“Every four or eight years, Ireland is forced to rally round young men from this class…”
I want to come back to the Olympic theme in more detail both here on Slugger and elsewhere. But this piece by Fintan O’Toole is worth flagging up for the pure politics of it, than anything to do with sport. The Ross O’Carroll-Kellys of elite Equestrianism failed to deliver, whilst the frequently maligned urban working classes once again provided the country with its only Olympic medal glory (boosted partly by the strange failure of the US and Cuba).
As so often in the past, national pride was salvaged by those of whom the nation generally feels least proud: young, working class men from marginalised communities. While the horsey set, with all their money and self-regard, were making a show of us yet again, the competitors who demonstrated honesty and discipline, pride and passion, were from the invisible Ireland that is represented only in court reports.
And:
Kenny Egan’s north Clondalkin, for example, is almost literally a non-place. It is the product, not of democratic planning, but of the shenanigans that are the subject of the Mahon tribunal. Its “town centre” is a shopping centre that most locals can’t afford to patronise. The struggle to turn it into a home has been harsh: a decade ago, when Egan was starting to box, an astonishing 57 per cent of those aged between 14 and 23 in north Clondalkin had experienced homelessness.
This is an Ireland largely bypassed by the glossy high-tech economy. Just 6 per cent of its men and 5 per cent of women have a third-level education. Even now, there’s a 30 per cent chance of a child leaving primary school with serious literacy problems and a 50-50 chance of even sitting a Leaving Certificate.
There are no silver medals for north Clondalkin in the deprivation stakes – it scores 10 out of 10 in the economist’s index. Yet, there’s more to this story than deprivation – there’s the struggle against it.
And he believes the dominant narrative in the Irish media about this ‘underclass’ is faintly somatic and comforting to the easy affluence of the chief beneficiaries of the Celtic Tiger years:
It finds it convenient when young men from the working class reservations live up to the stereotypes, when they wear hoodies and white socks and throw shapes and sip cans of Dutch Gold lager on the back seat of the bus. The threatening signals allow for the maintenance of a reassuring distance. These people are stupid and crude and potentially violent, and it’s best to stay out of their way.
But “every four or eight years, Ireland is forced to rally round young men from this class and adopt them as our great national hopes”:
We get to hear them speak in their guttural urban accents – and discover that they have something to say for themselves. We get to meet their families – oddly enough, they’re nice, decent people. The cameras are brought into their homes – which turn out to be strangely clean and bright and comfortably furnished. We find, rather disturbingly, that a place like north Clondalkin is full of people with the same aspirations and ambitions as everybody else and that some of its young men make far better representatives for the country than their supposed social betters.
Boxing matters to these young men because it creates a world in which hard things are expected of them. Violence is controlled, restrained and sublimated. Wildness is the ultimate sin and discipline the ultimate virtue. Bodily power is nothing without intelligence.
Manliness is asserted, not by bullying, but by behaving honourably and respectfully towards an opponent inside the ring and, outside it, by a stoical acceptance of defeat and even of unfairness. Above all, boxing is a fatherly culture. Older men – trainers and mentors – treat younger men like sons, giving them the benefit of their own experiences and receiving, in turn, the gift of being listened to. And the young men learn, in the process, not just how to box, but how to be fathers themselves. They learn about encouragement and discipline, about cajoling and warning, about the ways in which different generations can talk to each other.
Boxing does for these young men, in other words, what education and community and society ought to do but don’t. It treats them as people who can achieve very tough things, not just in sport but in learning to be a man. It gives them respect and demands in return that they respect themselves. It defines them as individuals – in few sports is the competitor quite so nakedly alone – but it also creates its own family and its own community. It has no time for self-indulgent victimhood. It both teaches and recognises the dignity that is won in struggling against unfavourable circumstances
.
If you had a tune you could sing to that. And yet, ironically, it would not be far from the one nation Tory revivalism of David Cameron. Yet, perhaps, if Irish Labour (or any of the opposition parties) is listening, that might be the route to go in a mixed economy which in its understandable dash towards prosperity has lost track of just who provides the bedrock of the industrious new Republic.
Reconnecting the bottom with the top may be an old Tory tactic, but it’s an obvious counterpunch to the semi-permanent and highly expedient governance of Fianna Fail & Co.
Mick
Who’s supposed to me the Tory here: you or me? I do wish you would make up your mind!
)
Few people are ideologically pure. If the Government should be involved in an area, they should be in as deep as they need, even if it means Nationalisation. If they aren’t, they should stay the hell out of it. I just can’t see how for the life of me how this is an area appropriate for the government to be driving, unless you have some huge amount of national pride invested in it or are a Authoritarian regime looking for distraction.
Plus, even if I sometimes hold right wing views, I know my heart is still beating and so can’t be a Tory.
Your original point was simply putting words into other’s mouths. Original it may be, but it doesn’t give me a lot to respond to Ken.
It really wasn’t. I stated exactly what I got off it. Words communicate ideas. I have been struggling to find the correct word to describe the sentiment, but it hit me on the way home: contempt.
The state is amply summed up in Blink, extract here:
http://www.enotalone.com/article/3938.html
The dismissal of Irish sporting culture as simply “ole ole” is contemptuous. I never like it.
