The symbolism was lost on no one of the GAA's declaration that the murder of Ronan Kerr last Saturday was also an attack on the GAA, writes DES FAHY
THE TEAM photograph, with its slightly disorganised rows, vaguely unruly boys looking this way and that, and coaches keeping patient watch on either side, is familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the GAA. The older boys at the back look about 11 or 12 years old, with, as is the way at rural clubs like Beragh Red Knights, younger boys from farther down the age groups added to the front two rows to make up the numbers.
Ronan Kerr stands out immediately as being bigger than the others, but he also seems more confident. That crouched, hand-on-the-knee pose suggests he knew his way around GAA team photographs and what was expected of players in them. Growing up in Tyrone during the latter part of the 1990s and early years of the following decade, Kerr would have known only success at national level for the county. His pose reflects that.
The GAA ran deeply through him.
The release of the photograph to the media this week, in the aftermath of his murder, last Saturday afternoon, had immense symbolism. By placing him right at the centre of a typical GAA scene, the image was more eloquent than the many thousands of words that have surrounded it.
Kerr was a member of the PSNI, but he was also steeped in the GAA family from childhood. Neither aspect of his life was divisible from the other and both defined who he was.
In 10 or 20 years we may look back on this week as one of profound importance for the GAA, when it was officially confirmed that Queen Elizabeth would visit Croke Park, and the association reacted in a sure-footed, proper way to Kerr’s killing. For decades, as the Troubles unravelled around it, the GAA frequently seemed confused and unsure about its role.
The avowedly non-political stance of the association brought with it serious internal conflicts as it sought to construct responses to the 1981 hunger strikes, the low-level harassment of its players by the RUC and British army and the murders of high-ranking officials.
The tendency for the GAA to take conflicted positions was most visible in the wake of the 1998 Omagh bomb. Many of its members were among the dead and injured, and the GAA was the single biggest contributor to the appeal fund set up for the families of the victims and the wounded. But at the same time the association could not sanction playing a series of fundraising soccer friendlies involving English Premiership sides on its grounds in Omagh, just a few hundred metres from the scene of last Saturday’s bomb attack. The games were played instead on a soccer pitch in the town with a significantly smaller capacity. As a result the GAA was widely criticised.
Even at that time it was clear the GAA would have to position itself within the changing society. The Patten reforms of the RUC, which led ultimately to the formation of the PSNI that Ronan Kerr joined 15 years later, envisaged a clear role for the association in so-called confidence-building measures. The GAA’s moves in relation to Rules 21 and 42, dealing with the prohibition on members of the security forces becoming members and with playing foreign games on their pitches, did not occur in a vacuum.
The debates surrounding both rule changes were hard fought and passionate, but the overarching aim was clear: if there were to be political and societal changes in the North, the GAA was determined to place itself at the heart of them.
The association’s decisive stance following Kerr’s murder was an unequivocal manifestation of that determination. The symbolism was lost on no one of a declaration by his home club’s chairman, Gearóid Ó Treasaigh, that the attack on Ronan Kerr was also an attack on the GAA.
There was a time when membership of the police forces meant exclusion from the GAA. We now have had a minute’s silence in memory of a murdered PSNI officer at a Tyrone county game, outright condemnation of the killing from its highest-ranking officials and a guard of honour at Kerr’s funeral made up of GAA members and PSNI officers.
Not all of this has been of the GAA’s making. The association has been forced by an expectant media to react quickly to politically charged events. In a time of crisis and tragedy, however, the GAA proved itself capable. Its pre-eminence as the most important cultural force on this island has long been known. It would now appear that its political influence is growing too.
Des Fahy is the author of How the GAA Survived the Troublesand Death on a Country Road
