Silence is a wondrous thing. We think we know what it is, but we seldom do, for what passes as silence these days often enough is merely the absence of conspicuous noise. But beneath that absence there is a family of unheard sounds of which part of the brain is subconsciously aware. You might - and probably will - call that thing silence; and so it will appear to be until you hear true silence. The two things are as far apart as a string quartet and a plump little piglet being fed live into a mincing machine.
One could hear true silence last Sunday in Co Kildare. At half-time during the All-Ireland final, I stuck my head out of the door; and the soundlessness that lay in the air was perfectly extraordinary. The "silence" which seized the nation during the Ireland-Italy match in New York five years ago was like a vase-throwing battle in Waterford Crystal in comparison. This Kildare silence was the silence of space beyond Pluto; one could hear the keen of the solar wind on its lonely and perpetual journey into the fourth dimension. It was the silence which only an All-Ireland final could create.
National magnet
There is not another country in Europe which can become so entirely enraptured by a sport nobody else plays. It is as if at this meridian, different anthropological rules apply. Across the Eurasian landmass, the only sport which will fill major stadiums and glue the rest of the respective nations to their television sets is soccer - and then only if the match is of major importance in the World Cup. No sport is a national magnet in the way that Gaelic football is; no organisation has the political and popular power that the GAA has. And what makes it all perfectly extraordinary is that this national obsession is purely amateur.
But Croke Park is not the truest measure of this passion. Drive through the countryside on a bleak mid-winter Sunday afternoon, when cold, grey rain is boring holes sideways through all those foolish enough to go out, and in obscure towns whose names you did not catch through the downpour you will come across several hundred badly parked cars. Somewhere nearby, the owners of those cars and their passengers are shuddering in a few Nissen huts without walls, their feet immersed in cold clay and concrete, as a sleet-laden wind from the Skaggerak shaves off their ears with blunt Arctic razors. Meanwhile, in a strip of mud beside the Nissen huts, 30 young men perform their imitation of Third Ypres, though with none of the creature comforts associated with that particular offensive.
Spectator sport
There is nowhere in Ireland which is immune to this rule. Even in the North, where 60 per cent of the population either look on the GAA as republicans at play or are so ignorant of it that they think it is an anagram for a Swedish stove, Gaelic football is the greatest spectator sport of all. The most unimportant match played in the most atrocious conditions will be watched by large, bullfight-boisterous crowds. Conversely, watching club soccer on television from Northern Ireland is like viewing all two dozen survivors of a global nuclear holocaust having a final kick around before they succumb to radiation sickness, with commentary by an unfortunate who clearly wishes he'd been killed in the initial blast.
There are many reasons for this. Parish and barony and county call forth remarkable loyalties in the Irish soul; and this is strange, for only the parish is of uniquely Irish origin. But Irish people dearly love a contest, and the rules of Gaelic football permit an entertaining contest, even when the skill base is low. Gaelic is an immensely versatile sport. Rugby and soccer are simply unwatchable unless played by talented players; and few things this side of the cauterisation of piles without anaesthetic are quite as unbearable as having to watch either sport played badly.
The free and easy rules of Gaelic, the endless variety of options, the ability of use all four limbs to propel the ball in any direction, makes it an easier game for poor players to make entertaining; and when it comes to fine teams, such as those last Sunday, and truly superb athletes like Jarlath Fallon, the sport is close to incomparable.
Sunday afternoons
That is why over the coming months so many people will bolt their Sunday lunches in order to spend over an hour watching 30 fellow humans flounder in mud; from that spectacle they will draw some nourishment and some excitement to talk about over the hot whiskeys afterwards, as the season begins its long, long journey through countless wet and windy Sunday afternoons towards its conclusion on a Sunday afternoon early the following autumn. It might well be that Jarlath Fallon will no longer be making that journey, because the financial allure of rugby is too irresistible for a postman.
This is bizarre. Gaelic is the only truly financially viable sport in Ireland, and yet the only truly amateur one. As the athletic demands of the sport increase, and they will, and as the time in training grows in proportion, and it will, so too will the demands grow for financial recompense. Unless the GAA can work out how to change things in order that they stay the same, Jarlath is a sign of things to come.