Ireland, the spectacle

Who cares about rugby?

The Six Nations is over again, which does not mean much to me. I don’t watch rugby because I don’t like it and in the world where on-demand TV and streaming services allow us to always control what appears on our screens, this means that the tournament, or any other tournament the Irish rugby team play, doesn’t impinge on me much. Where it does annoyingly force its way into my life at this time of year, however, is in my consumption of media, both traditional and social. Every year the sports podcasts I listen to are hijacked by a ramped-up rugby presence; Monday episodes are given over to analysis of the games just gone, Fridays given over to analysis of the team selection for the game to come. Every year, my Twitter timeline is dominated by people arguing, somewhat ungenerously to my eye, that nobody cares about rugby.

The journalist Kieran Cunningham decided to weigh in on the annual discourse this year, with a tweet that pointed out that “five Ireland rugby games were in the top 20 most watched TV programmes in Ireland last year” and opined that the “guff every year at this time that no-one cares is weird”. The idea of anyone seriously thinking that nobody cares about rugby is probably fantastical and it’s obvious that anyone who does actually hold that opinion is most likely not worth listening to, but Cunningham’s declaration on the popularity of rugby brought to mind Jerry Kiernan taking on Eoin McDevitt when the latter was the host of Off the Ball, with the former of the opinion that rugby received an imbalanced amount of media attention.

Kiernan: But who plays rugby?

McDevitt: Well, quite a lot of people play rugby around the world…

Kiernan [interrupting]: No they don’t, no they don’t.

McDevitt [continuing]: …England have hundreds of thousands of players for a start.

Kiernan: No they don’t.

McDevitt: But they do.

Kiernan: Sorry Eoin, they do not.

Whether or not Kiernan was right about the numbers playing rugby in England is not my interest, but he was right in the case of Ireland, a case he made often and as brashly as he could, although Cunningham is also, somewhat contradictorily, right: people in Ireland watch rugby, but they don’t play it. They barely go to it unless the national team are playing, one of the four provinces have a big European tie, or Leinster are playing Munster. Attendances for the four provinces in the 2018/2019 Pro 14, the last one to be held unaffected by Covid, were typically just above attendances in the 2019 Leinster Hurling Championship, except in Connacht’s case, but no province was near that of the regular attendances in the 2019 Munster Hurling Championship, saving for those at Waterford home games, which were being played in the insufficiently sized Walsh Park.

Sport Ireland’s Irish Sport Monitor 2019 found that 36 per cent of people in the 26 counties have a physical activity club membership of a type, the most popular being a gym membership (14 per cent), followed by membership of a GAA club (11 per cent) and a soccer club (3 per cent). 19 per cent of people attend sporting events; Gaelic football, soccer and hurling/camogie being the most popular sports with 8 per cent, 5 per cent and 4 per cent respectively. 12 per cent of people volunteer at a club; again Gaelic football is the most popular destination for this on 4 per cent, with soccer and hurling/camogie joint-second on 2 per cent. Rugby does not feature in the top twelve most popular activities by participation, with sports such as swimming, cycling, running, soccer, golf, Gaelic football and hurling/camogie all ranking ahead of it. Participation in sport was found to have grown in every working category other than the unemployed and the retired from 2015-2019, in every social class and at every level of education. The gap between the AB (top) social class and F (lowest) class in participation fell from 32 per cent to 30 per cent in the same period.

The Teneo Sports & Sponsorship Index 2020 found Gaelic games - an annoying grouping that doesn’t differentiate hurling from Gaelic football - to be the favourite sport of respondents (24 per cent), followed by soccer (14 per cent) and rugby (13 per cent), with tennis and cycling on 5 per cent and golf and athletics on 3 per cent. The most anticipated events were, in order: the Olympics, the Six Nations, the hurling All-Ireland, the football All-Ireland and the Euros. Katie Taylor, Johnny Sexton, Shane Lowry and Pádraig Harrington were named as the most admired athletes, with Joe Canning, Conor Murray and Sam Bennett next. There is a clear gap in what sports are favoured and participated in and what sports are consumed and anticipated as events within the 26 counties.

