LOCKER ROOM: People pulling together making support systems out of sport is one of life's good things

ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT, alright. If the egg-chasing fraternity can lay down the pikes and the cudgels for a few minutes now that the traditional baiting season has ended we’ll concede that all the following could apply to any team sport. Even rugby.

Anyway we were just struck recently by something we heard Páraic Duffy say about the phenomenon which will be upon us again next weekend, the Dubs en masse on Hill 16. There is a general air of sniffiness abroad about the modern Hill and it’s collective of great basking whales. We’re not immune to sniffing ourselves. Do they hibernate we ask.

Why does it take a threat of nuclear testing around Fairview to get them out of the pub and into Croker in time. Would they ever come early and follow the hurlers for goodness sake. ’Twas better in our day when every man and jack was a club man and a true aficionado.

But Duffy surprisingly was having none of it. When else, he asked, do the people of Dublin have the chance to stand together in the one place and celebrate themselves, to say we are Dubs. If the GAA can facilitate that, it’s a good thing.

And in the cold raw climate in which we are going to have to live for the next few years (thanks to all you people with the MBAs. After all the work that went into ensuring that the brightest and the best would no longer have to emigrate ye do this to us!) that sort of thing, experiencing communality through sport might be one of the best pleasures left to us.

For sure we crave those occasions when. prawns experience a holocaust just for the sake of our sandwiches, the days when we express our patriotism with a beery belly and a few bars of Olé Olé Olé music, the big manufactured occasions when we have the craic (as we self-consciously repackaged the whole notion of fun so that it wouldn’t be confused with the crack which was ninety in the Isle of Man before we got rich).

We love all that oul guff and we’ll get dickied up for any bunfight but what we will fall back on in the months and years ahead is each other. And in the era of Bebo and Twitter and texting just about the only place we encounter each other in the flesh and see each other as ourselves is in local sport.

I got an email during the week from a fella called Niall Bishop. I’ve never met Niall but have seen plenty of him and abused him lots. He’s a senior hurler with St Vincent’s and a good one too. He is well liked about the place and people speak highly of him. I say this because Niall Bishop is flagrantly and shamelessly a culchie and St Vincent’s has long been famous for it’s racial purity laws.

As he pointed out by way of introducing himself he responds less to being called Niall and more to being told to “go home to Galway ya bogger”. Next Saturday he plans to do just that. By bike. Along with 17 other people, five of them member of the St Vincent’s senior hurlers. They’ll head off from the Spa Hotel in Lucan at 7am and arrive in Oranmore some 11 hours later.

We’ve seen charity cycles before of course, there are good-hearted people who will cycle from here to Timbuktu if it would do somebody some good, but this is the first time I’ve noted one on the doorstep and it intrigued me.

Niall didn’t grow up with the five Vincent’s lads who will cycle with him but last Christmas morning when he lost his brother, David, to leukaemia at the age of 32 it touched the team rather than just a family back home in Galway. And the ripples spread out accordingly through the layers of a big city club.

In that club this summer, as every summer in recent years, the kids will play a one-day tournament called the Aoife King McGrane Tournament which was born when Aoife was struggling for her own life a few years ago. The father of that gorgeous kid Tomás “Mossy” McGrane, the former county hurler, will be one of the lads on the bike next Sunday morning. What comes out goes back in and when ya stop all the arguing and faction fighting that clubs are prone too it’s a beautiful thing.

David Bishop sounds like a character. A devoted fan of Oranmore FC, in a famous sporting year of his own back in the late ’90s, he spent a full season as a panellist on the Sligo IT panel which did a clean sweep, well a famous Ryan Cup and League double. He’d pull his brother’s take that he’d won more in nine months with Sligo IT than Niall had done with all his seasons with the mighty St Vincent’s.

By that time in the late ’90s the Bishops were just coming to terms with the death of their eldest son, Shane, who had lost his own battle to leukaemia in 1996 at the age of 25.

Next Sunday is about celebrating lives and raising money for the Patient Comfort Fund, affiliated to the Haematology Oncology Unit of University Hospital Galway (UHG). The fund makes monies available to provide for patients who are facing extended stays in hospital, in a long-term battle against blood-related illnesses.

Money raised will go toward items such as an extra pillow or a more comfortable chair for a visiting relative.

Niall, David and Shane’s dad spent 30 years of his life on the hospital’s maintenance staff.

“The haematology oncology unit is more than just a worthy cause for my parents and I. Not only did the staff there give delicate care and attention to David during his illness but many of the staff would have treated Shane, the eldest in our family, when he lost his battle to leukaemia in 1996 at the age of 25,” says Niall.

“The cycle,” he adds, “allows us to look beyond our grief for a moment and say thank you to those who tended so kindly to both David and Shane. In a way our loss was their loss too.”

All the anger we feel about our health service and our squandered millions, in perspective, it’s a waste of energy. The good things are to be found in the places they were always to be found, on sidelines and dressingrooms and in the experience of people pulling together making support systems out of sport.

Get on to the website at www.davidbishopcycle to see which towns these giants of the northside are cycling through or to make a donation. We fall back on ourselves in the end, every club, every team.

All the speeches and the bonding and the time put down together only count when you are tested. To see people tested like Niall Bishop’s family and to see them respond.

That’s why sport matters.