cheats but you can’t distinguish between forms of cheating. You can’t criticise dopers or a Henry and then turn a blind eye to the widespread cheating that blights Gaelic football.”
Many GAA people would feel that indirectly comparing Cavanagh, one of the finest players in the history of Gaelic football, to doping athletes is scandalous and without truth. Because under the rules what he did was not cheating. It was fouling. It was intentional fouling. As Cavanagh himself explained, the action he took was almost instinctive, because it is rooted within the culture of Gaelic games.
On the letters page of this newspaper on Tuesday, Martin Rodgers from Belfast addressed Brolly’s remarks in a wider context. He argued that the failure to adapt as a guiding principle Brolly’s core point – that the end cannot justify the means – is the kind of morality that has brought Ireland to its knees.
“The pursuit of wealth at the expense of community interests motivated banks and has created an uncaring and divided and financially and morally bankrupt society,” he wrote. “Every means at their disposal are now being used by those who made selfish and misconceived investments in the Irish property market to avoid suffering any financial loss and to continue with their ostentatious and extravagant lifestyles. Do we really want our children to grow up seeking to attain success at any cost?”
Other citizens share and have voiced similar concerns. But even Parky might blanch if tasked with knocking on the Tyrone dressing-room door and informing the Red Hand team that they are also responsible not just for the property bubble but the moral collapse of Irish society.
Still, it was clear that Brolly’s outrage had sparked something throughout a nation that has been mystifyingly passive through a decade of tribunals, inept government and catastrophic banking regulation.
The pillars have crumbled: few people express anything other than despair or disdain for the political arm of the Irish state. Declining numbers retain faith in the Catholic church. That leaves the GAA as perhaps the one major institution that has proven reliable. It has grown in importance during this decade of disgrace and lies and illusion.
Best of us
For all its faults the GAA contains the best of us: a burning belief in community, in volunteering, in working with young people and, through the limitless sacrifices that players like Cavanagh make, to play for the near quixotic dream of bringing home a big shiny cup called Sam, it offers the best illustration that some things transcend mere money.
Perhaps that is why the GAA comes under such scrutiny and why a lifelong Gael like Brolly can become tremulous with passion. The funny thing was that the phrases used on the sports shows afterwards to debate the context of Cavanagh’s tackle mirrored those often heard in the political theatre. “The lobby is so strong,” lamented Kevin McStay about the failure to bring in harsher punishments for Gaelic football infringements. Or, “The GAA moves very slowly.”
The best remark was one that King James II would have given anything to call on in mitigation for the Battle of the Boyne, in 1690. “Let’s go back to the Battle of Omagh, when we all got off on technicalities,” said the former Dublin footballer Ciarán Whelan, recalling the ugly brawl between the players of Dublin and Tyrone. “That wasn’t in the spirit of the game. We got off because the rule book allowed us to get off.”
Isn’t that how Irish politicians have more or less explained the failure to prosecute those responsible for the banking fiasco?
It also illustrates the enduring problem within the GAA. The rules, particularly those determining Gaelic football, are open to limitless interpretation and create an atmosphere of constant ambivalence. All sorts of qualifications are used to describe frees: they are “handy”,“soft”,“harsh” or “hard-earned”; the referee is either “pulling everything” or “letting it go”.
If is often noted that the referee would have booked a player “if he wasn’t already on a yellow”. Scuffles and fights are also categorised; inconsequential shoving is dismissed as “handbags”. The rule permitting a player to carry the ball for four steps before soloing, bouncing or passing is rarely enforced. If it were, half the goals and points scored would be disallowed.
Referees are constantly harangued and challenged. A successful Gaelic football game relies on the co-operation of teams, managers and officials to agree to loosely adhere to the rules, which can be stretched, dependent on variables such as the form of the referee, the intensity of the occasion and even the weather.
The same problem has recurred with tax returns or TDs’ expenses or electing political representatives or golden handshakes, with the abiding rules there to be massaged, interpreted or even ignored.
On Gaelic fields it usually works fine. But it can also lead to scenes such as the aftermath of the Leinster football final, which Meath won with a goal that ought to have been disallowed. It caused a minority of incensed Louth supporters to chase, shoulder and abuse the referee, Martin Sludden.
Every so often, spectacular bouts of anarchy break out on GAA fields, from the YouTube video of the crowd abusing the Galway hurling referee Christy Helebert after a club match to the infamous brawl at the beginning of the 1996 All-Ireland football final replay.
One of the most beloved Irish comedy moments is the D’Unbelievables sketch featuring John Kenny as Timmy Ryan, an irascible village GAA coach giving a team talk before the county final. He implores his team to get the other players sent off by goading them with insults until they strike out. “Lambaste them. Annihilate them. And when he hits you, you hit the ground. He gets the line, we get the free, 14 men down to 15. Ye don’t even know how to play the game.”
The killer line comes when Timmy looks around at his team and warns: “Ye’ll know all about it when ye go up to play under-14.” It is, of course, just a brilliant but easily recognised parody, hence its popularity.
Caught in a spot
The trouble for the GAA and the custodians of Gaelic football is that it has always been caught between imposing effective rules while retaining the game's robustness and physicality, which can vary from province to province.
Oisín McConville, speaking on the Second Captains Irish Times podcast, made a general point about the Tyrone-Monaghan game in his laconic Crossmaglen way. "It was a game between two Ulster teams. And certain things go in Ulster that probably aren't allowed down here."
And Brolly’s outburst raised all kinds of peripheral issues, including a perceived anti-Ulster bias. “I think there has been an increase in general disdain for Ulster people in general in the last 15 years too,” wrote Johnboy7 on Hoganstand. com.
“I don’t think it is because of the end of the Troubles but more to do with the Celtic Tiger. The prosperity bred a certain type of sneering, selfish, cynical self-important beings who see themselves as intellectually and culturally superior and much more cosmopolitan than the average Bogger/ Nordie/Skanger or whichever group they choose to look down their noses at on a particular day.”
His view was both endorsed and ridiculed, but he wouldn’t be alone in his belief. The GAA was a huge solace to many Ulster people during the Troubles, and now, during a dispiriting period on the island, it remains a huge source of pride and comfort in all four provinces, because it is something worth believing in.
And there are times when it seems to mirror the very imperfections that govern Irish life. Not long after last week’s game Malachy O’Rourke, the Monaghan manager, was asked for his opinion on the controversial tackle. He grimaced, clearly devastated that his team had lost a game in which Tyrone had just boxed more cleverly. He went to comment and then checked himself.
“I’m not sure what the rule is,” he said finally.
