Locker Room:If there is one small fly in the ointment of joy that the wonderful and novel achievements of our cricketers in Jamaica have given us it is the suspicion that our Minster for Sport will demand any day now that GAA grounds be opened for the playing of cricket.
It has been a grand week for the Irish sports aficionado. Steve Staunton's droll press conference was followed by Ruby Walsh's glory and then the cricketing revolution. The rugby boys scored 50 points because they needed to; Sunderland won again; the cricketers became a great story; Ballyhale - the epitome perhaps of the possibilities and potential of the GAA - returned to eminence; and the Dub hurling evolution continued apace.
And all the while lurking behind the blue skies like a storm front was the grim, vinegar puss of John O'Donoghue, the last mealy, free-roaming mouth and curmudgeon still in existence outside of this column's acreage.
There were some who thought that when O'Donoghue made his comments a while back about the Solheim Cup and fashion for the ladies perhaps he had the brains of a rocking horse. We realise now of course that he has the heart of a lion. In a move distinguished by both electoral bravery and crass stupidity the Minister has chosen this time to put the boot into the GAA.
Fortunately, Kerry is not a GAA county or it might have cost him votes.
Thomas Davis, a GAA club whose volunteers have been working for the people of Tallaght since - well, since 1887 actually - are in the throes of a High Court petition seeking permission to bring a legal challenge on a decision that the new Shamrock Rovers stadium in Tallaght should be a soccer-only venue. Thomas Davis want to overturn South Dublin County Council's decision of February 13th, 2006, that the 6,000-seat stadium at Whitestown Way should be completed for the purposes of soccer only.
Readers with long memories will recall that back in 1995, when this saga began, South Dublin County Council had ambitions for a 20,000-seat stadium in Tallaght which would be multi-purpose and have James's Gate soccer club as the anchor tenant.
James's Gate were soon supplanted by Shamrock Rovers, the itinerant club who have never quite recovered from selling their splendid ground in Milltown a couple of decades ago.
Down through the years as Rovers changed hands and became involved in a variety of different deals the complexion of the Tallaght deal has changed repeatedly.
The stadium lies like a ghostly monument to incompetence. After a public-consultation process, and following a recommendation by the Tallaght Area Committee in November 2005, the county manager's proposal for a single-purpose venue was altered, getting everyone back to the idea of a multi-sport stadium involving the development of a larger pitch suitable for Gaelic games.
On December 12th, 2005, SDCC unanimously adopted a resolution in favour of this proposal.
Rovers seemed happy. The GAA seemed happy. John O'Donoghue? Not happy.
Extraordinarily, he announced he would only fund a soccer-only stadium. The SDCC, having little choice, passed a resolution on February 13th, 2006, which reverted to the soccer-only scheme.
By now most people will have their own opinions about the relative claims of the parties to the dispute. The GAA clubs (there are five other local clubs backing Thomas Davis) have been rooted and seeded in the community for generations. They have worked hard for what facilities they provide. Sometimes they have benefited from grant money and Lotto money; all the time they have worked themselves to the bone for the community.
Shamrock Rovers are a professional soccer club, a commercial enterprise. They chose to sell the best ground in the country. Through extraordinary mismanagement they have lacked a ground of their own since. Despite the lustre of their name and history they have proven themselves incapable of providing facilities for their own use.
For some reason John O'Donoghue has leapt in and promised to fork out millions of taxpayers' money to come to the rescue of this commercial organisation. This is generous, not just because of Irish soccer's long, prodigal history of squandering and blowing cash and failing to provide for drizzly days. It is generous because the Minister apparently feels the pain of every surrendered penny as if he were paying for it by sale of his own organs.
Heroically unembarrassed by recent criticisms of the physical-education facilities offered our increasingly obese children, the Minister instead rounded on the GAA, a body which on a volunteer basis provided for generations what passed for a sports policy in this country; the GAA, which has worked to be at the heart of every community; the GAA, whose clubs from Thomas Davis to Laune Rangers provide football, hurling, camogie and women's football for anything up to 50 teams week in and week out.
The Minister had the unfeasibly large cojones to suggest that because the GAA received some money from the Government in the last few years it should just shut up about Tallaght. The Minister suggested Lotto funds (set up for arts and sport, but ransacked by successive governments for health funding) were actually all part of his money from selling his kidneys.
In fact, it was Lotto funding which made up all but 19 million of the 114 million given to help build Croke Park (192 million is promised to Lansdowne Road, but we suspect that will never get built and rugby will go out on its own down in Ringsend).
Croke Park is the sort of infrastructural project the Lotto was designed for. O'Donoghue appears to think Lotto funding is a grace-and-favour scheme which might buy him the rights to the GAA's silence on all issues.
Warming to his theme, the Minister chose to ignore the spirit of the times we live in.
"I also find it quite extraordinary," he said, "that the GAA should wish to play Gaelic games in a soccer ground given their outright opposition to soccer being played in their own grounds."
Wow! Now the ignorance on display here is quite profound. It becomes us though to scorn the man's simplicity. It means either he hasn't noticed Wales will be playing Ireland in soccer at Croke Park on Saturday or he expects GAA clubs all over the country to begin throwing their overused, over-mortgaged grounds open to soccer.
The Minister, we are sure, knows this would be an arrangement which could never be reciprocated given the dimensions of the various pitches involved and the existing overuse of every GAA pitch in the land.
The Minister apparently wants the GAA, a community-based, volunteer-based cultural and sporting body, to carry the can for the long history of squandering and mismanagement which has blighted the world's greatest professional game as played in this country. Soccer, which once thrived here domestically, professionally and entertainingly, has become a grim sideshow of foreclosures and receiverships.
In Tallaght, the argument isn't against Shamrock Rovers, although John Donoghue planting Rovers there will inevitably hurt the GAA population. The point is that nobody feels Rovers have given enough to the community to merit the amount of State aid being allocated. There is an unfairness at the heart of the concept and the Minister's crass comments underline that.
The GAA has already been quietly hurt by the Government's decision to renege on an earlier promise that the rebuilt Lansdowne would have a pitch configured to permit the playing of the occasional GAA game.
The whispers are, though, that when the planning people get back this week the news will be that the stadium's proposed capacity will be whittled and the IRFU, a little surprised perhaps at the sweetheart of a deal the FAI were handed in the redevelopment master plan, will opt to cash in their chips in D4 and build elsewhere on their own steam (with, one hopes, appropriate Lotto funding to help). The Irish Glass Bottle Company in Ringsend would be the perfect site.
And so Irish professional soccer, a commercial enterprise which retails a genuinely beautiful game, but is domestically incapable of running its own business, will be homeless again. Will Minister O'Donoghue be able to find a way to blame it on the GAA? Of course he will.
