Humanity John should look to England:NOW THAT Humanity John Gormley has slobbered over his ounce of green venison and hung the Meath Hunt well and truly out to wither, did you see treatment of our service animals take another giant leap forward when party politicians expatiated on our breeding bitches?
You tell me.
Meanwhile, hunt supporters across the water live in hope that their Hunting Act will probably be repealed. Hunts there have bided their time and used it well, marshalling a united front in favour of tight regulation to prevent unnecessary cruelty.
What’s happening in England is instructive. The Labour peer Lord Donoughue, a former agriculture minister, three years ago led a review to eradicate cruel practices in greyhound racing, and he’s been involved in a similar capacity with the horseracing industry.
Now he’s in the vanguard of quiet efforts to get the support of a majority of Tory and Labour MPs and peers in support of trenchant regulation; although the parliamentary arithmetic is tight.
If the hunt coalition does succeed, Donoughue will chair a mooted Hunting Regulatory Authority with three aims – hunting without unnecessary suffering; hunts to respect animals, property, lands and crops, and hunting only on land by the permission of the owner.
Penalties could lead to court, with those found guilty fined or disbarred for life from the pink.
Compare and contrast with the brave new world of rural Ireland, where the horse and the dog have always been intrinsic elements of our civilised human relationship with those animals – one in which both species are also crucial to a financial matrix that helps support hundreds of thousands of people.
So ask yourself. Are things better this weekend for hens, ducks, pigs or veal calves?
Do cattle now get a better deal in abattoirs (not to mention in Halal throat-slit ’n’ bleed slaughterhouses)?
Are stolid milch cows happier in themselves?
Are our live exports better handled? Have deer culls by dog-and-rifle stopped?
We read in Arab News last week that the Saudis may step in with a $100 million (€79m) plan to save nuisance outback camels in Australia. Perhaps they might also be in the market for one recently-redundant Meath deer herd?
Hasten that general election, when it’ll be tally-ho time for the green tally whores.
Uruguay buck the trend by giving back
VALEDICTORY WEEK, in the southernmost state of Africa.
Baubles will go to the winners of this weekend’s games.
Yet, so much more will reverberate elsewhere through this world game, the true people’s pastime, the one through which beggar and blessed can build on talent, ambition, drive – or just take joy in simply kicking a ball around with friends.
We already look back somewhat regretfully (noble Uruguay), quite delightedly (cheating French), downright deliriously (Portugal’s gannets) and, with real sorrow, at yet another sad African soccer soliloquy – played out this time to the C flat descant drone of the godawful vuvuzelas.
We’ll miss it when it’s over. Yet, like all sporting whores we’ll find other temptations, alternative seasonal passions. The GAA slides into serious summer now, bless its little báinin socks.
The hay’s well saved, much turf has been racked to dry – and the qualifiers are concentrating a countrywide honeycomb of coaching sphincters.
For now, two World Cup moots.
Oliver Tambo airport, Jo’burg. Three huge cutouts dominated the arrivals area, dressed in the putative yellow livery of Africa United: Michael Essien, John Obi Mikel, Salomon Kalou. Sums it up really: all well-paid Chelsea boys, and Nigeria’s Mikel and Essien of Ghana never made it; Kalou got on the pitch but left few scorch marks on it.
It used to be armies, civilising servants, railways and other infrastructure that opened up the mineral-rich “dark” continent for the efficient extraction of precious raw materials.
That hasn’t stopped, as developed countries still manoeuvre and manipulate (cf most recently, the ubiquitous Chinese), but on the soccer axis it’s been satellite TV, slick scouting networks and foreign-financed “academies” that have combined to mine the human mother lode. The new slavery?
Back in Africa, nowt or little of benefit sticks. Local leagues have been emptied by the greedy world game, not one sub-Saharan club has been paid a serious transfer fee . . . and then there’s Fifa (let us laud the Cape Town entrepreneur who sold T-shirts with the slogan “FICK FUFA”), whose worthies slip non-audited grants to African nations to keep the votes coming, and their own jobs safe.
Yet there are decent people, and they always bring hope and warmth.
I mentioned some months ago Craig Bellamy, many people’s soccer notion of Paul Galvin on speed, but whose Sierra Leone non-profit soccer academies are educating close to 2,000 kids and have personally cost Bellamy not far south of a million quid already.
Uruguay were billeted for their soccer World Cup pool in the northern Cape mining town of Kimberley. The locals took warmly to the unpretentious South Americans, who mixed well and opened their training sessions to local schoolchildren. When the squad bussed out for their matches, hotel staff sang Shosholoza, an old miners’ gang-song that has now become South African soccer’s unofficial anthem.
