Ireland’s recent loss to Wales in the Rugby World Cup was disappointing, to say the least. Like any country with a drinking culture, Ireland loves its sports—somehow beer and athleticism just seem to go together.
That Ireland made it so far in the tournament at all was miraculous simply because Ireland’s rugby team has never been that good. I don’t mean that it’s up-and-coming and has been improving lately—I mean that the squad has never been impressive, but all of a sudden it started winning, and winning well.
Rugby is popular in Ireland, and especially popular at Trinity, where two large pitches (fields) take up the center of campus. It is not, however, the most popular sport, or even the second most popular. The winner and runner up are two uniquely Irish sports: Gaelic football and hurling.
During the Semester Start Up Programme, I was fortunate enough to go on a tour of Croke Park, the stadium that hosts the Gaelic Games. Four sports are primarily played at Croke Park: Gaelic football, men’s and women’s, hurling, and camogie, women’s hurling. The All-Ireland finals for these sports take place on Sundays in September, and are the biggest sporting events of the year—without question. Let me use the men’s Gaelic football as an example.
To give you an idea of the scale of this match and what’s at stake for the winning and losing teams, I will offer up the Superbowl as an example—but the metaphor is only skin deep. This year, the match was between Kerry and Dublin. These two teams have a long history: they had competed in final matches against each other eleven times before, most recently in 1985. Of those meetings, Kerry took home the Sam Maguire cup eight times; Dublin, three. Kerry are the Patriots or the Yankees of Gaelic Football—they have won 36 finals in their history, making them the most successful Gaelic football team. Dublin, with 22 championship wins, are the second most successful team.
Unlike in the US, where a Houstonian might actually be a Dallas Cowboys fan, people from Kerry only support the Kerry team, and Dubliners will only ever support Dublin. You support the team of the place you’re from. Additionally, all the players on the Kerry team are from Kerry, and all the players on the Dublin team are actually from Dublin—there is no notion of trading players between teams. This is universal among all the Gaelic Games clubs (i.e., this goes for hurling and camogie as well). The clubs are very much rooted in the communities they represent.
This is no accident. The GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) was founded to promote Irish sports and is nationalist in attitude; that is, it supports the island of Ireland becoming a whole nation rather than being divided into Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom) and the Republic of Ireland (its own country). Thus, attending a match at Croke Park is a uniquely Irish experience, and the GAA would have it no other way.
So, had I been lucky enough to get a ticket to the Gaelic Football final, I would have donned my Dublin jersey (since I live in Dublin) and headed to the stadium on the north side of the River Liffey. Croke Park is the third largest stadium in Europe, and the GAA bought the land for the stadium in 1913. The stadium went through extensive renovation between 1995 and 2005, and impressively, the GAA owes no debt on the building. (Our tour guide joked that it’s probably the only building in Ireland that’s totally paid for.) On game day, the atmosphere in the stadium would be fantastic: fans all the way from Kerry in the southwest and from every corner of Dublin would be out to support their counties.
The teams would walk onto the pitch, and the crowd would go wild. And here I will point out another difference from sports in the USA: every single one of the GAA players is an amateur—they’re all unpaid volunteers. When you’re used to athletes making millions of dollars, the thought of a squad that plays solely for the love of the game and hometown pride is mind-boggling. That star forward could be your history teacher; the goalkeeper, your mailman. Or your uncle. Or your brother, dad, cousin. Just a normal guy, living a normal life, playing Gaelic football in front of 82,300 people (plus the rest of Ireland, watching on TV). Unthinkable.
But unfortunately, I did not score a ticket to the All-Ireland Gaelic football final. I watched it on TV in a pub next to college with a Bulmer’s and a friend. Naturally, the entire pub was supporting Dublin, including two middle-aged men in front of us. Things looked grim for a while, but first, allow me to explain the game.
Think soccer, but players can handle the ball. They can even carry it, but they must bounce it off the their toe or the ground every certain number of steps. Scoring is in either ones or threes: teams get awarded one point for putting the ball through the top of an H-shaped goal, but players earn three points if they get the ball into the net below the crossbar.
And then the violence! Picture American football, without helmets or any pads. It’s pretty brutal, almost gladiatorial to watch. (In hurling, which is played with a small, baseball-like ball called a sliothar and a wooden bat called a hurley, they wear helmets but no pads. In the final this year, one of the referees actually got his nose broken!)
This year, the match was a good game. Kerry scored first, but Dublin led by one point at halftime. The score: Kerry, 1-02 (total five points), Dublin, 0-06. Kerry overtook Dublin in the second half, and their score steadily climbed until they were four points ahead with only ten minutes left to go. With six minutes left, Dublin scored a goal (3 points), and a one-pointer two minutes later, tying up the score. In literally the last ten seconds of the game, Dublin scored off a penalty kick to secure the championship. Our middle-aged friends, who had powered down a few pints each over the course of the seventy-minute game (short, I know!) went nuts—hollering, dancing, hugging anyone and everyone.
As a visitor, I found it refreshing to see sports doing what they were always meant to do: unite individual communities and bring together the entire country in some friendly competition that has a long history in its cultural past. The GAA’s mission has not been lost in making profits or selling ads at ridiculous premiums (the teams do have corporate sponsors, but the entire match was broadcast interruption-free). All the money the GAA made from ticket sales goes back to the clubs—clubs that organize on a local level (towns) and have teams for all ages.
Needless to say, Dublin went nuts that night in celebration. Well, let’s be honest, the celebration started immediately after the match. In Doyle’s, the bartender stapled a Dublin flag above the bar, and I toasted the middle-aged men in front of me. We all raised our glasses to the big win, trying not to spill Guinness as we echoed Dublin’s slogan: Up the Dubs!
