If there was ever any doubt that Gaelic games were among the most athletically demanding of sporting disciplines, you only needed to tune into Liveline this week. The dexterity, defensive strategies, and sheer nerve showcased by those who lined up to defend the decision to award Kyle Hayes an All Star award would be useful assets in Croke Park on All-Ireland final day.
Hayes is, of course, a supremely talented Limerick hurler who now has five All Stars to his name, along with convictions for two counts of violent disorder and another for dangerous driving, which he is appealing. The arguments rolled out in defence of his latest All Star award – presented to him by the GAA, GPA and PwC just weeks after the dangerous driving conviction – demanded a Simone Biles-like ability to contort oneself into increasingly implausible positions. “He was playing for his county, not for law and order.” “Think of the psychological pressure he must be under.” The selection criteria for the award meant only his performance on the field was relevant. A priest from a parish near his own told us “he’s only human” and “should be allowed to move on”. And so on.
Writing in the Independent, Martin Breheny decried the “role model” label as “daft anyway. Created by a fawning media.” Where does it end, he asked. “If Hayes were barred from All-Star selection, what about his Limerick career?” In this paper, Denis Walsh said if the argument is that his convictions should have disqualified him, then “why was he allowed to line out for Limerick in this year’s league and championship? Why was he not suspended by the GAA for bringing the association into disrepute?”
Those are questions to which I’d also like to know the answer. I’m not the first to have wondered aloud about the association’s cultural blind spot about violence.
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According to the argument made by Breheny and others, getting an All Star is not meant to suggest you’re a role model. Rather, it is simply an acknowledgment that you are one of the best 15 players in the country, handpicked by a selection committee composed of our top sports journalists before being presented at a fancy ceremony with a gong that is “the equivalent of winning an Oscar”, as Pat Spillane put it. Nothing role modellish about it at all. The fact that Hayes was also one of three shortlisted as “hurler of the year” is also, presumably, not to be taken as any kind of endorsement either.
There’s a broader point here that goes beyond the GAA or sport. One takeaway from the US election is that young men are casting about for direction on how best to be a man. According to exit polls, Trump won the votes of nearly half of men aged 18-24. More than one-third of women in that age group voted for him too. The fact is that both young men and one in three women responded to his avatar of crude, telling-it-like-it-is, strongman masculinity.
These Gen Zs – a generation focused on self-improvement whose own lingua franca is the pithy, knowing language of memes – are unlikely to have been won over by his rambling, self-aggrandising monologues or his weird drunk uncle dance moves. But they do seem to think he’ll fix the economy, sort them out a house and push back against what former Clinton adviser James Carville called the “preachy females” of the Democrats. They also seemed to enjoy what has been called his “bro podcast tour”.
Trump’s stroke of genius – or his 19-year-old son Barron’s stroke of genius – was to do the rounds of manosphere podcasters. He did interviews with comedian Theo Von; 23-year-old gamer Adin Ross, whose shtick involves gay slurs and sniffing the recently vacated chairs of his guests; the Canadian Nelk Boys, whom he invited on his private plane; former wrestler and YouTuber Logan Paul; and the godfather of them all, Joe Rogan.
The general fare offered by these podcasts is a mix of chatty and sometimes revealing interviews, pseudo-self-help, pop philosophy, conspiracy theories, crypto talk, crude sexual comments – and generally an “anti-woke” safe space for exactly the kind of people who bemoan the existence of safe spaces. But they also offer something else that is much rarer than it ought to be: the chance to hear men having a long – in the case of Rogan, three hours long – conversation with another man.
Theo Von is not what anyone would call a deep thinker – he recently wondered in an interview with Dermot Kennedy why there are no women in Ireland (“where did all the men fall out of?”) – but he had insightful conversations with both JD Vance and an uncharacteristically thoughtful and inquisitive Trump about addiction. In these moments, he’s not so much Andrew Tate but, as Helen Lewis put it in the Atlantic, “Ellen for men”.
It is clear that there is a generation of young men who feel a bit directionless, a bit aggrieved by the where society is headed, and are looking for role models to help them make sense of their lives. This is where sport has traditionally tended to come in, and why organisations like the GAA need to think hard about the values they want to represent.
Any criticism of the GAA’s willingness to overlook violence is invariably met with a tirade about all the good work it does around the country; the fact that Gaelic games are played in three-quarters of primary schools and two-thirds of secondaries; and that every summer 100,000 happy children trot off to Cúl Camps. But it’s precisely because of all that, because of its near-ubiquity across so many aspects of Irish life, that its tolerance for violence on and off the pitch needs to be addressed.