In the six counties, the Department of Communities’ Experience of sports by adults 2019/20 report tells us that soccer is the most popular of physical activities that aren’t typically solitary, with 10 per cent of adults participating in it. Next are golf (9 per cent), snooker, billiards or pool (8 per cent), table tennis (4 per cent), darts, Gaelic football and tennis (3 per cent). It should be noted that the criteria for this survey, again annoyingly, was to ask those surveyed if they had participated in a given activity at least once in the last year, lest it be thought that the six counties’ snooker scene is thriving more than its GAA one. 26 per cent of respondents were said to be members of sports clubs, a figure which is on the rise, but unlike the southern stats, the northern ones do not specify which type of clubs are most popular. Despite the common assumption that soccer is the game of the working class, the survey interestingly found the games of the northern working class to be darts, Gaelic football, hurling/camogie and squash, with those four found to be the only sports people from the most deprived areas were more likely to have participated in than people from the least deprived areas. Perhaps with sixteen of the twenty poorest wards in the north being majority Catholic, this should not be so surprising. 52 per cent of people were found to participate in physical activity at least once a week but again there is no breakdown of what that activity entails.

In terms of attendance at sporting events, again defined by whether or not respondents had been to at least one match in the last year, soccer was found to be the most popular sport (34 per cent), followed by rugby and Gaelic football (both 25 per cent), hurling/camogie (9 per cent) and motorsports and golf (7 per cent). No club in the Danske Bank Premiership averages over 3,000 spectators per game; Ulster Rugby’s average attendance fell from 16,068 in 2014/15 to 13,879 in 2018/19; when Casement Park is finished, it will accommodate 34,578 people, while Ulster Senior Football Championship semi-finals regularly attract over 20,000 people and the 2019 final attracted 28,780. There is a clear constant demand for the GAA in the north that soccer and rugby do not keep pace with and an apparent trend of people going to one or two soccer or rugby games and leaving it at that, or going abroad to Scotland or England in the case of soccer.

Thus, people in Ireland watch rugby, but do not play it. The playing is still largely the domain of a handful of fee-paying schools in the south and selective grammars in the north, meaning that rugby exists as a pastime for an elite within an elite groomed from adolescence for the best among them to take their place in the #TeamOfUs. How it has come to be among the most watched sports in Ireland then begs an interesting question, one which obviously has to be contextualised in the fact that the Irish national team are actually quite decent on the world stage. “World stage” is something of a misnomer for rugby given that roughly ten countries worldwide play it to any serious level, but the fact remains that Ireland, at least at Six Nations level, are reasonably successful, i.e. they semi-regularly win silverware. While both the soccer and rugby national teams have gotten as far as each other in their respective world cups - the quarter finals - the soccer team cannot boast of any silverware of note and have only ever won the 2011 Celtic Nations Cup and the 1986 Iceland Triangular Tournament. The GAA sports, of course, are by their nature insular and thus do not satisfy any craving for international success an audience may feel.

Yet I think it would be unfair to ascribe rugby’s outsized participants to audience ratio to simple glory hunting on the crowd’s part. For as long as I can remember, rugby has dominated our media to the point that a foreigner arriving here would be forgiven for expecting to see fields and parks teeming with oval balls rather than the footballs and sliotars that actually do dominate our open air spaces. That those who control our media are typically plucked from the same elite circles that produce rugby players is of course no coincidence; this is a matter of culture, a battle over what it is and who gets to define it.

Those who posit that rugby is Ireland’s national game - a claim the stats show to be as delusionary as the idea that nobody cares about it - are not positing the idea on the mistaken belief that it is the most played sport in the country, they are doing so because they are of the belief that culture is for the elites to create and for the commoners to consume, that it does not matter what we do in our leisure time, which they are of the belief we have stolen from the bosses. Culture, they believe, should function as pure spectacle, to be simply consumed rather than participated in by the majority, and thus rugby is the perfect tool with which they can covertly preach their ideology in Ireland.

