Madam, - I wonder if members of the GAA who support the ban on so-called foreign games can guess the provenance of the following quote: "There was a rugby pitch on the grounds of the huge Gaelic football and hurling stadium of Croke Park, separated from it by a concrete wall, at the bottom of our street".
The words are Brendan Behan's and can be found in his masterpiece Borstal Boy. The writer then goes on to recall his negative feelings, brought on by an inculcated class hatred, of the boys from the Dublin schools noted for playing the game.
His musings occur as he settles down to read, and subsequently enjoy, a book by a former Irish rugby international, Robert Collis, called The Silver Fleece. And it was during this period in Borstal that the teenage Behan began to re-evaluate his opinion of the hated English and change forever his view of the people and their manners.
Perhaps some readers might have memories of this rugby pitch, or know when its demise occurred, and why.
At boarding school in Wiltshire, I can recall the Christian Brothers (Irish country lads to a man) for whom playing or watching rugby and cricket came as close to a transcendental religious experience as damn it, sometimes possibly more so than their avowed Catholicism.
Brendan Behan is dead 40 years this month. But as with all great writers, his words resonate still. At one point in Borstal Boy, he ruefully observes of someone, "Every tinker has his own way of dancing". I guess that applies double to the certain sections of the GAA. - Yours, etc.,
KEVIN WHELAN, Salthill, Galway.