Last Tuesday was the 80th anniversary of Croke Park's Bloody Sunday. Take a walk on the northside and you'll see a new Hogan Stand rising to replace the old in continued remembrance of that day when Tipperary footballer Michael Hogan was among 13 people murdered in a British army reprisal at the assassinations of 12 of its agents. As this 21st-century monument sprouts, the GAA has been denying reports it might allow rugby to be played in its redeveloped headquarters, which remains as much a shrine as a stadium.
We can only take the GAA at its word but where the politics of Irish football are concerned, the new century will inevitably deliver a whole new ball game. The places of Gaelic games, soccer and rugby in New Ireland are not as fixed as they used to be. Broad outlines of identity, in which Gaelic games are considered primarily Catholic, nationalist and rural, soccer is seen as urban and working-class and rugby as non-denominational and middle-class still pertain. Such outlines are shifting, however. There's more social fluidity in Irish football these days.
Given the increasing stress on the economics and marketing of sport, older ideologies are, to use a Jack Charlton cliche, "unda pressha". At Government and governing bodies level, tiresome rows about new stadiums rage on. Among the public though, exclusive allegiance to any single sport continues to dwindle. "I would like every Irishman to play the game that most appeals to him," said the nationalist Sean MacEntee back in 1931. Because of history and politics, MacEntee's wish may never be granted totally but ironically, in post-nationalist Ireland, the game is beginning to swing his way.
Still, there's much to play for and tactical realignments within and between competing forms of football are evolving rapidly. Even the GAA, the largest and most powerful of all Irish sporting organisations, has been reshuffling its resources. Its "back-door" system in the hurling championship, for instance, though it makes a mockery of the idea of a sudden-death, knockout competition, has generated extra income through extra matches. The playing of rugby at Croke Park would also add to the association's coffers because profit is the reigning goal of sport nowadays.
Of course, rugby, like soccer and cricket, remains to GAA hardliners "a garrison game". But it plays out of a less reviled garrison than does soccer. For a start, the competition to the GAA from rugby is not as threatening. The most important rugby games generally take place while the GAA is snoring through its devalued National Leagues. The expanding soccer season, driven by mega-marketing, massive TV exposure and a frenzy to maximise income, which has seen the EU class the game as an industry, not just a sport, increasingly overlaps with the peaks of the GAA calendar.
Money and marketing aside, there are deeper animosities in play too. Rugby might be permitted in Croke Park (even though the `BertieBowl" is more financially attractive to the IRFU, which this week gave its backing to the Government's proposed national stadium). But soccer, at least for the foreseeable future, will not.
It's a perplexing history which ensures that GAA relations with the IRFU remain, as they have been traditionally, much less antagonistic than GAA relationships with the FAI. After all, rugby, though it operates on a 32-county basis, has been the football of the British officer class while soccer has been the game of squaddies. Soccer internationals are preceded by Amhran na Bhfiann; rugby ones by the compromise Ireland's Call, which would certainly sound like a cultural swan-song for traditional Ireland were it bellowed out from Hill 16.
Rugby might therefore be expected to generate at least comparable hostility from within the GAA. As Tom Humphries has pointed out however, Eamon de Valera, who played rugby at Blackrock College, believed that rugby and hurling were the natural games of "the Gael". Dev, it seems, is not alone in this view and in some parts of the country - Cork and Limerick, for instance - many sports fans ignore Gaelic football and soccer to follow rugby in winter and hurling in summer. Catholic fee-paying schools also have traditions - largely class-based - of promoting Gaelic games and rugby but the best quality "schoolboy" soccer still remains outside of the schools.
Last year, Billy Lavery, the president of the IRFU, attended an All-Ireland final as a guest of the GAA. This year, former GAA president Peter Quinn and current president Sean McCague made what The Irish Times described as "conciliatory noises" about the possibility of rugby, at least, being played in Croke Park. The official line banning "foreign games" (that is, British-originated) from Irish nationalism's biggest shrine remains in place. But rugby and Gaelic games could yet consolidate a realignment against the perceived threat of booming soccer.
Ireland is not unique in seeing formerly fixed positions of competing forms of football become more fluid. In Britain, even though English rugby is winning at the top levels of the newly professionalised game, many former exclusively rugby schools are being forced by pupil, parent and pop culture pressure to field soccer teams. Even Rugby School, where a plaque commemorates William Webb Ellis, the pupil who, allegedly, in 1823 picked up the ball and gave birth to the game, now devotes a term to soccer. Although the Webb Ellis origin myth is a Victorian fabrication, it retains deep symbolic significance for Rugby and rugby.
