January is the month to live like a monk. Or a club hurler

Not yet halfway through January and I feel like a monk. Or a GAA player. There being little difference. Owing to matters (spending) beyond my control last month I now suffer an equal and opposite reaction in abstemiousness. It happens every January, adding greatly to the misery that month guarantees. Yes, in January you might as well be a monk. Or a GAA player.

Last November you may have seen the widely circulated demands made on its players by a certain GAA club. It inspired universal shock and awe. A week in Lough Derg (Donegal) would be a treat by comparison. Anyone wishing to be part of the club’s panel for 2024 was banned from trips to “Australia/America and Canada etc for the summer”. The “etc”, presumably, means the rest of the world.

Unapproved holidays between June and October were also “out”, as was drinking. “Out” also with golf, soccer, or any other sport, not because they were foreign games but distractions. Everything, it seems, is out, out, out, with the singular exception of a mandatory commitment to training “at the highest level ALL [its emphasis] of the time”.

I tell you, no monk would put up with it. Yes, like former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Clarinbridge’s hurling club in Co Galway seems too to have succumbed to an “out, out, out” dismissal of all it won’t accept where players are concerned.

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Hurling is the greatest field game in the world, bar none. It is played by amateurs who, it now seems, must abide by disciplines few professionals would accept. It’s enough to turn any young person against the game. “Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart,” as Yeats said. Too much, too much.

It was another Dubliner, George Bernard Shaw, who lamented that youth was wasted on the young. He died at 94. Clarinbridge GAA club seems determined that its young people have no youth at all. And, as we’re quoting, here’s what Hamlet said when told of the Clarinbridge club rules: “Fie on’t! O fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. The youth of Clarinbridge should be out there eating, drinking and being merry for, verily, tomorrow’s responsibilities will ensure that they can’t. Lovely hurling, indeed.

Youth, from Old English geoguð, related to geong for “young”.

inaword@irishtimes.com