NO matter what the International Body on Decommissioning says tomorrow, surely we should be advancing towards accommodation between our differing traditions anyway? We shouldn't have to wait for a nod from Mr Ancram here or Mr Adams there, to push forward with detente in all sorts of cultural ways. For right now in the middle of the international championship, something of a doldrums for the GAA, perhaps we should consider a meeting of the waters from the twin streams of rugby and Gaelic.
Maybe the IRFU attachment to Lansdowne Road is so profound that it will not shift venue the GAA would more cheerfully go to the stake than abandon Croke Park. This is not wrong this is human nature. Croke Park was the cathedral where Irish separatism was celebrated in covert ways, a Masshouse in which Irish national sporting culture became an allegory for the Irish nation.
That alone would ensure its special place within Irish nationalism, never mind the beating heart of the GAA, even without the appalling events of Bloody Sunday. They, of course, are well known to all Irish schoolchildren. Less well known, because of the policy of neglect and falsification which attended the teaching of history in Ireland in the subsequent years, was the importance of Lansdowne Road to another tradition. Lansdowne Road was the place where the footballers of Dublin gathered for enlistment in 1914, under the president of the IRFU, Mr H. Browning.
Dublin Fusiliers
Scores of D Company, the Footballers of the Dublin Fusiliers, were to die in Gallipoli and in, France, and the, man who raised them was himself shot dead by insurgents at Mount Street Bridge in Easter 1916 en route back from, the weekly route march to Ticknock with his fellow loyalists in the Georgius Rex. Many of the surviving soldiers he recruited never recovered from their experiences and died of alcoholism or committed suicide. Lansdowne Road remembers these victims in its own discreet fashion, though most rugby players are probably unaware of these associations.
But those who run the IRFU, the much scorned alickadoos whose devotion to the game is the reason why it has survived and prospered, probably remember their loyalties to the game and to the Venue and to the memory of the men who gathered at Lansdowne Road in 1914 is probably every bit as intense though more discreet as those of their fellow Irishmen across the river.
Perhaps the unique place in Lansdowne Road within rugby culture is unassailable perhaps that unassailable position will mean that the IRFU will redevelop the grounds as redeveloped they must be. We have by a clear distance the worst international rugby ground in Europe and compared with Lansdowne Road, even the most modest ground I visited in South Africa during the World Cup was like the Stadium of Light against Tolka Park.
Remain at road
It might well be that the IRFU for historical reasons will remain at the road. My colleague Ned van Esbeck has proposed that the ground is reconstructed downwards, a route which Barcelona took to enlarge and modernise a ground the football authorities were determined to retain as its location.
And if that be the course, well and good. Nobody who has walked the enchanted mile to Lansdowne Road on the day of a rugby international, the pubs full and the crack crackling, would ever want otherwise. But if a move is necessary should not Croke Park be the most sensible, though shared, home? Does it make any real financial sense that the IRFU should build a completely new home at the old Phoenix Park racetrack as has recently been proposed?
No But it makes sense financially, and it makes sense logistically, the rugby to share a home with the GAA. The seasons of the codes do not seriously overlap and where they do, alternative venues could be found for the rugby. A reduced Lansdowne Road ground could be retained, and surplus land there sold off.
At a different level, such a home could provide the key ingredients to a cultural reconciliation between different Irelands between the Ireland of the Northern unionist and the Southern nationalist certainly. But there are other Irelands to reconcile here, tribes within tribes.
For just as the GAA reconciled the entirely different cultures and skills of the inland hurling areas, often enough based in the small towns of Old English settler provenance of Tipperary and Kilkenny and south Galway, with the more dispersed football playing populations of seaboard counties like Kerry and Mayo, so a new ecumenical Croke Park could assist in a new accord between the rugby players of Galway and their GAA neighbours between Cork hurlers and Cork rugby, players between the numerously complex and fascinatingly diverse strands of Irishness which are partially evident in the sporting codes they are loyal to.
Wondrous stadium
Croke Park is a quite wondrous stadium, the equal of the best I have seen anywhere. I confess to being prepared to be hyper critical after the new stand was built but I was overwhelmed by the elegance and majesty of the structure. It has the grandeur and self confidence one might expect from an organisation as rightly proud of its traditions as the GAA.
That self confidence should now enable the GAA to admit the rugby players of Ireland if, that is, it is the IRFU's wish, to share that venue. Traditions need not be diluted nor loyalties diminished by such generous hospitality or by such prudent, selfless guesthood. Gaelic players might absorb some of the club culture from rugby and rugby players could, certainly learn a few handling and foot balling skills in return.
Everybody would benefit.
Rugby would not be marooned in some new stadium in the suburbs and would share the economic costs of Croke Park. More to the point useless divisions would be bridged while priceless traditions were maintained.