COUNTY COLOURS: When the English imposed the 32-county (34 if you're the GAA) administrative carve-up of Ireland, they surely never envisaged that it would come to hold such a firm grip over the Irish imagination
ONE OF the most evocative emblems of the county line is a simple shed on the N17 where Galway becomes Mayo – and vice versa. It is whitewashed now, but for many years it was painted in the red and green of Mayo, and boldly proclaimed “All- Ireland champs, 1951” – as if 1951 had just been extinguished with last New Year’s Eve candles and good intentions. The road was the same on both sides of the county divide: narrow and shaded with trees. The fields were the same and the sky was the same. But that shed alerted passengers to the fact that they were leaving one place and instantly crossing into somewhere else. A Mayo man once confessed that he let out a whoop of glee every time he drove by that shed.
Everyone in Ireland believes their own county to be the best. How did this happen? How did a system of convenience, imposed by the English rulers dating back to King John, come to hold such a firm grip on the Irish imagination? What possessed the Irish biographer DJ O’Donoghue to attempt a definitive assessment of Irish county supremacy in his 1906 book The Geographical Distribution of Irish Ability. Why did the redoubtable Flanagan brothers feel compelled to namecheck every single county in their track, Ireland’s 32, as recorded on their 1920s album The Tunes We Like to Play on Paddy’s Day. In England the county system still exists, but outside the cricket strongholds and the shires that are perpetuated in the works of Tolkien, they don’t seem so important there.
But in Ireland, what began as a practical method of governance by the English has been transformed to the point where those randomly drawn lines have acquired a sacred quality for the Irish.
“The crucial function of the county was legal and administrative, and the central figure there is the sheriff and the law officers,” says Willie Smith, Emeritus professor in Geography at UCC.
“You might think that our notion of the sheriff is of the Wild West. But you look at records in the 16th and 17th centuries for Kilkenny, for example, he is on the circuit and collecting dues and you get a notion of the routine character of the county functions. The counties established by the Normans can be traced to the meeting of county elites once or twice a year. There is a creation of county consciousness even then. The new counties in Ulster and Connacht, Wicklow, Westmeath, Longford, all develop strong identities because they are based on old Lordships. Cavan and the O’Reillys; Fermanagh and the Maguires; Clare and the O’Briens; Leitrim and O’Rourkes. So they were pouring new wine into old bottles.”
As a Tipperary man happily exiled in Cork, Prof Smith has often wondered about the mythology attached to counties and the perceived differences between neighbouring divisions of land.
“I think the Kilkenny-Tipperary identity is fairly real: Leinster-Munster, more pastoral on one side and tillage on the other. But Cork and Kerry is interesting, because the rivalry is intense but I see little difference in personality. In general, it is mythical. Counties are much more alike than they are different.”
And yet people fiercely cling on to the idea that their county is God’s own territory and champion its beauty spots and celebrate its patriots and famous sons in song and in statue.
THE OBVIOUS contemporary reference point for county consciousness is the GAA, now the richest source of pageantry and county pride, with the All-Ireland championships forming the centrepiece of Irish sporting summers for more than a century. The easing in the GAA’s residual suspicion of television helped to revolutionise the coverage of the summer games, and over the past decade they have come to dominate screens and radio broadcasts. The rise of new teams – the Ulster counties in football and Galway, Offaly and Clare in hurling – created the perception of county movements, culminating in the grand procession to the shrine of Croke Park.
The wonder of the All-Ireland is that it is based on an illusion: the GAA thrives on the parish rather than county model.
The miracle of the championship is that it succeeds in persuading people who have fostered intense neighbourhood rivalries through decades of local GAA games to leave those squabbles aside so that they can together support the notion of the county team. Few passages illustrate the hazards of this mingling of the various peoples from one county as perfectly as John Healy did in his memoir, recalling his visit to Barry’s Hotel on the morning of the 1948 All-Ireland final.