Late last year, Rodney Walker, chairman of UK Sport, said he was not surprised by the current trend. "It's about pupil power," he said. "Soccer is now a magnet for all youngsters. It is clearly the game in town." Even at England's poshest school, Eton, more pupils play soccer than rugby. Fear of injury, and the fact that rugby is increasingly best suited to a more limited range of physiques, are, along with the Murdochisation of soccer, tipping the balance. In France too, with the national team winning soccer's World Cup and European Championship, the sport is thriving.
In Britain and Ireland, the key playmaker of the new developments has been Rupert Murdoch. His media politics and media economics have disrupted the old formations to the point where saturation television coverage has rendered soccer almost as anthemic to this generation as pop music was to the generation of the 1960s. In this regard, he may yet kill the goose that has laid the golden egg but for the moment, everybody has to play ball by his economic rules. "Everybody" includes even prime ministers. Seeking street cred, Tony Blair exposed himself as a rather bogus Newcastle United "fan". Bertie Ahern (in football terms at least) is not similarly bogus. Still, although he leads the party of de Valera, he scores goals, not tries, in his dreams. Croke Park is in his constituency but he supports Man United and Celtic as well as the Dubs - the classic, if predictable Trinity for northsiders who follow football. Ahern recalls that when playing street football in the Drumcondra of almost a half century ago, his inspiration was Liam Whelan, the Cabra star killed in the 1958 Munich air disaster which practically wiped out Manchester United's Busby Babes. Back then, of course, Man United was almost as identifiably Catholic as they are now capitalist. Some 10 years before Whelan's death, another Dubliner, Jackie Carey, had captained the club to an FA Cup victory.
Celtic was founded by an Irish Christian Brother from Sligo. Ahern's nationalist sporting credentials are, unlike de Valera's, those of the average Dubliner.
Watching the manoeuvres of Irish football in changing political, economic and cultural contexts is like watching playing teams seeking new advantages and adapting to new threats. English soccer has become a significant part of global showbiz, prompting outbursts such as Roy Keane's "prawn sandwiches" attack on a sport that he sees is being severed from its roots. As a major beneficiary of that severance, Keane was, like his combative style of play, on the edge. But his argument, albeit blinkered, made a valid point.
All forms of football, Irish as well as British, are being more dramatically uprooted than at any time since soccer split between professionals and amateurs; rugby split between League professionals and Union amateurs and Gaelic, post-Bloody Sunday, hardened its anti-British stance. In a world where money doesn't just talk but bellows orders, Rugby Union has gone professional and leading GAA players are now seeking a slice of the loot. Watching all these developments is a public propagandised to revere choice.
THE cultural nativism of the GAA versus the class cachet of rugby - and perhaps both versus the globalising world's dominant game - may not be sport as we know it, Jim. But Murdoch has changed the rules of the game. As older loyalties to ideology, culture and class are superceded, the football which best adapts to market demands will be the big winner. Enjoyment through playing or spectating is only a part of the big picture - when the goal of such a characteristically consuming passion as football is to cultivate consumers above connoisseurs.
In Croke Park's museum, where War of Independence medals mingle with All-Ireland ones, replica panels from Irish high crosses are displayed. These contain, a plaque suggests, "objects resembling a hurley and ball". Perhaps they do. It's an understandable appeal to antiquity on the part of the GAA. But along with appeals to antiquity, the museum sells baseball caps in county colours, T-shirts and the usual novelty tack: "Dubs" car fresheners, key-rings and pint mugs. The marketing is at nothing like Manchester United levels but the GAA, like the IRFU, would dearly like it to be.
It's a long haul from Celtic high crosses to gaudy baseball caps but it reflects the GAA's sense of itself in Irish history. However, in an Ireland where ties to nationalism, Catholicism and Dev's rural idyll are being weakened by ties to a wider world, the GAA, like the other football bodies, is on shifting ground. In redeveloping Croke Park on the site of one of Irish nationalism's shrines, it is, literally as well as symbolically, asserting that its ground doesn't shift.
Then again, shrines can't, can they? (Think of the Middle East.) But commercial realities have shifted the goalposts for all forms of Irish football. Competition between Gaelic games, soccer and rugby will not quite become a knockout contest. They are all sufficiently vibrant to prevent that. However, with commercial forces now calling the shots, the key point to recognise is that real player-power must not be confined to professionals.
Every 21st-century child should play the game they fancy and leave the partisanship to their 20th-century parents and the powerbrokers in suits. Tradition is fine but "ignore the message, play the game", is the fairest message in 2000 - whatever the game and wherever the venue.