The Uruguayan response was magnificent, based on their acknowledgment of a “moral obligation” to Kimberley’s hospitable people.
They’ve now created and funded (and they ain’t that flush themselves) a five-year project to coach locals with a view to putting a team in South Africa’s first division, and they’ll move promising players to train in Uruguay.
Bravo, Uruguay.
Japan wrestles with Sumo scandals
IN VERY few physical endeavours does effort meld with artistry, and the arcane meet the outré quite as deliciously as in Japan’s noble art of sumo wrestling.
Forget the J League or baseball – Sumo’s the national sport of Nippon; and it’s always been a savage test of strength, speed and skill.
Down two millennia, the best performers have been honoured and adored not just for tournament success, but also for their dignified bearing in public, and their modest, low-key demeanour in dealing with Kipling’s twin imposters.
High personal standards were a given. Modernity and globalisation have not been kind to sumo. Television brought a worldwide audience – and concomitant money temptations; integrity and tradition, as well as the
patience of aficionados have been tested by the arrival of Polynesian and other foreign wrestlers who have muscled into the elite ranks these past two decades.
And for quite a while, there’s been gangsterism and gambling.
Now the annual 15-day Nagoya tournament – one of only a half-dozen Grand Sumo contests held each year – has gone off television screens, as the thick has truly plottened.
Kotomitsuki, a 34-year-old holding the second-from-top rank of Ozeki, was awaiting expulsion this week from the Japan Sumo Association for allegedly making some five million yen on baseball bets with Yakuza gangsters, in an effort to pay off a mobster who was blackmailing him to keep quiet about the wrestler’s betting. Kotomitsuki thus broke Japan’s strict gambling legislation.
It gets worse.
The JSA is also likely to dump Otake, a wrestler-turned-sumo- stable-master, who in turn had been borrowing from Kotomitsuki to fuel his own betting addiction and was also in debt to mobsters.
And worse. Japanese media reports suggest as many as 65 of the 700-odd wrestlers now in stables have admitted to illegal gambling on a variety of sports, supporters of sumo are viscerally outraged and national broadcaster NHK has bowed to fan pressure and taken Nagoya off air from tomorrow, for the first time since the network began live sumo 57 years ago.
They had little choice, frankly, after police arrested Kotomitsuki’s blackmailer, himself a former sumo wrestler- turned-yakuza-enforcer.
Behind it all is a recent police crackdown on a vicious element of the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan’s strongest yakuza syndicate. Links between sumo organised crime have long been an undercurrent, but have now become a visible flood.
Mixed messages
GEORGE ORWELL reckoned much sport was a version of war, without the weapons.
Siena’s twice-annual Palio horseraces rarely attract much by way of bellicose reaction. Doubtless if there were serious Greens in Italy, they’d think of something to object to, although the Piazza del Campo is covered in a thick carpet of soil and the main danger is to bareback riders unhorsed on tight, treacherous bends.
The Palio prize, a race banner awarded to the best of 10 riders chosen from Siena’s neighbourhoods, has this month sparked an altogether splendid epiphenomenon.
For Lebanese-born artist Ali Hassoun has meshed Muslim and Christian iconography in this
year’s pennant, depicting St George wearing a keffiyeh headdress, beneath an image of the
Virgin Mary. He’s also included the cross, crescent moon and the star of David, as well as quotes from the Bible and the Koran, plus Alhambra-inspired Moorish decoratives.
His multicultural approach is based on the fact that when the Sienese defeated Florence 750 years ago, they did so with the help of a cohort of Saracen archers and the redoubtable St George – himself born into a Christian family, whose father was Turkish and mother Palestinian.
Hassoun’s image has now drawn the ire of local Catholics and the anti-immigrant Northern League – a coalition of antagonism that suggests he really has hit an artistic (and publicity) jackpot.
Echoes of 1966
LAST WORD goes to We Wuz Robbed soccer matters. Much was made in gung-ho English
papers of German glee over Frank Lampard’s incorrectly disallowed crossbar goal; portraying
a fiendish, not to say Hunnish delight in Mittel Europa as revenge for 1966 – when a Russian linesman allowed Geoff Hurst’s dubious “goal”.
Terry Wogan remarked last weekend on little Englanders throwing themselves into Trafalgar
Square’s fountains to whoops of “Two World Wars, One World Cup”!
And he revived the hoary canard that says that Russian linesman, when asked on his deathbed why his crossbar decision had favoured the English, hoarsely whispered: “Stalingrad”.
