Patrick Gregg is bound to have ruffled a lot of feathers with his assertion in the letters page last Tuesday that preference should be given to our national games over those of other sporting organisations because the GAA is the only Irish sporting body which has as its national objective "the preservation of the Irish identity".
We can leave aside the question of what our national identity actually is in the absolute certainty that it will be explained to us by numerous cultural commentators before very long.
Judging by media comment over the past weeks on the Croke Park controversy, even well-informed commentators - sporting and otherwise - appear to believe that the GAA has no such mission as that claimed by Patrick Gregg. Whether or not one agrees with his views, he has performed a useful function in mentioning the mission, because it seems most people have either never heard of it, or have long forgotten it.
As far as media comment goes, this situation is hardly acceptable. We are supposed to have a well-informed sporting press, yet all the (negative) emphasis has been on the perceived backwardness of the GAA, on how it has "disgraced" itself again. The rare "defence" piece has involved only figures, vague politics and soccer antipathy springing from the ABU well.
It is only 10 years since the GAA published its Official Guide, which even then caused a good deal of amusement in certain circles because of its nationalistic hyperbole, its notions of "impaired" nationhood (political separation from our Northern brethren) and its hoped-for creation of a "disciplined, self-reliant, national-minded manhood".
But that's the GAA position. It hasn't changed. And the organisation's current stance on Croke Park is all of a piece with it. Of course it is not clear to many of us how the exclusion of "non-national" games from Croke Park helps to preserve a national identity, but that can only be a failure of communication: the GAA management presumably knows what it is about (its mission), and just hasn't properly explained itself. It should do so.
It is not at all strange that an organisation as large as the GAA should have a primary objective amounting to a mission. Briefly recalling the origin of the GAA, Patrick Gregg noted that it was "later to be baptised in Thurles".
The religious imagery is appropriate. A success from the kick-off, the organisation was founded in a wildly enthusiastic welter of nationalism and Catholicism, with everyone from Archbishop Croke to the Irish Republican Brotherhood getting in on the act.
(And it's worth noting, for those who tediously make much of the election of a Protestant, Jack Boothman, as President in 1994, that one of the GAA's first patrons was Charles Stewart Parnell). We will say nothing about the irony of the GAA's first meeting taking place in a hotel billiards room.
It is also interesting that from the beginning, the GAA fostered county loyalties among its supporters: it saw clearly where "identity" was rooted - in villages and parishes throughout the country, and not in some vague pan-national aspiration (even if it does want the Six Counties back).
It isn't all that long - perhaps 10 years - since we heard the treacly tones of our former President Mary Robinson telling the GAA, on the occasion of its All-Stars Awards, that the organisation should have confidence in its own strength and place within Irish society, and use that confidence to open itself to the rest of the world: "The GAA is better equipped than most to embrace openly and positively new ideas and cultures."
What patronising claptrap that was. And what complete rubbish. And how graciously, and wisely, the GAA chose not to even hear what Mrs Robinson said, but applauded her anyway.
The GAA is, to its eternal credit, not equipped to even bid the time of day, never mind to embrace, new ideas and cultures. Its whole point is to cling to very un-new ideas and cultures, i.e tradition. That is its strength. The cult of the new - ideas, culture, whatever - it regards quite correctly as just that: a cult, at least until someone can show that these vague novelties actually have some useful substance.
Patrick Gregg also referred in his letter to the "pretence that there is a European national identity". He is right. There is no such thing. But when it comes to an appreciation of the wider world, the GAA has more clubs outside Ireland than there are in Connacht alone. That's enough international identity to be going on with.
