Sense of identity palpable when Donegal and Tyrone meet

On Tuesday afternoon in Dáil Éireann, Leo Varadkar made his first speech as Taoiseach-elect and, quoting Arthur Griffith, said that people could not be moved by “a cold thing like economics”; rather “it is question of feeling”.

On Thursday night, somewhere in the Tyrone interior, Mickey Harte named his starting 15 for Clones. (Sean Cavanagh made the grade).

And on Friday morning in Donegal Town, everyone was talking about the closure, after 65 years and with immediate effect, of M. McGettigan & Son, the butcher shop on the Diamond whose award winning sausages merited a visit from H.R.H Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, last summer.

It’s a pity that, during his time as Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Mr Varadkar’s diary-keepers and appointment-makers never made time for him to squeeze in a visit to Clones on some championship Sunday when the clans were gathering.

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Not for the usual ministerial experience of one of the GAA’s showpiece days- the D-reg’ luxury saloon sweeping into town half an hour before throw-in; the conspicuous security; the glad-handling with the dignitaries, the folksy mug of tea and the plate of Mr Kipling’s French Fancies arranged just-so.

No, imagine if they’d had the vision and imagination to allow Leo, in his rising days as Minister for Sport, to become, as Tom Petty had it, a face in the crowd. Out in the street. Walking around. Making his way down Fermanagh Street just after noon when, for the supporters from both counties, it was still possible for day to spin in any direction.

It would have been an invaluable opportunity for the future Taoiseach to see and hear and smell up close that place of which he spoke about with high optimism and evident sincerity in his maiden address on Tuesday: Ireland.

Donegal and Tyrone, who will play in Clones on Sunday for a place in this year’s Ulster final, are two counties whose identity and sense-of-self have become hugely interwoven with the fortunes of their respective GAA teams.

And the GAA, for all of its faults, has almost accidentally evolved into the only intersection at which all elements of Ireland collide in a way that is boisterous and natural: north and south, urban and rural, town and country.

Two summers

When the State was young, Clones was a big, prosperous market and railroad town, a borderlands thoroughfare and you only have to take a passing glance at the handsome buildings in the centre of the town to understand that it was a town that was certain of itself.

Like many, many towns, it has suffered and the Ulster championship Sundays have become important to the local economy.

Gaelic football was always immensely important to Tyrone but, even as they won their three All-Irelands in the last decade, it is as if the game has, post-Troubles, assumed a front-of-house position in the nationalist sections of the county.

Donegal, a county on the edge in every sense, was still punch-drunk from the attendant consequences of the recession when the county-team was revitalised and then transformed under Jim McGuinness. In the space of two summers, the county team went from being a flickering and unreliable sort of entity into a super-charged emblem of whatever ‘Donegal’ means in the imaginations of people from that place.

In an immediate sense, the reason people that from both counties have responded with such animation and fervour to the exploits of their teams is down to what they have done and continue to do on the football field.

Tyrone, since 2003, have, at their best, played outrageously good football. The most appealing thing about them was that their brilliance was inconsistent: they were like the best fireworks display you’ve ever seen whose timing was erratic. So you had to keep watching their sky.

It’s hard to underestimate the symbolic significance for Tyrone supporters of coming down to Dublin and watching their team turn it on in August and September games against the county teams which, history dictated, always won.

Tyrone’s football teams provided for Tyrone people the most vivid and emotional proof possible that things could change, that things could be different. At their very best – versus Kerry 2005, Dublin 2008, Armagh 2005 – Tyrone didn’t just defeat other teams. They forced them to re-evaluate their place in the bigger scheme of things.

The Donegal project, meantime, started as a whisper in Glenties and had already become a mantra by the time the general public caught up with it. Between 2011 and 2012, the football team kept defying the limits of everybody’s expectations and did so in way that was unapologetic and radiant with an internalised pride-in-county.

Little wonder that when these counties meet now, sparks fly. The wins and the losses are lived vividly and deeply felt. But they are also just the bread and butter of the championship. There will always be another game and another team.

What’s more important than the All-Ireland wins of Tyrone and Donegal is that they caused people to stop and think about what it meant to be from those places and not from somewhere else.

Localised pride

McGettigan’s is, until it closes for good on Saturday evening, one of those shops that increasingly only exist in the pages of a John McGahern short story.

In the year 2000, in response to the increased competition from national and multinational superstores, the brothers, Ernan and Diarmuid, developed a range of sausage meats – cranberry and basil, hickory and maple etc – that won national prizes and gave people a reason to keep coming through the door.

Their product was a source of localised pride – hence the shop’s inclusion in the Royals’ whistle-stop tour of the region. But it wasn’t so much the sausages that mattered: it was that for the few minutes you stood in McGettigan & Son, you were in a place that in accent, passing conversation and atmosphere could only have been located in Donegal Town and not anywhere else.

The brothers held out as long as they could but, as they stated in the Democrat this week, they were overwhelmed by big-store competition. Their ending was, unfortunately, down to a cold thing like economics.

Maybe it’s just progress that has brought the end of McGettigans. Maybe it is nobody’s fault and stupid to even care. The disappearance of one artisan butchers is hardly significant in the grand scheme of things. But if that keeps happening to hundreds of small businesses in dozens of towns all over Ireland, then what’s left but a great big national Liffey Valley Centre?

Big championship occasions like Clones on Sunday are on one level an escape from all of that – the daily grind of bill-paying and keeping businesses and ideas alive and prospering in the towns and villages that make up Ireland.

But these matches – Donegal versus Tyrone – are also the very furnace that makes people keep on keeping on. On Tuesday, as the county players prepared for training, Taoiseach Varadkar stated his belief that “politics can be a way to convince people that change is possible”.

Here’s hoping that under his leadership, that becomes so. But the chances are that if you ask the people of Donegal or Tyrone who will fill Clones on Sunday to identify the source of any belief they have in change for the better, they will point to their teams.

And they may not have all that much to say as to why that is. You just have to stand in the middle of them minutes before two o’clock on Sunday. It’s a question of feeling.