BishopAccountability.org
	The Myth of Our Glorious Past Irish Independent May 24, 2009 http://www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-football/the-myth-of-our-glorious-past-1749348.html This is one of the most important weeks in the history of the state. Because, after the publication of the Ryan Commission report, we can no longer pretend that we don't know what kind of country we come from and what kind of people we are. Nobody can ever again write about Ireland in the years covered by the report without taking into account the fact that, hidden in the background, was a huge system for the incarceration of children, ruled by terror and characterised by widespread unpunished incidences of sexual abuse, physical assault and mental torture. In the same way, no-one can ever again write about Irish sport in those decades without bearing in mind this grim backdrop. After all, only a fool would write a history of German sport in the 1930s, of Russian sport in the '50s, of sport in the Southern states of the US during the Jim Crow years, which did not make reference to the corrupted nature of the milieu from which both players and spectators issued. We will have to face up to the brutal reality that the country which celebrated the first Irish rugby Grand Slam, Ronnie Delany's Olympic gold medal and the deeds of Ring, Mackey, O'Connell and Purcell was one in which church and state conspired to inflict unimaginable suffering on the most helpless members of society, one in which no-one shouted stop or even dreamed of doing so. When I've written about those years in the past I've used the trope of innocence to define them. You know the crack, "those were more innocent days", "it was a more innocent time then." What sheer stupidity on my part. Whatever else a society built on a system of social control centred around the abuse of children on an industrial scale was, it wasn't innocent. When I've written about the big GAA games of the era, Munster hurling finals for example, I've treated them as wonderful examples of communal togetherness, perfect expressions of a socially cohesive and organic community to which everyone belonged. It turns out that was all bullshit too. Because there was a large class of people who didn't belong at all, who were excluded from society and seen, in effect, as non-people. They weren't at those games because they were locked up from a young age. The rags to riches story is a staple one in sport the world over. Boxers, athletes, footballers, come from the poorest of backgrounds and make it big. That didn't happen in Ireland in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. It couldn't. The kids at the very bottom of the heap didn't get a chance to show what they could do on the pitch or the track because they were prisoners. If you were in rags, you stayed in rags. The keepers of the dungeons ensured that their charges hardly had enough food to stay awake, never mind run, jump or kick a football. These days the knowledge that major GAA games used to start with the ball being thrown in by a bishop seems amusing. You see the old footage of the bish fleeing the field, skirts gathered round him, flunkeys at his side as the match gets underway and it's all a bit Father Ted. Yet the Ryan Commission report lends that image an undeniably sinister hue. Because what kind of country is it that can't even start a football game without the assistance of the church? The kind of country where priests, nuns and brothers can do what they like when they like to whom they like. We tut-tut about the religiosity of the Americans but they never felt the need to have Jimmy Swaggart kicking the ball off in the Superbowl. There is a famous photo of Christy Ring kneeling to kiss the ring, the one on the finger, of some bishop or other, before a big game. Again, what kind of country? Meanwhile on the field the Artane Boys Band played. The church interfered with sport in the same bullying way it interfered with everything else. In 1934 John Charles McQuaid, later to become Archbishop of Dublin and then president of Blackrock College, learned that the National Athletic and Cycling Association (NACA) was allowing women to compete in track and field events at the same meetings as men. McQuaid declared that this was "un-Catholic and un-Irish," and said that "no boy from my college will take part in any athletic meeting controlled by your organisation at which women will compete, no matter what attire they may adopt." McQuaid didn't stop there. He started a campaign against the NACA and almost every Catholic college in the country threatened to join the boycott. Mixed athletics, McQuaid pointed out, was "a social abuse outraging our rightful Irish tradition." What's more, he revealed, it was a moral abuse "formally reprobated by the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius XI," who had said "the Christian modesty of girls must be, in a special way safeguarded, for it is supremely unbecoming that they should flaunt themselves and display themselves before the eyes of all." (McQuaid had an obsession with sex which would seem excessive in a 16-year-old boy with an internet porn habit.) The poor old NACA had no chance. When, and fair play to him for doing so, a Mr McManus of the Dublin board suggested at a meeting of the association that "it would be unfair to drive women out of sports," he was shouted down. The NACA gave in. The president of St Jarlath's College Tuam, Fr Joseph Walsh, congratulated McQuaid: "You must have the satisfaction of feeling that you have led the way to victory in a really important fight." They were some crew those screwed up boys in black. But the politicians who gave them the nod weren't much better. The supposed decency of Jack Lynch is one of the great givens of Irish political discourse. Yet Lynch was Minister for Education from 1957 to 1959 and took over as Taoiseach in 1966, looking the other way all the time as abuse went on in the institutions. Perhaps Breandan o hEithir's summation of Lynch's character is as good an explanation as any for this. o hEithir gets invoked as a kind of patron saint of Irish sportswriting by people who, I suspect, haven't read very much of his work. They don't seem to realise, for example, his great dislike of what might be termed GAA kitsch, a genre to which I have myself made some gruesome contributions. That dislike is at the heart of what he wrote about Lynch in the great Begrudgers Guide to Irish Politics. "It is simply not true that Jack Lynch did not have a vision of Ireland, just as de Valera and Sean Lemass did. Lynch's Ireland revolved around the Munster final. The week would pass in honest but not too exhausting work and much speculation about the outcome. The weekend would be devoted to the Great Hosting. Drink would be consumed in manly moderation, before and after the Great Event, and songs would be sung in orderly but forthright fashion . . . On Monday mornings, honest work and reasonable discussion on what had passed and what there was still to play for would be resumed. "For there would be a Munster final every week in Jack Lynch's Ireland -- two or three at Christmas and Easter if things were going well: if there were no unseemly strikes, if all injuries had been inflicted accidentally and all disagreements settled on the field out of the referee's sight . . . "Alas, Poor Lynch! The weather and the times should really have kept in tune with his rosy, sweetly-scented vision of Ireland of the crushed grass, mature Paddy and, 'the wicked chuckle of hurleys,' in the Tipperary square: the Ireland when the safe period meant the teams and the crowd standing to attention and facing the flag for the National Anthem." Sentimentalising about sport, o hEithir knew, can help keep your mind off more unpleasant realities. But there's no excuse for indulging in that kind of sentimentality anymore. Instead of fantasising about a glorious past which never was, it might be more appropriate this weekend to spare a thought for all those star footballers, hurlers, rugby players, boxers and athletes who never were, those tormented kids from Artane and Letterfrack, Upton and Goldenbridge, Cappoquin, Glin, Ferryhouse and every other hell hole run by the church, funded by the state and tolerated by the general public. In the week that's in it, it's hard to think of anyone else. Personally, I think it would be a decent and appropriate gesture were a minute's silence to be observed before every sporting fixture played in the country over the next week by way of apology to the victims. It's the least we could do. Contact: thephotograph@hotmail.com
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.