Desmond Fahy celebrates the new confidence in Ulster football.Throughout our formative years the day of the All-Ireland football final was one reserved for reverence, boyish anticipation and pulled curtains.
The ritual was always the same. This was a time before the saturation media coverage of today and one when the major television broadcasters in the North could not decide whether to treat the GAA with open hostility or mere indifference. Anyway, the end result was the same - if we were to see the game, it was RTÉ or nothing.
Our dinner would always finish early on All-Ireland Sunday and for one day only we would gladly forgo the indescribable pleasures of tinned fruit and squirted cream. Just after one o'clock my brother and I would be sent into the "good room" to set up base camp. This was an important job and one from which the younger brother and sisters were excluded.
"Good room" in this context meant nothing more than the one with the sofa and television, but it was not somewhere we were usually allowed and that only added to the sense of occasion.
Reception of RTÉ pictures was notoriously poor in late-1970s Northern Ireland and we had cunningly tried to stack the cards in our favour by having something called a booster fitted. The technological import of this mystical white box was and continues to be lost on me but the net effect was that you went from a fuzzy picture with poor sound to a fuzzy picture with slightly better sound. Still, it was something.
The problem with the picture was that it was unviewable in normal daylight. It was akin to watching Kerry and whoever doing battle in a hailstorm with only intermittent flashes of green and gold through the gloom to let you know the established order was being maintained. So our ingenious solution was to use the curtains to block out all natural light - our own private GAA cinema.
Beyond the obvious technical benefits, this darkness had other positive spin-offs in that it allowed minor crimes and misdemeanours to go totally unnoticed. On one "final" Sunday in the early 1980s we managed to eat an entire box of fresh gooseberries undetected. The buzz of the subterfuge was compensation for the stomach cramps that followed.
One of us would climb up on the back of the sofa and pull the curtains across. Meanwhile, the button on the set would be pulled out and the commentary in Irish of the minor game would ring around the room for a full minute before the picture appeared. These were moments of pure tension but when both sound and vision were at last operating more or less in tandem we could emerge as conquering heroes from the good room to announce this minor technological triumph to the rest of the house.
This is how All-Ireland final day in our house was for a decade or more. Not for us the desperate search for tickets or the long journey there and back. But then we were by no means unusual in that. We were GAA people but outside the GAA mainstream.
The 20 years and more between Down's pomp of the 1960s and the province's second coming at the start of the 1990s were truly dog days for Ulster football. The All-Ireland final was an occasion that was visited upon other counties and other provinces but never on us. Good things never happened to us. We stood all the while with our noses pressed smudgily and expectantly up against the window pane just waiting to be invited in. But the call, for Tyrone at least, never came.
The contrast between those dark, almost furtive, afternoons squinting at poor-quality television pictures and the brassily confident, floodlit build-up to this year's final is stark and startling.
After apologetic years on the margins of Northern culture the GAA now cockily struts its way through the mainstream and the presence of Tyrone and Armagh in an All-Ireland final is a revealing metaphor for that. It is also a symbolic affirmation of the way in which the GAA here has struggled through the Troubles and come out the other side.
Twenty years ago the GAA had to fight for minutes of coverage on BBC Northern Ireland or UTV. Now it can dictate the agenda as both organisations queue up for contracts and airtime allocation.
Drive through any town and you'll see Paul McGrane and Peter Canavan on billboards advertising energy drinks alongside well-known figures from rugby and soccer. Pick up any newspaper, broadsheet or tabloid, and marvel at Gaelic footballers and hurlers purloining column inches from Premiership millionaires and World Cup rugby players.
The old furtiveness and circumspection are gone, to be replaced by confidence and sure-footedness. After decades of uncertainty and self-doubt the GAA now knows much more about its worth and its place in the world.
This manifests itself in many strange and subtle ways. In the south Belfast day nursery our four-year-old boy attends, his classmates have been discussing for weeks their allegiances come the final. His schizophrenic supporter's routine - the product of a Tyrone father and an Armagh mother - goes down a real storm.
In workplaces, and most particularly in religiously mixed, middle-class working environments, there are knowledgeable and interesting debates about the possible tactical nuances of the match and the virtues of Mulligan vis-à-vis McDonnell.
In itself none of this would be startling or unusual were it not for the fact that as recently as 10 or 15 years ago Gaelic football and hurling were the sports that dare not speak their name in normal, day-to-day Northern Irish conversation.
The political connotations of association with the GAA, however misinformed and spurious they may have been, were crucial in ensuring the GAA remained peripheral and ghettoised within the nationalist community for the three decades of the Troubles.
The creation of this "them and us" situation had two effects. The first was that it made it easy for broadcasters, newspaper editors and opinion formers to ignore the GAA and push it conveniently to one side. The enforced politicisation of the association made it a soft target. The second was on the GAA people of the North themselves. The cumulative effect of the incidents of harassment, the antagonism and the general indifference to their point of view contributed to the taking up of entrenched positions from which some have found it difficult to extricate themselves as the political mood has changed.
The Northern GAA mindset is one born out of very particular, complex cultural circumstances. For all the new-found confidence there is still a nagging, underlying sense of insecurity, a vague unease that everything that has been fought for and gained over the years could be quickly taken away. And however hard even the most informed of Southern commentators might try, the Northern GAA way is one they find impossible to understand fully.
The hysterical fall-out from Tyrone's semi-final win over Kerry was only the latest manifestation of this, and the truth is that the lack of understanding between the two parts of the island has always been lurking just below the surface.
The familiar questions asked of Ulster GAA people are one, why do we take it all so seriously and, two, why are we so defensive when it comes to criticism. The same answer is delivered to both queries with bemused irritation: because the GAA really matters to us and perhaps matters more than it seems to in certain other parts of the country.
Affiliation to the GAA in the North has always been more than a passing sporting fancy. It is a statement of identity and an important cultural signifier. The relevance of this may be decreasing as the pluralism that has long been a feature of sporting life in the rest of the country begins to filter through, but change here comes in slow drips, not crashing waves.
The equation is simple. Criticism of the way in which Armagh, Tyrone or any other Ulster side plays football is interpreted as much more than fair comment. Rightly or wrongly, in certain sections it is construed as an attack on an entire way of cultural and sporting life.
Feed into the mixwhat appears to be sour grapes at the apparent current pre-eminence of Northern football counties and you have a potent mix. Is it any surprise that people get more than a little excited?
So it has been and so it shall probably continue to be. Ulster football and the people who follow it are brash, direct and in your face. If that's not to the taste of the rest of the country then maybe it's time to celebrate the differences instead of trying to bridge impossible gaps.
The result might be that we Northerners might become a little less defensively parochial and the critics might in turn tone down some of their shriller contributions. In the meantime, settle down for the main event. You never know, you might surprise yourself and even enjoy it.
Des Fahy is a barrister, author of How The GAA Survived The Troubles (Wolfhound Press) and a former under-age star with the County Tyrone club Drumragh Sarsfields.
