ALL OF THIS uncomfortable carry-on from our west Clare Hotelier means we’re suddenly reading a lot about Ireland’s policy of neutrality, which has this column thinking about our animating national characteristic of ambiguity.
Yes, we are neutral, went a regular refrain in the days of the Emergency, but who are we neutral against?
Eamon de Valera announced neutrality and he was the State’s first great architect of ambiguity – though he would likely rail against this description for being too narrowly-defined.
It began in 1921 with his concept of External Association – whereby Ireland would be a associated with but not a member of the British Commonwealth – and ran through his eventual means of swallowing the hated Oath of Allegiance, which he signed while covering with papers, stressing he was merely signing it to be permitted access to the Dáil.
It now falls upon a new generation of Irish political leaders to operate in shades of grey. This whole opposition speaking rights row feels like a training exercise in that regard. (And if that’s the equivalent of pre-season, it’s going about as well as Ireland’s run-in to the 2007 Rugby World Cup.)
As you’d expect of any national characteristic, you’ll find it in the national sport.
Gaelic football is another realm of Irish life that has thrived for more than a century in ambiguity, but now it is suddenly assailed from all angles by lousy definition.
On one side is the march of a suite of new rules, and from another is the blinding, remorseless glare of Revenue. This pincer movement will eventually squeeze the sport into another shape entirely. Whether that shape is for better or worse remains to be seen, but it’s guaranteed to be different.
The sport’s new rules have deftly been recast as “enhancements”, but there are comparatively few rules to enhance in the first place. Contrast Gaelic football to the other major field sports and you’ll realise just how scantly-regulated the whole thing is.
Seriously, Gaelic football was the only liberal enterprise to earn the approval of the early Irish Catholic Church.
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In Gaelic football, you can pick up the ball or you can kick it along the ground; you can kick it or hand-pass it in any direction you like; and you can walk or run in any direction while you’re at it. As to how you win that ball back off the opponent, the sport never really got round to defining something as unimportant as a tackle. Referees came to treat an unfair tackle in Gaelic football as the US Supreme Court used to define pornography: they simply know it when they see it.
What few rules were written down were meanwhile sanded down into ambiguity, most obviously the four-steps rule, which should really be re-written as the ‘any-more-than-eight-steps-and-you’re-pushing-it’ rule.
This is the rule most often cited in the deathless opinion that, ‘Were you to ref the game strictly according to the rulebook, you couldn’t have a game at all.’
This ambivalence to a thin rule-book has not been a bad thing. It’s the very opposite to how the country has treated the Irish language, in which we are all first taught the strict rules and then told to get on with things. The results have been a coffined language and a vital, teeming sport played right across the country.The lesson: better to get on with the thing and learn the rules later.
But sadly these days of innocence are behind us, as the inter-county managers whose job it is to get results have effectively beaten the sport.
Without the defence of any rules to forbid them from doing so, a succession of managers realised that the best means of winning games would be to monopolise possession. If the opponent doesn’t have the ball, they can’t score.
This idea was at the heart of the revolution enacted by Pep Guardiola, but whereas that enhanced football’s spectacle, the same principle has made Gaelic football a generally putrid watch.
Gaelic football’s light-touch environment meant there was no blanket defence against the risk-and-skill-free recycling of possession. And given the only thing that is redistributed more quickly than money in GAA are ideas, this whole attitude soon soaked into the club game too.
This led to the stage where the game needed to be saved, and the GAA correctly determined the only way to save it was by bringing in some rules. For this they turned to the man in Irish life most hostile to any sort of ambiguity: Jim Gavin.
And true to his nature, Gavin has rained precision down upon the old game. Now there are painted arcs and strict zones and remorseless punishments. Listen back to his interview this week on Morning Ireland and you’ll hear him talk about a longitudinal survey, a reiterative process, and disincentivising infractions . . . this is the esoteric language which will prove your salvation.
Managers found their collective voice to decry the new rules last weekend, but they are not speaking as neutral actors here. The fewer the rules, the easier it is to get results.
But as Gaelic football’s Age of Ambiguity ends, the sport has a more serious concern than additional rules.
Limerick’s Tom Morrissey said the quiet part out loud in a recent op-ed for the Irish Times, when he asked whether inter-county players are “the last of the amateurs?”
“Look at Croke Park on All-Ireland final day: everyone in that stadium is being paid”, he wrote. “The administrators in the Hogan Stand, the management teams(!), the physios, the caterers serving drinks, the people selling programmes, the media, the photographers; they’re all professionals.”
He wrote this off the back of the GPA’s economic impact report, which, in a typical Irish flourish of ambiguity, the players’ body warned the GAA’s amateur status would be under threat if the players aren’t given more money.
The GAA’s amateur status, of course, is built entirely on ambiguity: it only endures with a collective agreement not to mention that there’s plenty of people being paid for their role in this thing.
This has been made possible by this or any other country’s greatest single edifice to ambiguity: the word ‘expenses.’
Acknowledging that is to admit the reality that the amateur status is an aspiration, but no longer a fact.
The signs are that this collective quiet is not going to last much longer.
With the players asking more money in State grants, and county boards chafing at spiralling costs, Jarlath Burns last year floated the possibility of putting inter-county managers on an agreed stipend. This is indicative of the common-sense, reality-tackling thinking that is defining and exalting his presidency.
Should it happen, it will also mark the end of another ambiguity, and this won’t just change the sport itself. It will change its place in Irish society.
