Sir, - It is beyond my comprehension how Fr Joe McVeigh (August 4th) can reconcile his laudable commitment to a "just, tolerant and pluralist Ireland" with his support for the GAA's Rule 21. The Rule denies Irishmen the right to join the GAA because of the uniform they wear. A few years ago the Irish News criticised it editorially on that ground in particular.
Nearly a century ago the official organ of the Royal Irish Constabulary criticised the ban on the ground that "it was denying Irishmen the right to participate in what was part of their national heritage". By the way, I was a delegate at GAA congresses in Northern Ireland in 1971 and 1980. On each occasion members of the RUC were in attendance for the protection of delegates.
I presume Fr McVeigh is aware that Sinn Fein mounted a picket outside the recent Congress when Rule 21 was on the agenda. And, if he is a regular reader of the Irish Catholic, he will be aware of a report in that newspaper of late which recorded that priests in Northern Ireland interviewed by the paper on Rule 21 declined to be identified publicly. I wonder why? One of the priests interviewed stated that he objected strongly to the presence of a Sinn Fein picket outside his club premises during a debate on Rule 21. And he went on to assert that Sinn Fein's only interest in the GAA was self-promotion.
Of course, Sinn Fein's interest in the GAA isn't new. It dismissed the GAA as a "useless relic" because it didn't join it in the Civil War. Later it tried to have members of the Garda Siochana and the national Army banned from the GAA and the Gaelic League in the cause of "national purity".
That ethos was at the very core of the infamous ban on "foreign games". It represented, as does Rule 21 today, ethnic cleansing without recourse to bloodshed. Undoubtedly, the decision of the recent Congress to retain Rule 21 tends to identify the GAA with the 5 per cent of nationalists who rejected the Good Friday agreement in the Northern Ireland referendum. We have to live with that decision, however regrettable, as an expression of democracy.
However, motivated - like your correspondent - by a commitment to promote a just, tolerant and pluralist society in Ireland, I shall, please God, be asking my club at its forthcoming a.g.m. to sponsor a motion once again to delete Rule 21.
Finally Fr McVeigh's criticism of the GAA patron, Archbishop Clifford, for his Rule 21 intervention is too silly for serious comment. - Yours, etc., Thomas Woulfe,
Victoria Road,
Dublin 6.