Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch Read Free Book Online Page A

which was perversely against the national interest. The GAA concocted a kind of sporting version of the Iron Curtain, behind which the
purity of the Gaelic project could be maintained without interference from the more decadent culture on the other side. And it banished all dissidents.
    It was indeed one of Bill Graham’s more inspired moments when, in another context, he described the old Soviet Union as being ‘like an entire continent run by the GAA ’. He was right at the time, but if Bill had lived to see the new Croke Park, with ‘soccer’ matches being played in it, he would doubtless have reviewed his
position. He would have acknowledged that like the Soviet Union, eventually the GAA had its glasnost and perestroika . And unlike the GAA , the Soviet Union could only manage it with a President who was blind drunk most of the time.
    And there was always the amateur ethos, a positive off-shoot of this generally twisted old attitude. It can be regarded as Paddy’s special contribution to sport in a world mad for money.
Paddy can be in Sydney or Chicago looking at the All-Ireland final in which none of the stars are being paid a weekly wage, and he can be thinking: we are indeed a great sporting nation.
That’s the ‘big ego’ bit there. But there is also a little voice which nags at him, a voice reminding him that this is, after all, an exclusively Irish affair, and that if these
guys are as great as they’re cracked up to be, they’d surely be across in England playing the old garrison game, making millions.
    That’s the ‘low self-esteem’ bit.
    Like, we may be a great sporting nation, blah blah, but are we actually any good? And if we are, how can we tell if we never compete with people from other countries?
    Gaelic games were at once a comfort blanket and a source of insecurity at the time of Euro 88. They allowed Paddy to demonstrate many of the things that he did very well. But was sport one of
these things? There had been a few iconic individuals — Christy O’Connor the golfer; Ronnie Delany the runner; a few rugby players who may have been nominally Irish but who in truth
belonged to an upper-middle-class élite which was beyond nationality; there were a number of phenomenal horses and jockeys and trainer Vincent O’Brien; Eddie Macken the show-jumper;
Barry McGuigan and the boxers who always did their stuff at the Olympics; Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche ...
    There was strength and depth, in Paddy’s sporting contribution, but alas, the one that really counted was the one that had always eluded us.
    Association Football, the garrison game, is the one that counts. The rest is not exactly bullshit, but football is the one which gives everyone a chance, simply because it is played everywhere
and it doesn’t require a set of golf clubs or a place at a fee-paying school, or a horse. And it certainly doesn’t require you to be from the 32 counties of Ireland, to know
what’s going on.
    Jack Charlton would become quite fond of the big days out at Croke Park, though, as a typical ‘gruff Yorkshireman’, he would bravely express reservations about any sport which is
played in just one country in the entire world. He would also marvel at what he perceived to be the lowly status of football in Ireland, by comparison with these so-called national sports of Gaelic
football and hurling and greyhound racing.
    But here he revealed that perhaps he didn’t know us that well after all.
    Which is reasonable enough, since we don’t know ourselves that well either. He didn’t seem to fully understand, as he sat on a fine day in Croke Park with the stadium full, enjoying
the spectacle along with the great and the good and maybe even the followers of Kerry or Kilkenny who could now actually be arsed to come to Dublin in person, that it’s not like this all the
time. That the Irish were probably as good at football as they were at any other sport. Perhaps better, when you reflect on the numbers of