On Gaelic Games: This is the week we are being encouraged to surf the nostalgia wave, ponder what we used to be and what we've become and what has been gained and lost in the process. The Time of Our Lives? Ireland '86-'06, according to the RTÉ website, "is a reflective and thought-provoking RTÉ initiative", posing the question, "A lot has changed, but has it changed for the better?"
It's not clear why the past 20 years have been chosen for this contemplation, which runs on RTÉ television this week, but it's a handy temporal package and certainly encompasses a period of tremendous change.
Like society at large and the community within which it exists, the GAA reflects that change, and 1986 might as well be a different world. The evidence is everywhere, even in the relatively trivial.
This day four weeks it will be 20 years exactly since Simple Minds played Croke Park and left the surface looking like a patchwork quilt for the Leinster hurling final between Offaly and Kilkenny. Great was the vexation, and understandably so.
By the end of this summer three big stadium gigs will have been staged at Croke Park. Leviathans of rawwk, Bon Jovi, played the week before last and the pitch was completely unaffected. The concert schedule is just part of what makes the GAA's main stadium tick over financially.
It's an apt starting point to use for the consideration of what has changed for the association. Croke Park is now complete after a redevelopment process, lasting about 15 years. It is gleaming and state-of-the-art, apart from the quirky survival of the Northern End terrace. It is also largely paid for and will be a financial engine for the future, as well as a source of pride for members and the crowds that flock there during the championship.
Complaints that it is too big and too commercial, too much of a palace to the zeitgeist's consumerism, ignore firstly its role in adding to the gate of fixtures staged there and its value as a revenue stream to the association. Crowds of less than 40,000 may look small in the context of the stadium's scale, but attendances are a big success story of the past 20 years. Hard to believe, but the All-Ireland hurling final of that year, Cork-Galway, attracted just 43,451 spectators. Last year Croke Park hosted 10 match days with bigger crowds than that, not counting the All-Ireland finals.
It's interesting to take as texts for the transformation of the GAA the All-Ireland programmes of 1986. By coincidence, the pairings were the same as last year, Cork-Galway in the hurling and Tyrone-Kerry in football.
Leave aside the fascinating but not centrally relevant aspects, like how primitive the advertisements look, with only one in full colour. Ryanair had achieved lift-off but its advertising was more genteel than the red in tooth and claw stuff we've grown accustomed to, confining itself to boasting, "Choice of daily flights from Dublin and Waterford. Low unrestricted fares (no penalties)". The Wolfe Tones had a full page, declaring: "The name Wolfe Tones has blazed from the canopies of the most prestigious concert halls of the World, they have been honoured as Freemasons in cities on both coasts of the United States of America."
Leave aside also the details of the players and officials involved (for instance, former Dublin chair John Bailey refereed the hurling final), there are significant pointers as to how the world has changed. On the back of both programmes is a full-page advertisement for the Press Group of newspapers. The Irish Press pioneered the coverage of Gaelic Games and sponsored the minor All-Ireland hurling trophy, but within less than 10 years of these finals it would be dead. Ironically, it wasn't around for the economic boom that might have saved it and the exponential increase in the space devoted to the affairs of the GAA, a process it had started just over 50 years previously.
More pointedly, there is another full-page, from the GAA itself. Under the heading, GAA Tax Campaign, it was part of a vigorous resistance against various revenue impositions, from VAT on hurleys and rates ("a tax on voluntary achievement") to DIRT (Deposit Interest Retention Tax).
Aside from the transient nature of an anti-government campaign, there are also little nuggets to be found in the pamphleteering. In the preamble it states: "We are an amateur voluntary body providing non-commercial sporting and other facilities (on a nationwide scale for the past 100 years without State handouts)."
That hardy financial independence has changed - for the better, as State involvement in the recreational and leisure sectors was overdue and is increasingly important from a public health perspective.
In a 2004 interview in this newspaper marking his 25th year as director general of the GAA, Liam Mulvihill identified as one of the biggest changes within the association the growth in public funding. "Twenty-five years ago there was virtually no State involvement with sport. Over the past 10 or 12 years the amount of State funding has increased significantly. We have been beneficiaries of that, but so have all the other sports.
"Most people think of Croke Park and Lansdowne Road, the capital projects, but probably more important is the money given through the Sports Council and the annual funding of sports budgets and the grants given to clubs. It would have been hard to imagine that 25 years ago."
The other major change obvious from the All-Ireland programmes is the structure of the championships. In the ritual "How They Got There" section, we can observe it took Kerry three matches to reach the final, spread from June 15th to September 21st. Tyrone's presence, in contrast to nowadays, was a bit of a novelty, the product of the three-year exemption that allowed a Connacht or Ulster county to reach an All-Ireland when the provinces' turn to play each other in the semi-final rota came around. It was of course a memorable final. Tyrone gave Kerry a fright and it would be the eighth and last All-Ireland won by Mick O'Dwyer's great teams.
RTÉ's series this week is quizzically pitched, a question mark raising the central issue of whether we are happier for all the material gain. It's a moot point.
As regards the GAA: is it in a stronger position? No question. There may be new challenges, such as the growing tension between recreational club activity and the showcase intercounty schedules, but largely these are the problems of success.
It's a different world. And a better one.
smoran@irish-times.ie
