OUR LESSER-SPOTTED muse this week is Leo Varadkar, who last week decided to press his thumb on the most active fault line in Irish life by decreeing that urban Ireland needed to do some straight-talking to rural Ireland.
Now unshackled from day-to-day politics, Varadkar went on the Path to Power podcast in the aftermath of the fuel protests to say that “people in rural Ireland are very quick to tell people in urban Ireland that ‘we’re the real workers, we’re the ones paying all the bills, we’re the ones feeding the country.’
“I think we maybe need to be a little bit more blunt in urban Ireland and say actually, that’s not the case. We’re the ones paying all the bills and you’re the ones in receipt of a lot of subsidies and a lot of tax benefits that other people don’t get.”
These comments would have been the stuff of political suicide were Varadkar still in office, but he evidently feels sufficiently unshackled now to risk being seen as being above up in Dublin and atop a high horse.
His old colleague Simon Harris dismissed Varadkar’s comments by saying he did not believe in dividing people, but it is the condition of any active politician within a walk of any Dart station that they must never speak openly about Ireland’s rural/urban divide, lest they be accused of widening it.
But the divide is spoken about in other realms and Varadkar’s comments set us thinking this week: to what extent does Irish sport articulate this rural/urban divide?
We should preface this by stating that the Irish sports fan is generally more ecumenical than we often give them credit for. There are men in Longford for instance who will cheer the Irish football team and the Leinster rugby team, and who might have even gone to a hurling game once upon a time.
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But even the reductive views of our sports express a certain truth of the national divide between rural and urban.
The League of Ireland has never fully shed its garrison origins and remains a largely urban pursuit, over-centralised in Dublin, while the GAA has both penetrated Ireland’s major cities and not shied away from putting itself forward as being the sporting representative of rural Ireland.
In this the GAA have something in common with the chameleon qualities of Eamon de Valera, the Blackrock College-educated metropolitan figure who spun an image of the true Ireland being that of cozy homesteads and rural simplicity.
It was De Valera and his fellow revolutionaries’ early failure to evolve Ireland away from the British model of an island ruled by a central administration perched by the sea that has begotten this enduring divide, and through sport we can see some of the anxieties and annoyances playing out.
The movement to split Dublin GAA, for instance, would never have sprung up without its attendant anxiety at the apparently inexorable stockpiling of money and opportunity in the capital, and that something drastic must be done to rebalance things. If we were splitting counties because they were winning too many provincial and All-Ireland titles in Gaelic football, then Kerry would be the obvious place to start. Plus, they have already got ahead of the game by splitting up their club championship.
The GAA have made explicit our rural/urban divide, last year publishing their demographics report and sounding the alarm about rural depopulation, with 78% of GAA clubs based in rural areas where the population is declining. It also found that one in three people on the island are living in Dublin or within an hour of a Dublin satellite town, an area covered by only 18% of GAA’s clubs.
What if we follow the money?
Varadkar’s comment about rural subsidies rings true with respect to the Horse and Greyhound Fund, which has funnelled more €1.9 billion to the two sports since 2001 under the principle that it creates and sustains rural employment.
Those two unique sports aside, the State’s main funding vehicle of sports infrastructure projects across the country is the sports capital grant programme, which has been reasonably well spread in a geographic sense.
The Department of Sport have published a county-by-county breakdown of the funds allocated between 2015 and 2023, and while counties Dublin, Cork, and Galway have received the greatest individual amounts in absolute terms, if you adjust the monies distributed per capita then Dublin ranks last among the 26 counties, with Galway 18th and Cork 22nd. The county that has done best per capita is Westmeath, followed by Leitrim, Sligo, Kerry, and Carlow. The highest-ranking county with city status is Waterford in 11th.
(Longford is the one county faring badly in every sense: in spite of having the second-smallest population per the 2022 census, it comes in at 23rd on the per-capita breakdown of sports capital funding. Longford are also one of only two counties – the other being Westmeath – yet to receive any funding from the State’s separate large scale infrastructure fund.)
That is not to say there isn’t a divide when we look at sports funding, but merely that inequalities are not expressed along geographic lines.
Sports with a large middle-class membership base have historically fared best when it comes to State funding, something the government tried to address by factoring in the socio-economic Pobal Index into their allocations, so as to allow for uplift to the areas and sports needing it most.
But in spite of this, the whole process has a significant inequality baked in. TD Gary Gannon pointed out last month that golf clubs submit almost three times as many grant requests, while an analysis by The Journal found that, in 2023, golf clubs received seven times the funding of boxing clubs. Of course this needs a bit of caveating – it costs a lot more to maintain a golf course than a boxing club – but the disparity nonetheless draws attention to the truest divide in Irish society.
Sports clubs who own their land or have had a lease of at least 15 years are eligible to apply for a maximum capital grant of €200,000, whereas those who have been renting for less than 15 years can apply for no more than €70,000, provided the landlord signs off on it.
And so we see that the true divide is not necessarily between rural and urban, but between those who own their property and those who do not. And so we see in sport a system perpetuating the central inequality in Irish life: in 2023, 97% of Ireland’s total wealth was owned by homeowners, with just 3% owned by renters.
And so Irish sport is analogous to Irish society in our favour for feeling sharply a divide between rural and urban while not acknowledging that our true national divide is class.