“Half of Mayo was trying to push in the doors – and the other half was trying to get out. Among the people trying to force a way out as I was trying to get in was Tom Lanagan, whom I had described as ‘the raw boned man from Ballycastle’. He caught sight of me going through the doors and let fly with a straight right hand. ‘Now who’s raw boned,’ he shot back as he was bundled away. Someone asked me if I was hurt and I said, ‘Not at all.’ The Charlestowns and Swinfords were all over the place.”
In the early years of the GAA, not everyone was convinced by the merits of the county system. Mark Duncan notes in a 2009 essay that by 1912 the Gaelic Athlete magazine was lobbying hard for the abolition of the county model, noting that it created an English-designed patchwork of “varied sizes and most irregular and absurd shapes” that created an ultimately unfair template for the participating teams. That radical proposal never saw light, but a century later there is no doubt that the county system is absurdly slanted in favour of the bigger and more populous counties. But not only did the GAA persist with the 32 counties, they succeeded in incorporating two more. London and New York may be the most glamorous and important cities in the world, but for the purposes of the All-Ireland championship they are de facto (and lowly ranked) counties, bunged into Connacht for the provincial series of the All-Ireland championships. And the importance of the county system reigns supreme in the Irish enclaves of the American and British cities.
Almost a century after organised Gaelic Games in New York, for example, there has been no concession to locality – no Bedford Stuyvesant Shamrocks or Yonkers Parnellites. Instead, the local football scene is populated with teams faithfully bearing names from the old country: Leitrim, Kerry, Mayo and so on. And for decades in the Irish boroughs of the American and English cities, the most prized possession was gossip or news from home. Weeks-old editions of local newspapers would be scoured from cover to cover. Those same newspapers reinforced the county identity in their mastheads and became so strongly associated with their place that the county name became defunct. “Did you see the Champion/Demo/Herald/People/Leader?” was a question asked in every county. And in Cork, before the Examiner condescended to become a national publication, they went one better: “Did you see de paper?” Emigrants kept in touch with their home counties through the newspapers and through ballads, and the sight of “county” footballers on a summer visit to one of the sweltering Gaelic fields in the US was the next best thing to being home.
IN 1966 Val Dorgan accompanied the Cork hurling legend Christy Ring on a celebrated visit to New York. In the book he wrote about Ring a decade later, he recalled an evening in the home of Ring’s former Glen club mate Josie Looney that captured the essence of emigrant nostalgia for the lost county.
“After a massive meal we toasted every street and alley from North Gate Bridge to Dublin Hill. We sang Dear Old City, Beautiful City, The Banks, The Armoured Car, The Night the Goat Broke Loose on Grand Parade and Ring was high on hurling. Shoulders hunched, head thrust forward characteristically, blue eyes gleaming, Ring shook a massive fist at Looney and demanded: ‘Can a man sing about himself?’ In a light ballad voice, with lots of expression, he sang us Bryan McMahon’s celebrated Ballad for Christy Ring. ‘We’ll have a good cry tonight,’ said Josie Looney’s wife Mary.”
How often was that scene re-enacted by people from different counties? It was no coincidence that Ring, a shy and reticent man, was on the other side of the Atlantic when he let loose his emotions about home.
More than 40 years on and the myth of Ring endures and deepens the story of Cork as a county. So it goes with other counties.
“There was nothing inevitable about county identity at all,” says Paul Rouse, lecturer in the school of history and archives at UCD and director of the GAA Oral History Project.
“Even within the GAA it was an accident that the county became so important. Only a fool would argue that the GAA hasn’t had a definite impact on shaping county identity. But it is certainly something that drives people nuts, because some people have no interest in the GAA. You don’t want to change places with your neighbour! It is about where you are from and local friendships and an affinity for where you grow up. We are just a generation away from being a country reliant on the land. It all has to do with a certain sense of place. And there are also people who grow up in a certain county and can’t wait to get away from there.”
And then, of course, they begin to miss it.
