I sympathise with Daithí Ó Troithigh, who complained recently (Letters, September 5th) about the difficulty of finding a pub in Dublin showing the All-Ireland Hurling Final rather than English Premier League soccer.
Mind you, it's a moot point whether, as he claimed, "these are pubs that pride themselves on being Irish". For most of us, being Irish is like an inherited medical condition. You're not consulted about it beforehand, or given a range of nationalities to choose from. So pride hardly comes into it. The most we can do is accept our Irishness, and try to manage the condition as best we can through a healthy diet and lifestyle.
Apart from that, I take Daithi's point. But it's one thing when Irish pubs in Ireland discriminate against the GAA. What really annoys me is when Irish pubs abroad do it. After all, such businesses unquestionably pride themselves on their nationality. The I-adjective appears extensively in their promotional material. And they invariably drape the premises with tricolours to underline the point.
So when I was in an Irish pub in Paris recently and the TV menu du jour pitched the first All-Ireland football quarter-finals against a meaningless rugby friendly between England and Wales, I had no doubt which sport would get priority. Presumably the rugby would be shown as a delayed transmission, or on a token screen in the corner. The action from Croke Park would surely be the main event.
Au contraire. The Gaelic football dominated only until the rugby coverage started. Then the manager announced that all the screens on the ground floor were being switched over to show the England-Wales game. The GAA coverage would continue in the basement.
Now it is true that - thank God - Irish pubs in France are not exclusively patronised by Hibernians. Other English-speaking nationalities frequent them too, as do many locals. Indeed, it was already clear that the GAA fans on the premises (all four of us) were outnumbered by the English cohort alone, and that the latter's ranks were being swelled gradually by rugby-loving French.
Also, it should be said that we were by then witnessing the closing stages of the Cork-Sligo quarter-final, a game of quite staggering awfulness (especially when viewed on a large screen). Watching it sapped your will to live, never mind to resist the pub's plan to change channels. So in truth, there was a certain relief when it was relegated downstairs, where foreigners wouldn't see it. And when the time came, we followed meekly.
Even so, as we took up position in the dank basement, it struck me that here was the 800 Years of Oppression re-enacted in miniature. Anglo-French colonisers had occupied the ground floor, usurping our seats and our TV screens, and making free with our barmaids. Meanwhile, we poor, dispossessed Gaels had been driven underground, forced to practise our culture in secret.
Suddenly, watching the broadcast from Croker acquired the ambience of an illegal gathering. One sensed that we could be arrested imminently. But in fact, the only oppressors who visited us in our cavern were rugby supporters on the way to the toilets.
They paused occasionally to glance at us and at what we were watching. It was the Tyrone-Meath game by now, resulting in increased excitement levels. And as we shouted our slogans at the television - "Crease him!", "Hit it long!", "What about Geraghty, ref?" - we were conscious of providing the onlookers with an ethnic exhibit of the sort that gives these pubs much-needed authenticity.
We need not have expected gratitude. In one final indignity, the manager did not consider us sufficiently numerous even to merit the opening of the downstairs bar. Our numbers peaked at seven: almost enough to consider a rebellion. But when we did rise, it was only to buy our pints upstairs and carry them back down.
In an ideal world, Irish pubs would be a key weapon in the GAA's attempts to promote its games to an overseas audience. But given the discrimination witnessed in Paris, my worry is that even next weekend's showpiece between Cork and Kerry will be eclipsed. After all, it clashes not only with the crucial Samoa-Tonga rugby match, but also with the Premier League tie between Manchester City and Aston Villa.
Incidentally, on the occasion of this first ever all-Munster football final, and on behalf of Ulster people everywhere, I would like to take the opportunity to apologise to everyone for the dark years of Northern domination just ended. It was a blight on the game, we know. We now accept that there was never any pulling, dragging, gouging, biting, third-man tackling or anything else unpleasant in GAA until it introduced by the Northern teams in the 1990s.
Now, mercifully, football's long night of the soul is over, and those twin aristocrats of the deep south are about to remind us how pure the game was before it was hijacked by savages.
The Cork-Sligo match notwithstanding - and Sligo's proximity to the Border can be blamed for that - a Cork-Kerry final is sure to be a celebration of the human spirit, of everything that is noble and beautiful. Freed from the shackles of massed defence, I particularly look forward to individual displays of balletic grace from the Kerry forwards, of a kind not seen since the death of Nijinsky.
It would be a tragedy if such a spectacle were not shared with the rest of the world. So I appeal to all Irish pubs abroad to give Sunday's game maximum coverage, and if possible to erect large screens on the streets outside. Just this once, if you really must, you can stick the soccer and rugby in the basement.