We see attempts to convert the most popular games of hurling/camogie, Gaelic football and soccer into spectacle from the media at every turn. In the run up to last year’s FAI Cup Final, journalist Malachy Clerkin lauded the game’s “storytelling” and decried the GAA for not following its lead. Examples of such storytelling included the then-Bohemians midfielder Ross Tierney giving an interview that spoke of his brother’s suicide and the health issues suffered by one of his children. What Tierney did in speaking about his issues is patently a good thing, but the idea that it is a model to be followed in order to create a spectacle is vulgar in the utmost. The “story” of any given game of football, soccer, or hurling is that there is a game on; we do not need players, not least the amateur players of the GAA, to mine their personal tragedies in order to give the sport the emotional heft of a telenovela. Such a request seems to come from a place of enjoying loud noises and vibrant colours, liking the TV screen rather than the sport itself being shown.

The GAA is constantly criticised by the media for the few instances where its hierarchy refuses to indulge the demands of the spectacle. The recent decision to move the All-Ireland final dates to July, one of the few recent decisions taken by the association within the interest of the club players, coaches and volunteers that make up the bulk of its membership, has been roundly decried. The GAA is giving up valuable airtime to other sports, it is argued; they are ruining the allocated schedule of spectacle. Even more recently we have had Joanne Cantwell referring to the National Hurling League - of which RTÉ only bother to shows Divisions 1A and 1B - as a “farce”. What is again misunderstood by those in the media is that the new GAA calendar demands an intercounty player play with their county from January to July and with their club from July until at least October. Ten months on the road is a long slog for amateur athletes, and it should be of no surprise that the league that begins this annual odyssey can take on an experimental and sometimes pedestrian guise, but the club championship does not enter the heads of media types because it will, for the most part, not happen on their TV screens. It is the same logic that governs their opposition to the new dates for All-Ireland finals; they do not understand that the average GAA member is delighted to return to the grassroots where the community of sport is most acutely felt while the weather is still good. The All-Ireland final is the All-Ireland final, and, as Covid almost proved, it would be watched if it were on Christmas Day.

Soccer in Ireland has of course been victim to the spectacle for much too long; John Delaney famously spoke of how the national men’s team was the chimney of the house, reasoning that a house needed strong foundations in order for the chimney to stand. Instead, Delaney pissed away money on vanity projects, leaving Ireland’s grassroots and the League of Ireland, the vast, vast majority of soccer played in Ireland, to wither on the vine. The recent decision to hitch the FAI’s wagon to British bid to host the 2028 Euros is just the latest in a long list of examples of spectacle over substance. As the participation figures show, Ireland is not a country where growing the game - often cited as a reason for hosting tournaments - is a necessity and it will most likely not host enough games to make it a worthwhile endeavour. The FAI would be better served reinvigorating a grassroots that has been left to rot for so long that that the national team chimney has fallen from the sky and shattered on the ground.

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness: But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.”

So wrote Guy Debord in the now hack-to-quote Society of the Spectacle; nothing could better some up the role of the media in the creation of the illusion that rugby is anything other than a minority pastime in Ireland. We are regaled with the words of “Ireland’s Call”, bombarded with ads that tell us about the #TeamOfUs, and told in articles that rugby is now our national game. The media, as managers of the spectacle, knows what it is doing and it revels in its role of using this official language of separation. It seeks to separate us from the very notion of culture and how culture functions in the real world; it is obvious to anyone with even a modicum of awareness that Ireland’s games are hurling/camogie, Gaelic football and soccer, but the media have rendered rugby as the focal point of all sporting vision in an attempt to tell us that it is they who decide what culture is, not the millions who willingly give their free time to pursuits like the GAA and grassroots soccer and perhaps unconsciously actually define Irish culture. The rugby team is presented as the team who best represent Ireland because they are the team who best represent the elitist idea of culture as pushed by the media: developed and defined by the scions of Clongowes, the Christians in Cork, and Belfast Royal Academy and consumed by the rest of us, passive in our role. What’s worse is that this approach is working: in a recent Off the Ball segment, a vox pop featured a young man stating that hurling was the most popular game in Kilkenny, with rugby second and soccer third. There is one rugby club in Kilkenny; there are 32 soccer clubs.

