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Will New York ever really be a part of it? Not as long as calls for entry to the qualifiers fall on deaf ears

WE have a private joke in this column’s circle, which provides us with a silver bullet to fire no matter what crisis befalls. Whoever comes to us with a belly-ache, no matter the gravity, from Irish Water charges to the rising political tensions in the Middle East, we come armed with a quick fix, road-tested solution.

‘Do you know what you should do?’ we offer the aggrieved, ‘you should write a letter to the editor of the Kerryman.’

We have been throwing out that line for so long that we had actually forgotten the genesis of that dodgy bit of witticism.

Until this week, when the New York manager Justin O’Halloran made a plea for parity of esteem by suggesting that it was time they were afforded more than one day in the summer sun.

And that lit the bulb. Back in the 1990s when we were on the London GAA beat, the Kerry junior footballers came to town for an All-Ireland semi-final which promised to be another grim day for the exiles.

They would, no doubt, get their posteriors brutally handed to them and then afterwards what was left of their dignity would be killed off with soft words.

‘Lads, there is credit due to ye for keeping the game alive over here,’ was the usual sugared line peddled to the vanquished.

It was a reminder that while players at home played to win, those overseas played for some abstract higher cause in honour of the mother land.

Except this day went giddily and gloriously off script as London triumphed.

All went swimmingly until a few weeks later a letter was published in the Kerryman from someone in the management team who sought to provide context for defeat.

The details have blurred but the gist of it was that they had not been received as they would have liked, they had been subjected to unsettling delays in travel and the food provided by their London hosts was sour to the taste.

Still, not half as bitter as the result, one suspects.

In all the years that Kerry football have been winning and losing football games, we never recalled previously their need to explain away a defeat by letter to the local paper.

But then respect for opposition can only be truly measured when you are beaten and those rehearsed words no longer apply. It is then that the truth ekes out.

It has always been that way. We recall from the same time a London ladies team travelling to Dublin for a seven-a-side tournament, which they ended up winning.

They were hailed with cat-calls of ‘English bitches’ from a few of the more embittered onlookers as they made their way to collect their medals.

You would like to think, not least at a time when the strength of the GAA’s pulse is best measured by its phenomenal growth internationally, that we are a little more enlightened as a people and as an association. And we are, but that is not to say that there are people still left outside who feel the chill.

New York, most pointedly. Of course, there are all kinds of arguments, based on competitiveness, logistics and finance as to why they cannot be accommodated with access to the All-Ireland qualifiers.

One swallow does not a summer make, and just because New York came within a kick of the ball of beating Roscommon last year hardly serves as a guarantee that they will keep the ball kicked out to all comers in the future.

But we have a Football Championship where entry is not based on merit – last year’s decision to snub a tiered competition being the most recent affirmation of that.

There is the financial cost involved in bringing New York over for a qualifier game – or subsidising their opponents to travel the other direction – but given that GAA (and GPA) hands are permanently held out to Irish-American benefactors, that is surely one tab that there should be no complaints about picking up.

Of course, there is the logistics involved but we don’t take the boat anymore and in a shrinking world a weekend in New York raises few eyebrows for the upwardly mobile, so a three-day trip is doable for a football team.

There is the ‘undocumented’ issue, where the bulk of their players would not be able to travel, but O’Halloran deserves to be taken at his word when he declared that 90 per cent of his panel would be good to go.

Anyhow, there is an obvious irony in fearing that New York would be weakened beyond reason in the qualifiers because of players not being able to travel, when we see teams here lose players by the taxi-load for the summer because they are heading in the opposite direction Above all, this is about respect. At the start of this decade, the GAA put a preliminary round in place to the qualifiers to ensure that any Connacht team beaten by New York would have access to the All-Ireland series.

Not extending that opportunity to the exiles is a slight, one which suggests they are a lesser entity.

The day we address that will be one worth writing a letter home about.

Not extending the opportunity to the exiles is a slight which suggests they’re a lesser entity