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Gaelic football’s age of ambiguity is ending - it’s now facing a harsh reality
ALL OF THIS uncomfortable carry-on from our west Clare Hotelier means we’re suddenly reading a lot about Ireland’s policy of neutrality, which has this column thinking about our animating national characteristic of ambiguity.
Yes, we are neutral, went a regular refrain in the days of the Emergency, but who are we neutral against?
Eamon de Valera announced neutrality and he was the State’s first great architect of ambiguity – though he would likely rail against this description for being too narrowly-defined.
It began in 1921 with his concept of External Association – whereby Ireland would be a associated with but not a member of the British Commonwealth – and ran through his eventual means of swallowing the hated Oath of Allegiance, which he signed while covering with papers, stressing he was merely signing it to be permitted access to the Dáil.
It now falls upon a new generation of Irish political leaders to operate in shades of grey. This whole opposition speaking rights row feels like a training exercise in that regard. (And if that’s the equivalent of pre-season, it’s going about as well as Ireland’s run-in to the 2007 Rugby World Cup.)
As you’d expect of any national characteristic, you’ll find it in the national sport.
Gaelic football is another realm of Irish life that has thrived for more than a century in ambiguity, but now it is suddenly assailed from all angles by lousy definition.
On one side is the march of a suite of new rules, and from another is the blinding, remorseless glare of Revenue. This pincer movement will eventually squeeze the sport into another shape entirely. Whether that shape is for better or worse remains to be seen, but it’s guaranteed to be different.
The sport’s new rules have deftly been recast as “enhancements”, but there are comparatively few rules to enhance in the first place. Contrast Gaelic football to the other major field sports and you’ll realise just how scantly-regulated the whole thing is.
Seriously, Gaelic football was the only liberal enterprise to earn the approval of the early Irish Catholic Church.
In Gaelic football, you can pick up the ball or you can kick it along the ground; you can kick it or hand-pass it in any direction you like; and you can walk or run in any direction while you’re at it. As to how you win that ball back off the opponent, the sport never really got round to defining something as unimportant as a tackle. Referees came to treat an unfair tackle in Gaelic football as the US Supreme Court used to define pornography: they simply know it when they see it.
What few rules were written down were meanwhile sanded down into ambiguity, most obviously the four-steps rule, which should really be re-written as the ‘any-more-than-eight-steps-and-you’re-pushing-it’ rule.
This is the rule most often cited in the deathless opinion that, ‘Were you to ref the game strictly according to the rulebook, you couldn’t have a game at all.’
This ambivalence to a thin rule-book has not been a bad thing. It’s the very opposite to how the country has treated the Irish language, in which we are all first taught the strict rules and then told to get on with things. The results have been a coffined language and a vital, teeming sport played right across the country.The lesson: better to get on with the thing and learn the rules later.
But sadly these days of innocence are behind us, as the inter-county managers whose job it is to get results have effectively beaten the sport.
Without the defence of any rules to forbid them from doing so, a succession of managers realised that the best means of winning games would be to monopolise possession. If the opponent doesn’t have the ball, they can’t score.
This idea was at the heart of the revolution enacted by Pep Guardiola, but whereas that enhanced football’s spectacle, the same principle has made Gaelic football a generally putrid watch.
Gaelic football’s light-touch environment meant there was no blanket defence against the risk-and-skill-free recycling of possession. And given the only thing that is redistributed more quickly than money in GAA are ideas, this whole attitude soon soaked into the club game too.
This led to the stage where the game needed to be saved, and the GAA correctly determined the only way to save it was by bringing in some rules. For this they turned to the man in Irish life most hostile to any sort of ambiguity: Jim Gavin.
And true to his nature, Gavin has rained precision down upon the old game. Now there are painted arcs and strict zones and remorseless punishments. Listen back to his interview this week on Morning Ireland and you’ll hear him talk about a longitudinal survey, a reiterative process, and disincentivising infractions . . . this is the esoteric language which will prove your salvation.
Managers found their collective voice to decry the new rules last weekend, but they are not speaking as neutral actors here. The fewer the rules, the easier it is to get results.
But as Gaelic football’s Age of Ambiguity ends, the sport has a more serious concern than additional rules.
Limerick’s Tom Morrissey said the quiet part out loud in a recent op-ed for the Irish Times, when he asked whether inter-county players are “the last of the amateurs?”
“Look at Croke Park on All-Ireland final day: everyone in that stadium is being paid”, he wrote. “The administrators in the Hogan Stand, the management teams(!), the physios, the caterers serving drinks, the people selling programmes, the media, the photographers; they’re all professionals.”
He wrote this off the back of the GPA’s economic impact report, which, in a typical Irish flourish of ambiguity, the players’ body warned the GAA’s amateur status would be under threat if the players aren’t given more money.
The GAA’s amateur status, of course, is built entirely on ambiguity: it only endures with a collective agreement not to mention that there’s plenty of people being paid for their role in this thing.
This has been made possible by this or any other country’s greatest single edifice to ambiguity: the word ‘expenses.’
Acknowledging that is to admit the reality that the amateur status is an aspiration, but no longer a fact.
The signs are that this collective quiet is not going to last much longer.
With the players asking more money in State grants, and county boards chafing at spiralling costs, Jarlath Burns last year floated the possibility of putting inter-county managers on an agreed stipend. This is indicative of the common-sense, reality-tackling thinking that is defining and exalting his presidency.
Should it happen, it will also mark the end of another ambiguity, and this won’t just change the sport itself. It will change its place in Irish society.
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column GAA Gaelic Football