Even within hurling we see the media attempt to define the game by the tiny minority of games played that fall into the sphere of their spectacle. We are told that the sliotar is too light these days, a factual error because it is no lighter than the sliotars of the early 2000s - the difference is in the height of the ridges - but also a completely misleading idea based in the ridiculous abilities of a handful of hurlers. The idea of the sliotar being too light comes from the fact that long-range points have become more common in intercounty games in the Liam McCarthy Cup. Because special hurlers such as Wexford’s Paudie Foley, Limerick’s Diarmuid Byrnes and Cork’s Patrick Horgan can put the ball over the bar from 120 yards, we are told that the sliotar used in club games up and down the country from minor grade upwards will have to be made heavier. Intercounty hurlers have never been stronger physically, their hurls have never been better; it is inevitable that some, although again they are a minority even within the intercounty game, should be able to pull of these incredible feat. And the feat is incredible, yet we are told by the media to meet it with disdain because it tampers with their imagined idea of a game of hurling.

Walk to your local pitch on any given gameday and see if there is a player there capable of scoring the points players like Byrnes and Foley score; there will more than likely be someone capable of hitting the ball 100+ yards, but the ability to keep it accurate over that distance is the mark of a truly elite player. Again, these are real elites, we are talking about the best fifteen hurlers from the best ten counties in Ireland, because the media refuses to acknowledge the lower rungs of the intercounty hurling ladder, never mind the club game, with any real seriousness. Analysis of this type also sells the game short and robs the viewer of any understanding of the tactical mores of the game, which are so often hard to parse from the limited framing of a television screen. Half backs have more time than ever to stand and strike the ball due to a tactical trend of half forwards withdrawing into the midfield and further in order to clog the middle third of the pitch. This is a modern tactic that has its roots in Brian Cody’s best Kilkenny teams, but where the modern iteration falls down is that Kilkenny players like Eoin Larkin certainly clogged the middle, but they also re-entered the half forward line in order to pressure half backs receiving the ball, and corner forwards would often be on hand to help. This is no longer the case, and with half forwards camping in midfield, half backs are free to stand and strike gargantuan shots from miles out. Note that none of these scores which are “ruining the game” are ever scored while the striker is on the run.

We see this approach mimicked in other spheres of culture too, with no better recent example than that of Róisín Ingle in the Irish Times telling prospective Ukrainian refugees in Ireland that our food is defined by crisp sandwiches and copious amounts of tea, and our language by the myriad of uses we draw from the word “grand”. Nothing could better sum up the attitude of the media towards the actual culture of Ireland that this supposed letter to the refugees exalts something so trivial as the multiple uses for grand in the English spoken in Ireland and then mutilates its sign off by attempting to use the Irish language. “Céad míle fáilte. Lá Fhéile Pádraig.” it reads, which translates to one hundred thousand welcomes, St Patrick’s Day. Everywhere we look this infantile understanding of Ireland has spread: men with bags on their heads extol the virtues of Hiberno-English and Hiberno body language but never mention the native language, bands whose management companies moonlight in gentrifying Dublin beyond recognition tell us that Irish music was worthless before Girl Band, and social media account after social media account seeks to define Irishness by the quality or lack thereof of pints of Guinness and chicken fillet rolls.

