‘Try telling an overworked nurse the GAA’s return is a morale boost’
Crazy to proceed with the season in midst of this crisis
IAM not a man of violence but the next person who tells me that this week’s exemption to allow the Championship go ahead is a morale boost for the nation, I have an overwhelming desire to send them on a trip to the local hospital.
That is not a physical threat. I will pay for the taxi so they can make that bland observation to the cleaner, the nurse or the doctor, who is swathed in PPE as they meet head-on the consequence of Covid’s second wave.
‘Hi nurse, I can see you’re pretty busy there but I imagine there is a pep in your step now you know that Dublin and Laois is going ahead in the Leinster Championship tonight…’
It is violence by proxy. I am hoping the target of that banal observation will send the messenger on an unplanned visit to the A&E Department.
Seriously, I have had it. I love the GAA and have been obsessed with hurling since I was knee-high. And every time the Championship comes around, the child in me still thinks it is Christmas Eve.
But a time comes to all of us when we have to grow up and this is it.
No, the GAA returning will not boost my morale and if it is boosting yours, may I suggest that the mirror hanging on the wall is not there just to flatter you when you’re wearing your Sunday best.
You need to look through it and ask, what good will this really do? More importantly, what harm could it do?
For starters, I believe the players and their families are being exposed to an unacceptable level of risk.
I don’t put much faith in GPA polls but even so, almost half of the players intimated they were either opposed to playing or that their participation was conditional on improved protocols, and in particular the lack of a rigorous and regular testing programme.
If you really claim to love the GAA, how can you be comfortable that half of the players that are providing you with this morale boost are doing so while their well-being and that of their families is being compromised?
And the half that were in favour? Whatever about herd immunity, herd mentality has long been a characteristic in county panels where the mantra is t hat it is all about t he collective.
The irony is that this culture is cultivated by individuals in management who have got skin in the game.
I just don’t think the GAA, or indeed society in general, has yet realised just what we are dealing with here.
Mental health is being weaponised to suit selfish agendas. We want GAA games because it will boost the spirit of the nation and particularly the old and infirm, we want pubs opened because people are suffering from loneliness, we want young people to enjoy themselves because that is the entitlement of youth and we should not burden the poor dears with the responsibility of protecting the most vulnerable.
If you listened to those arguments, the last thing you would imagine is that we are in the grips of a deadly pandemic, but we are.
The GAA has taken much credit for how it performed during the first lockdown and, when it was over, for returning the games to the communities.
That great work was undermined at the latter stages of the club championships when inevitably the drink culture, which has always been there, won out.
I am not a drinker and I don’t preach about it, but let’s be honest, the prize for winning in the GAA is not the cup that is presented but the two-week drinking binge that follows, while the prize for losing is the one-week sorrow-drowning festival to numb the alleged pain.
This has always been the way, so why would you think it would be any different now.
What has that got to do with the GA A? Nothing and everything.
The GAA can hardly change that culture and, no more than the Government-imposed restrictions, the only way that we can get out of this is through personal responsibility.
But we know that in many instances, responsibility will not be taken. Most likely it will be suspended and ‘emotional release or distress’ will be the excuse.
And when this season builds to its climax, people will seek each other out in the pretence of tribal bonding but in reality just to have a p***-up and they will seek a free moral pass on the basis that they are proud county people.
They are the ones who would tell you straight to your face that they would die for their county, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they might just be making that decision for someone else.
The GAA knows this better than other organisation in the country. It stands for so much that is good in our community, but i t also understands our greatest flaws.
It should have taken the decision out of the hands of the National Public Health Emergency Team and the Government by stressing that its primary concern was the welfare of its players and the community at large and called the whole thing off.
Had it done so, the history books would read that no Championship was played in 2020, which would have been a fitting legacy for the great trauma that has been visited on this country.
And, yet, we would still have had a champion to be proud of; the GAA itself, which put lives before leisure, community before Championship.
But that has not happened and even before a ball has been struck in anger, we have already lost.
‘Mental health is being weaponised to suit selfish agendas’