The unthinking association
The imposition of the sin bin in hurling, the debate about splitting Dublin: these are symptoms of a GAA that is out of ideas and unable to imagine meaningful change
In a recent episode of Second Captains exploring the history of the GAA’s Vigilance Committees, the semi-clandestine groups dedicated to the policing of adherence to Rule 27, a clip of former GAA President Pat Fanning’s was played. Fanning was speaking after a motion to repeal Rule 27, the ban on association members playing or attending foreign sports, had been carried at the 1971 annual congress.
The clip, where Fanning voiced his opposition after the fact, was, literally, a blast from the past. This is a past that I, born 23 years after the speech, never experienced, a past where people conceived of and publicly spoke of the GAA as a political organisation. Fanning said that the ban on foreign games had “reflected and epitomised the very spirit of our association”. “The rule deleted, and what then?” he asked. “Do we then reject the past and with deletion proclaim ourselves a mere sports organisation? Do we forsake the tradition that nurtured, gave purpose to, and made of this Gaelic Athletic Association a great weapon in the cause of Ireland and Ireland’s people?”
Whatever your opinion on the GAA’s ban on foreign games – largely unworkable due to the cultural penetration of British imperialism that had necessitated the founding of the GAA in the first place – to hear Fanning speak as he did was to rediscover a time available only to people my age through archival footage, audio and newspaper clippings. In our time the GAA has presented itself as the mere sports organisation Fanning had forewarned against; during the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment of Bunreacht na hÉireann, as GAA figures began to campaign on both sides, the association issued a reminder that they have “strict rules against political involvement”. Fanning warned of a loss of Irish nationhood; it was his native Waterford that cited partitionist grounds (and used the term “Northern Ireland” in official GAA correspondence, something I had never seen before) to refuse to play a game in Antrim during the Covid-19 pandemic. When Antrim acquiesced and agreed to hold the game in Dundalk, you wondered how many nails a coffin could need. Antrim cited sporting grounds, the will to respect the “integrity of the league” and win in “a fair and manly manner on the field of play”. In today’s GAA, any notion of being more than a mere sporting organisation is gone; you play, and you play to win.
Decrying the atomisation of society in 1945, Theodor Adorno wrote that “work while you work, play while you play” had become a “basic rule of repressive self-discipline”. “No fulfilment may be attached to work, which would otherwise lose its functional modesty in the totality of purposes,” he wrote, “no spark of reflection is allowed to fall into leisure time, since it might otherwise leap across to the workaday world and set it on fire.” The world Adorno saw demanded that work be unenjoyable and culture be unthinking, by 1971 Pat Fanning was mounting a last stand against this becoming the operational reality of the GAA. In 2021, it is easy to look at recent decisions such as the imposition of the sin bin in hurling to see that Fanning’s war has been lost; our association has become a mere sports organisation, a constitution that requires it to be unthinking.
Cynical fouling has become an issue in hurling, of that there is little doubt, but the imposition of a sin bin at this year’s annual congress was nothing more than the confused offering of an association with no ideas left, a moral panic designed to distract from the overall organisational rot. In its most basic, unthinking nature, sport is concerned only with results. When the GAA offers its players nothing but the prospect of on-field victory, said players will do whatever they can to achieve those results. In hurling, where goals are killers in terms of momentum and on the scoreboard, cynical fouls will inevitably be used to stop goals going in. Pundits and analysts often criticise the use of the cynical foul – who could ever forget Joe Brolly on Seán Cavanagh – as the worst symptom of the GAA’s win-at-all-costs attitude. What they fail to account for is where this attitude has come from; they act as if this generation of players has simply licked it off the bushes, ignoring the fact this generation was raised and coached by the generation that followed the repeal of Rule 27, when the GAA abandoned all pretence of being more than a sporting organisation and began to offer its players nothing but the opportunity to win games of hurling and football.