Counter-revolution won in Ireland, and being left with reactionaries in the south and the fascism of the orange state in the north means we can never actually “mature as a nation”, as the columnists love to put it, and embrace all that it is that makes Ireland Ireland. Instead of our traditional music, we are told that “diddly-aye stuff” is cringe and U2 and the Cranberries are Irish music; stripped of our indigenous language, we are left to ponder the multiple terms we have for our mothers; unable to fully embrace the wonder of our national game of hurling due to its lack of international presence - which is what validates Ireland in the eyes of these people - we are left with rugby; and unable to cultivate our own thriving food culture by the robbery of the agriculture industry barons and the British Empire before them, we are left to argue northern Tayto versus Free Stayto.

Of course, culture follows the shape of politics within a given place and it is thus that we suffer these cultural deficiencies. The media and associated managers of the spectacle seek to create a cultural world devoid of democracy because that is the larger world we already inhabit. In the south, if you and your fellow citizens decide to reject a European treaty, you will be made to vote again; in the north, if 99 per cent of people vote for one party, that party will still be forced to power share with the next biggest party of the other political tradition. An Ireland whose sport is defined by a rugby team none of us have any role in creating would be the perfect counterpart to two states where your vote doesn’t really count. The goal of the spectacle is to make you feel involved via your consumption, your casting of a vote, but at the end of the day it is clear that what you think, what you see, what you do does not actually matter because you will have no say in what Ireland is.

The media is committed to its portrayal of sport, and all other culture, as spectacle because the ideology it propagates holds that the average people of the GAA and soccer clubs up and down the country cannot shape the destiny of anything. Just as a select elite groomed from childhood decides how life is shaped in our politics and how we perceive that through our media, so too must a select elite define how we understand culture and its role in our lives. We see it everywhere, most recently in polling that tells us the majority of Irish people favour neutrality and staying out of NATO while our media class tells us that the Irish people are considering their status of neutrality, that some are ashamed by it.

What this has in common with rugby, Tayto and Guinness is that the only thing an average person can do with any of these things is consume. We are barred from the elite schools that produce rugby, barred from the control of industry that would give the Irish people a meaningful hand in their own produce, and barred from the halls of power wherein the material conditions of Irish life are shaped. It is here that we can situate our fetishisation of the pub too; given the now-meaningless label of community hub, it is in reality our Mecca of consumption, where the match is on the TV, the crisps are behind the bar and the pints are in the kegs. You can even talk about politics there if you like, not that it will change anything.

None of this is to say that rugby is inherently a bad game, that Tayto and Guinness aren’t nice and that the pub isn’t good fun. I don’t like rugby as a game, I find it boring, but it’s fine if you don’t; I don’t like Tayto either, I prefer McCoy’s or Hunky Dorys; Guinness is my second go-to pint if Smithwick’s isn’t on tap; I love going to the pub, cliché as it is. We all consume, there’s no way out of that as things stand, if you turn off your TV and read a book, you’re just consuming different media. We can’t all be out and about and involved in the real cultivation of culture 24/7, but this is to say that that being out and about, that real cultivation of culture is closer to the “real” Ireland than any game of Six Nations rugby will ever be. The figures bear out that people watch rugby at the weekend and then do not involve themselves in it during the week. Maybe it’s harsh to say nobody cares about rugby but it would appear that the majority who do seemingly care about it, care about it in the same sense that I care about Succession. We are essentially fed slop from the elites and forced to make aesthetic choices as to which slop we consume; this is basically inescapable, but in the sports played on the ground, in our native language spoken by those who refuse to let it die, in our music we play the length and breadth of the country, we can see the culture that we cultivate day-to-day in a way that defines Ireland to an extent those in Montrose could only dream of. Take your slop, God knows I take mine, and by all means enjoy it as a form of respite, but don’t ever mistake your consumption as a worthwhile substitute for endeavour and participation. It needn’t be hurling, or the language, or trad music. It can be anything you want, but in ainm Dé, let it be something.