Locker Room:This column is an Eddie-Free-Zone. Our ignorance concerning what is right and just about Eddie's future employment is pristine. For the non-egg-chasing reader that ignorance shall be twelve hundred words of bliss. Honest.
Still, Eddie aside, we're curmudgeonly this morning and are looking about for somebody to kick. We feel as belligerent as a teenager with an ASBO and three flagons of cider. In Japanese workplaces (this could just be urban myth, but I like it) they provide a dummy in the basement with a rough facial resemblance to the bossman, so the workers can go down and periodically beat the tar out of the dummy like Americans taking details in Guantanamo Bay.
In Ireland we don't have such a facility generally available but sports columnists have the Minister for Sport and Whatever You're Having.
As such - and if I'd known I was ever going to say this I'd have got sponsorship or placed heavy bets - I miss old Mr Congeniality, John O'Donoghue. In the Dáil right now John occupies the position of one of those Premier League players who has suffered a long term injury. As Ceann Comhairle he still gets a Premier League player's wage and he'll be looked after till his contract runs out - but he's not really a player anymore.
The injury which put him out of the game wasn't anything to do with the pig's ear he made of the entire Tallaght Stadium issue but more to do with the persistent presence in the Dáil of Jackie Healy Rae. Mr Congeniality could have been a made guy if he had taken Jackie Healy Rae out of it. He had been given the ammunition.
Anyone looking for the skinny on how it all went wrong but should have gone so right should get Googling and summon up a recent report out of the Dept of Economics in UCC. The report is called Irish National Lottery Sports Capital Grant Allocations 2003-7: Further Evidence of Political Influence (by John Considine, Frank Crowley, Sinéad Foley and Marie O'Connor). Sexy.
During Mr Congeniality's time holding the remote control that operates the National Lottery Sports Capital Grants the Minister kept pressing the button that made money go to south Kerry. So much so that he deserved a grant himself to deal with the repetitive stress injury to his thumb. Most grateful for his efforts was his own club St Mary's of Cahersiveen, which came from nowhere to become the fifth best funded GAA club in the country during what they think of as the golden years (2003-2007). Some €650,000 made its way to Cahersiveen and who is to say the club who gave us Jack O Shea and Maurice Fitz didn't deserve it.
There will be no cavilling own in Waterville anyway where €390,000 blew as a balm to treat jealousy. During the three years when south Kerry had a hotline to the big cahuna with responsibility for bread and gravy the region did better respectively each year than 18 other counties, than 17 other counties and finally 16 other counties. There has to have been a little disappointment in Fianna Fáil when Tom Fleming failed to get into the Dáil on Mr Congeniality's bespoke coat-tails.
During this time, by the way, Dublin fared the worst in per capita terms. Not complaining. Just saying.
Anyway we are sure the new chap, a naturalised Dub, a fresh-faced garsún called Séamus Brennan won't feel the need to butter up the downtrodden voters of Stillorgan and Mount Merrion in an attempt to bring in a third soldier of destiny after himself and Tom Kitt.
The Minster has always seemed like a can do sort of fella and the first thing he can be doing is follow the recommendations of the UCC report especially in regard to setting limits on the deviation of per capita allocations from average. He might go still further and follow another recommendation.
"If the desire exists for an equitable geographic distribution then it has to be taken out of the hands of the Minister. Is not a Minister elected to serve the needs of his or her constituency? We should not expect politicians to be morally superior beings. We need rules and procedures to constrain them and to alleviate the pressure they face from the voters in their constituency."
We await developments but are concerned also about a little aside made in another recent report, also from (bless them) UCC but this time from Prof Ivan Perry. The headline-grabbing finding of this one was that 14-year-old boys nowadays are on average four stone heavier than their grandfathers were at the age of 14. They are taller too but the rate of fatness is outstripping the development in terms of height.
Prof Perry noted there was a difficulty here from a health perspective because items like play areas, urban spaces, cycle paths and sports facilities were outside the remit of the heath services. Now it often seems that items like health and services are also outside the remit of the health services so we wouldn't be pushing to increase their burden just yet but there needs surely to be some central planning of all these items with massive input coming from the health, education, social services and justice departments.
As such, we were interested and slightly disappointed in the Minster's response to a recent in-house report which suggested the state of this nation's sporting facilities was such that it seemed unlikely we will be able to cash in on the London Olympics. The Minister said piffle and tosh to that and went on to state he would be using Beijing next year as a platform to launch the drive for our national readiness to cash in.
Now then apart from suggesting Con Keating Park in Cahersiveen as a base for Olympic teams, the only other sane response is, WHAT THE HELL? Our sports facilities are an inadequate, embarrassing mess, we are distracted constantly by castles in the air like Abbotstown, or the ongoing controversy of the National Aquatic Centre and our kids are being failed. They are being denied the right to cash in on the Celtic Tiger.
Jim Glennon, probably the best Minster for Sport we never had, made a good point just before he shuffled off into that half-life available to former politicians, suggesting some sanity in the way we plan new areas and developments. He spoke about planning requirements which would require green spaces and multi-use sporting facilities not just to be present in the community (or creating and strengthening the community) but also for them to be placed precisely where the schools are - so that usage is maximised during the day and the night.
Instead we have an obsession with obliterating every piece of green space in our cities and the burgeoning dormitory areas around them.
The volunteerism which sustains so many sporting clubs is wasted in large part by the ongoing need to raise funds and then more funds and more funds just to keep going.
Our kids are getting fat and bored and living out retarding, empty little half-lives on Bebo and PlayStation and we are worried about how we are going to cash in on the London Olympics? The things we get exercised about here in this great little sporting nation are truly revealing. Eddie! Stan! Roy! Or in recent years has not the mark of the gold standard bore not been the man whose opinion it was that the GAA, because of its access to some public funding, should be obliged to open its fields and pastures to everyone? Where is that bore now? Is he hectoring the Catholic Church about taking public funds to educate kids but ghettoising the children of non-Catholic immigrants into facilities elsewhere.
And now the fretting as to whether we will be able to cash in on the London Olympics! Not, mind you, as to whether the Olympics are a sufficiently genuine and ethical spectacle anymore, something with which to inspire our kids (our last two gold medal winners have been cheats). And if we do inspire them what we can offer them afterwards. What are they to do with the inspiration? Where can they go for the perspiration? The expressed worry about the cashing in situation is the most long term piece of planning we have heard of recently concerning sport in Ireland.
Maybe it's a start. Come on Minister, inspire us.