Without an ability to think big, to conceive of a great spiritual shift within the organisation, we are left with
technocratic fixes for the symptoms of our deep cultural rot. Of course, this is not just exclusive to the GAA: look at the Irish Government’s reaction to Covid-19, where the options offered seemed to be lock down forever and opening up to a guarantee of the disease spreading. Nowhere is the possibility of a well-resourced health sector and welfare net seriously considered. In hurling, we are given a similar choice of mind- and soul-crushing alternatives, to go to the sin bin or to foul each other ad nauseum. When these big issues of the day are not to the fore for one reason or another, pundits are left to scramble for topics of conversation that are so asinine that they are downright bizarre: are you a fan of the yellow sliotar? Did you see Simon Harris’s Instagram Live?
Again, a fear of thinking big cripples us when we talk of the great footballing issue of the day: the Dublin county team. Ireland’s reliance on foreign direct investment and that FDI’s concentration in the capital has left the Dubs with cash to burn in sponsorships, not to mention the centralised funding they receive due to the large population that comes, and only grows, with such a concentration of resources. Such is their largesse, Dublin barely have to bother fundraising, previously a cornerstone of GAA funding whereby larger sections of the community would get involved.
The question constantly debated is whether or not to split the county. Whether or not the GAA, an association founded as part of the Gaelic Revival, should have ever abounded by the English-imposed county system is a debate for another day, but to abandon it not out of some neo-Gaelicism but simply because one county has become too good seems like the unthinking cowardice that always demands you plum for the easiest option. Dublin is simply too big, and should be split up, the thinking goes.
Mark Fisher wrote extensively about his theory of capitalist realism, the idea that capitalism had become so hegemonic since the fall of the Soviet Union that it was now impossible to imagine the world without it. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, Fisher famously wrote; on Twitter I joked that it is easier to imagine the end of the Dublin football team than the end of the GAA’s current funding model.
The splitting of a county seems a more reasonable request to some than a reinvigoration of our scavenger hunt model of funding that encourages counties to take all they can get wherever they can get it, be that from sponsors, wealthy donors or fundraisers. Ireland’s current economic model means that the GAA’s county funding model will always favour Dublin. Our inability to see past the length of ourselves now means that a distributive network, where sponsorship is centrally pooled and allocated on the basis of need, seems like a pipe dream.
Nowhere has the GAA’s obsession with nothing but victory been more evident in recent years than in the debate over the club and county seasons. Club players were left in the doldrums year after year, constantly waiting for the elite – who only become the elite through winning at club level before being called into the county teams – to finish their months-long season in order to get the club season, the so-called lifeblood of the game, on track in the rapidly darkening September and October evenings.
The splitting of the season into two halves, one for club and one for county, as was ratified at the annual congress, is one of the few causes for hope the GAA has offered its members in years. A truly revolutionary movement in how our seasons, and thus our lives, are constituted, the split season can hopefully be the beginning of a radical reckoning with how it is we have conceived of our games for the last few decades.
Yet some journalists and commentators are unhappy. The All-Ireland Finals, which they talk about only in terms of being “products”, could be under threat if they move from their traditional dates. This idea only holds water if we think of All-Irelands as events to be sold and consumed rather than as the competitive pinnacle of the sports we play. Hurling is hurling, as Brian Cody loves to say, and the idea that fans would somehow be less willing to engage with a July All-Ireland Final than a September one is dependent on the idea that fans are there for something other than hurling. Maybe they enjoy Drumcondra on a September afternoon, who knows. Maybe, just maybe, they show up to watch hurling and will do so regardless of the date. What this also ignores is that there still will be hurling to watch in September, it just won’t be the revenue-spinning kind. Instead club games will happen around the country and some will be aired for free on RTÉ. There is, in this prospect, not an outright equality of opportunity, but a hope that the scales could possibly begin to be tipped.
Long before Adorno, long before Hayes’ Hotel, Friedrich Schiller wrote of man’s quest to achieve aesthetic freedom, where physical existence joins with rationale to give man “complete intuition of his humanity”. Aesthetic freedom meant a thinking engagement with culture, which “meant for Schiller everything that man makes or produces, be it art works, scientific or ideological theories, or social, economic, and political institution”. Marx would later ground this theory in materialism, writing in 1844 that it was our lack of control over our labour that alienated us from the possibility of aesthetic freedom. The world that Adorno wrote about, that Pat Fanning was born into, was a world whose political institutions had doubled down on that alienation from labour and ensured that aesthetic freedom could never be broached by a population needed to be unthinking and supine. Whether or not they thought of it in these terms, the GAA’s founding and the Gaelic Revival and the revolutionary period that followed aimed for what Schiller and Marx had described, what Fanning sought to hold on to: an Irish aesthetic and political freedom.