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Sports shows how the true divide in Irish society is not urban v rural
OUR LESSER-SPOTTED muse this week is Leo Varadkar, who last week decided to press his thumb on the most active fault line in Irish life by decreeing that urban Ireland needed to do some straight-talking to rural Ireland.
Now unshackled from day-to-day politics, Varadkar went on the Path to Power podcast in the aftermath of the fuel protests to say that “people in rural Ireland are very quick to tell people in urban Ireland that ‘we’re the real workers, we’re the ones paying all the bills, we’re the ones feeding the country.’
“I think we maybe need to be a little bit more blunt in urban Ireland and say actually, that’s not the case. We’re the ones paying all the bills and you’re the ones in receipt of a lot of subsidies and a lot of tax benefits that other people don’t get.”
These comments would have been the stuff of political suicide were Varadkar still in office, but he evidently feels sufficiently unshackled now to risk being seen as being above up in Dublin and atop a high horse.
His old colleague Simon Harris dismissed Varadkar’s comments by saying he did not believe in dividing people, but it is the condition of any active politician within a walk of any Dart station that they must never speak openly about Ireland’s rural/urban divide, lest they be accused of widening it.
But the divide is spoken about in other realms and Varadkar’s comments set us thinking this week: to what extent does Irish sport articulate this rural/urban divide?
We should preface this by stating that the Irish sports fan is generally more ecumenical than we often give them credit for. There are men in Longford for instance who will cheer the Irish football team and the Leinster rugby team, and who might have even gone to a hurling game once upon a time.
But even the reductive views of our sports express a certain truth of the national divide between rural and urban.
The League of Ireland has never fully shed its garrison origins and remains a largely urban pursuit, over-centralised in Dublin, while the GAA has both penetrated Ireland’s major cities and not shied away from putting itself forward as being the sporting representative of rural Ireland.
In this the GAA have something in common with the chameleon qualities of Eamon de Valera, the Blackrock College-educated metropolitan figure who spun an image of the true Ireland being that of cozy homesteads and rural simplicity.
It was De Valera and his fellow revolutionaries’ early failure to evolve Ireland away from the British model of an island ruled by a central administration perched by the sea that has begotten this enduring divide, and through sport we can see some of the anxieties and annoyances playing out.
The movement to split Dublin GAA, for instance, would never have sprung up without its attendant anxiety at the apparently inexorable stockpiling of money and opportunity in the capital, and that something drastic must be done to rebalance things. If we were splitting counties because they were winning too many provincial and All-Ireland titles in Gaelic football, then Kerry would be the obvious place to start. Plus, they have already got ahead of the game by splitting up their club championship.
The GAA have made explicit our rural/urban divide, last year publishing their demographics report and sounding the alarm about rural depopulation, with 78% of GAA clubs based in rural areas where the population is declining. It also found that one in three people on the island are living in Dublin or within an hour of a Dublin satellite town, an area covered by only 18% of GAA’s clubs.
What if we follow the money?
Varadkar’s comment about rural subsidies rings true with respect to the Horse and Greyhound Fund, which has funnelled more €1.9 billion to the two sports since 2001 under the principle that it creates and sustains rural employment.
Those two unique sports aside, the State’s main funding vehicle of sports infrastructure projects across the country is the sports capital grant programme, which has been reasonably well spread in a geographic sense.
The Department of Sport have published a county-by-county breakdown of the funds allocated between 2015 and 2023, and while counties Dublin, Cork, and Galway have received the greatest individual amounts in absolute terms, if you adjust the monies distributed per capita then Dublin ranks last among the 26 counties, with Galway 18th and Cork 22nd. The county that has done best per capita is Westmeath, followed by Leitrim, Sligo, Kerry, and Carlow. The highest-ranking county with city status is Waterford in 11th.
(Longford is the one county faring badly in every sense: in spite of having the second-smallest population per the 2022 census, it comes in at 23rd on the per-capita breakdown of sports capital funding. Longford are also one of only two counties – the other being Westmeath – yet to receive any funding from the State’s separate large scale infrastructure fund.)
That is not to say there isn’t a divide when we look at sports funding, but merely that inequalities are not expressed along geographic lines.
Sports with a large middle-class membership base have historically fared best when it comes to State funding, something the government tried to address by factoring in the socio-economic Pobal Index into their allocations, so as to allow for uplift to the areas and sports needing it most.
But in spite of this, the whole process has a significant inequality baked in. TD Gary Gannon pointed out last month that golf clubs submit almost three times as many grant requests, while an analysis by The Journal found that, in 2023, golf clubs received seven times the funding of boxing clubs. Of course this needs a bit of caveating – it costs a lot more to maintain a golf course than a boxing club – but the disparity nonetheless draws attention to the truest divide in Irish society.
Sports clubs who own their land or have had a lease of at least 15 years are eligible to apply for a maximum capital grant of €200,000, whereas those who have been renting for less than 15 years can apply for no more than €70,000, provided the landlord signs off on it.
And so we see that the true divide is not necessarily between rural and urban, but between those who own their property and those who do not. And so we see in sport a system perpetuating the central inequality in Irish life: in 2023, 97% of Ireland’s total wealth was owned by homeowners, with just 3% owned by renters.
And so Irish sport is analogous to Irish society in our favour for feeling sharply a divide between rural and urban while not acknowledging that our true national divide is class.
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