As Tyrone and Kerry prepare for the All-Ireland Football final, the time has come to reveal a dark secret. The GAA was unaware of the skeleton in my cupboard when it took its great decision to allow the Ard Comhairle permit rugby and soccer to be played at Croke Park while Lansdowne is being rebuilt. I kept my mouth shut then, but as the tabloids say, "now I can reveal" that soccer has already been played in Croke Park - and I was one of those who played it, writes Seamus Martin.
It happened some time in the early 1950s. My only previous experience of the great venue had been an embarrassing one when I dropped the baton in the 4 X 100-yard relay in the Primary Schools' Sports. On this occasion, however, it was a short-lived thespian career that brought me to Croker.
The word went round in school that auditions were being held in the railway hall in Inchicore for a Pageant of St Patrick to be held in Páirc an Chrócaigh itself. Our gang showed up, having first worked hard to obtain permission from our parents.
The auditions were stern and at times frightening. Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards were in command. At one stage a group of teenage girls who failed to pass muster became the subject of Edwards's wrath. "May you have babies born in suits of armour," he roared. In those days public expressions that touched on the reproductive process were unthinkable. To make such a venomous remark on a subject that was taboo, in front of a group of schoolboys, was so shocking that the words have remained imprinted on my memory half-a-century later.
The schoolboys, however, got off more lightly than the girls. A group of boy slaves was needed to portray St Patrick's companions stolen from their homes in Britain by merciless Irish raiders. We were hired for the early part of the pageant until St Patrick grew up and was old enough to be played by Anew McMaster.
Rehearsals at first took place in Inchicore. We were kitted out in smocks and put through our paces in the hall. Later the rehearsals moved to Croker itself, a venue very different from the great stadium of today.
The old double-decker Cusack stand was then considered state-of-the-art, though that phrase had not been invented at the time. "Ultra-modern" was the term then in use. The Hogan Stand was merely a piece of terracing covered with a red roof of corrugated iron of the sort that could be seen on hay barns throughout the countryside.
In those times the ban on "foreign games" was strictly enforced. Clubs had vigilance committees which sent spies to soccer and rugby matches. The names of GAA members who strayed into such evil territory as Lansdowne Road or Dalymount Park were noted and read out at meetings. Players and even pavilion members were liable to expulsion.
Even non-members had to watch out. In Ballyfermot there was a local curate, Father Daly, who regarded soccer as a sin and emerged like a great marauding magpie from hiding in nearby bushes to seize the ball from offending players.
I found it particularly difficult to understand or tolerate, even as a child, that the GAA, or Father Daly for that matter, could regard those who played soccer as less Irish than those who abstained from "foreign games". I had, I should explain, been influenced by two uncles. One had dedicated his life outside the family to Shelbourne FC and something called "the movement" that was dedicated to a notion called "the Republic". The other uncle divided his allegiances between "the Republic", Shamrock Rovers FC and the occasional slow racehorse. Both had spent time in prison for their political beliefs and to my child's mind the GAA regarded them as "good Irishmen" when they were inside and unable to indulge in "foreign games" and "traitors" when they were released and free to go to soccer matches.
My fellow slave-boys at Croke Park were soccer fans too. In time our heroes bore strange names such as Ferenc Puskas, Nandor Hidegkuti, Sandor Kocsics and Zoltan Czibor, members of the Hungarian team which scored six goals against England at Wembley. Our pronunciations of these names owed everything to our extremely limited knowledge of the Hungarian language, but in our imaginations, we were not simply fans of these great players, we became these men. We were the "Mighty Magyars".
In between our bouts of slavery on a make-believe Slemish mountain in Croke Park, and our apprehension as to the nature of future statements by Hilton Edwards, we, along with older members of the cast of thousands, were given an occasional rest period. But boys of 10 and 11 are allergic to rest.
One of us had brought a soft football known as a "bouncer". The Gaelic goalposts had been removed for the pageant but that did not pose a problem for kids who never played with real goalposts anyway.
Coats were placed to mark the bottom of imaginary posts which held up a non-existent crossbar. Penalties were taken from 12 paces out. The precise length of those paces was subject to heated discussion since there was no referee. A full 90-minute game was out of the question and no one had a watch, so games ended when a team had scored an agreed number of goals or when Hilton Edwards ordered us back into slavery.
There was no doubt, however, that the game we were playing on the sacred sod of Croke Park was soccer, or simply "football" as it was known in our own terminology. And there was nothing any vigilance committee could do about it. The vigilantes didn't come to Croker; their attentions were focused on other venues. And in any case, as Hungarians, we didn't regard ourselves as subject to the GAA's jurisdiction.