Much of what Pat Fanning feared has come to pass: not only are players permitted to play foreign games, but they are now permitted to play them inside GAA grounds; members of the British Army and PSNI are now permitted to be members of the association; and we sell our games to the highest bidder to be put behind a paywall and kept away from those in our society who can’t pay to watch. Even the people who originally opposed the Sky deal for its anti-universalist aspects, like Joe Brolly, have meekly admitted defeat and become pundits for the pay-per-view and subscription services.
People can scoff at Fanning’s stated wish for the association to provide “Irish sport for Irish boys” but in that wish was a hope of self-sufficiency, the idea that we could create something away from the Premier Leagues and the NFLs of this world, something self-contained that didn’t need to rely on outside approval via TV ratings. The Fintan O’Toole types of Ireland would have you believe this to be small island solipsism, but it isn’t, it’s a wish to remove ourselves from the cultural hegemony that our forced membership of the Anglosphere has cursed us with and create something different, something based in both the fulfilment and the reflection that Adorno spoke of, something not sponsored by Etihad Airways.
That nobody seems to be making this argument is an indictment of the malaise that has come over us. The prevailing opinion is that we win at all costs because that is simple human nature, just as it is argued that greed is human nature in the world at large. Neither of these things are true, we take what we can get, both in sport and in real life, because it is all that we are offered. Left starving, we grab the only chocolate bar on the counter.
We’re not alone; this is not a GAA-specific malaise. The films of Adam Curtis largely track how the western world ran out of big ideas following the neoliberal turn that began in New York and was delivered to Ireland via its membership of the European Union. This neoliberal turn began in the 70s, in the decade after Fanning saw Rule 27 repealed, and has now successfully crippled any idea of broad change. Instead, we are left with boring, small-time fixes for organisational issues that have caused the spiritual issues that leave us rudderless. Have a sin bin, have a Just Transition Fund, have a black card, have a shared-equity housing scheme.
“Psychological emptiness is itself only the result of the wrong kind of social absorption,” Adorno wrote. “The boredom that people are running away from merely mirrors the process of running away, that started long before. For this reason alone the monstrous machinery of amusement keeps alive and constantly grows bigger without a single person being amused by it.”
Current Covid-related losses notwithstanding, the last decades have seen the GAA grow bigger and bigger in terms of revenue while delivering nothing to the average player but a risible playing calendar. The split season gives us our first opportunity in decades to reorient our relationships with the games we love and possibly deliver a more equitable deal for the people on the ground, the ones who know that no match is a product.
The GAA was founded as part of the wider cultural heave of the Gaelic Revival, with the idea that we didn’t need to look elsewhere for our leisure, our sport or our expression. These inherently political ideas were stripped away one-by-one as the counter-revolution of the Irish Free State abandoned all hope of a self-sufficient, united Ireland and gave way to a place whose economy is shaped by Silicon Valley and whose state and security is dictated still by Britain. The GAA, much like Ireland, is lost as is, left to make stupid little changes to give the appearance that something is happening; this should have been obvious during the great two-point sideline cut trial of 2005.
Buried in plain sight in the folklore and history of the GAA are its founding principles. Once rediscovered and recentralised, the cynical fouling and the size of Dublin would be of no issue, left to be side notes because the results would become one of the least interesting aspects of the association. There are GAA clubs in nearly every parish in Ireland and the association estimated it had over 500,000 members in 2014, a number that will have only grown since then. A realignment towards the organisation’s original goals of cultural and political freedom and self-sufficiency would make it one of the most powerful blocs of people in Ireland overnight. The only way for this to happen is for the GAA to wake from Pat Fanning’s nightmare, to cease being a mere sports organisation.