I see you ducked the issue raised by McGonagle last December. €3.5 Million is not a lot of public money, but it’s meant to preserve GAA’s amateur status in the face of an onslaught from Aussie Rules. According to McGonagle it was a case of robbing Olympic Peter to pay GAA Paul. Funding for AI went down in an Olympics year.
Haven’t realised I’d ducked the issue. The GAA is of much more long term value for Ireland than Olympic sport. It is embedded in communities and has links and facilities that would cost three fortunes to build up. If they need the money, give it to them ahead of anyone else.
Is it worth it? Maybe it will prove to be. But given the code is in a long term tussle with a larger commercial predator, I suspect it is only postponing the inevitable. It is not clear to me why the richest football code on the island cannot find a market solution to what boils down to a commercial problem.
I don’t know, a few successful transfers isn’t enough for a crisis. Yet. Australia is also a bigger move than the UK, and it isn’t the same game. Enough money will do the trick eventually, obviously but I think the GAA will be resistant for a while yet.
Would a professional game command the same loyalty at all levels? Would those interested in the cash be more likely to take up soccer or rugby? Would it result in a concentration in cash that means the top grounds become better, but the grassroots clubs suffer? Or would a rising tide lift all boats? It’s hard to say.
Public funds are often most effective in building capacity where there would otherwise be a market failure. By no stretch of the imagination can the GAA be seen as a market failure.
This isn’t really about “market failure” though. What outcomes do you want? If you want more Olympic medals, you can get them. Is that really what you is desired though? I find it madness. The GAA have facilities and clubs throughout Ireland. Ensuring they are well funded ensures access. A national game also helps with tourism and the GAA is certainly a force for social cohesion in the South, at least. Investing in it also gives the Irish Government some leverage with the association that they really haven’t pressed that much. A smart move might be to predicate higher funding for some opening of facilities for wider access.
Do you want to encourage grass roots level sports and try and get people more active? You’re better investing in schools and leisure centre facilities, or paying the independent sporting bodies to open their facilities up. You might never get a medal out of it, though.
Money does go beyond the GAA too. The investment in rugby and soccer will produce another high quality stadium in Dublin, and improvements elsewhere. There is value added by it.
I’m not against investing in top level sport per se. It certainly does help boost national morale for a bit, and probably has some effect in encouraging people to take up more sport, but I’d wonder how much. But if they want public money, I think the drive should be coming from them and not government – they should all be planning grassroots level programmes, high performance programmes, infrastructure development and demonstrating they are a public good. If they did they’d find a lot more political support for giving them more money.
Mick
Like ken and Paddy’s rough consensus on my status as a Tory/Tory shill (delete as appropriate), they are worthless assertions without any kind of a backing argument.
If anyone wants evidence that you are black hearted Tory, then I simply refer them to Brassneck over the course of the last year. If you don’t think you’re a Tory your deluding yourself.
But not a shill. Plenty of other examples of those on Brassneck too. It doesn’t materially change the necessity of finding solid argument. It simply disappoints me.
Indeed Sammy, the usual spittle flecked response that my posts seem to elicit from you
Then learn to do sarcasm better… it doesn’t always come over on the internet.
…and there are people who suggest that Jewish success in finance and the media is due to genetically provided high intelligence. Richard Lynn, for example.
ken,
Two things before I close on this thread.
Government in this specific case was not supporting sport, but participating in a scheme that allows the GAA to tell itself and its members that the code is still amateur from top to bottom. The elephant in the room is that government chose to intervene and make the Olympic sports in a competitive year pay for it. The willing forgetters, like yourself, only make it easier for government to do what they bloody well like, without ever having to explain what they what they’ve done with the state’s limited resources.
Two. The Tory thing is a piece of imaginative (not to mention vituperative) nonsense (although I’ve not the least objection to being thought of as a Tory). Your assertion that I am not a shill is about as credible as Paddy’s lame assertion that I am. As you rightly say, “it doesn’t materially change the necessity of finding solid argument”. Ah, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose! At least Paddy had the decency to do his usual disappearing trick when caught out pushing a fraudulent line.
Mick,
I pointed out that FOT (an avowed feminist) had written a piece extolling the virtues of manliness,controlled agression,mentoring,fatherhood etc.
To put this in a Northern context.
it would not stretch things to describe this as Ian Paisely making a Tiocfaidh Ar La speech in Crossmaglen.
My point was exactly WHO was making the point on masculintity etc.
I fully agree with the main thrust of FOTs analysis of the benefits of a boxing lifestyle for a young man.
It is precisely becuase,in the past, FOT has been so against propenets of such a view (eg John Waters) that was, for me, worthy of comment.
That isnt playing the man imo.
Mick
Government in this specific case was not supporting sport, but participating in a scheme that allows the GAA to tell itself and its members that the code is still amateur from top to bottom.
They intervened to help avert a crisis in the national sports that threatened the Championship, and for a change that was lobbied for by the GPA for over 5 years.
The elephant in the room is that government chose to intervene and make the Olympic sports in a competitive year pay for it. The willing forgetters, like yourself, only make it easier for government to do what they bloody well like, without ever having to explain what they what they’ve done with the state’s limited resources.
I imagine that in other years, they’d have found the extra cash from somewhere else. Here is the explanation given, by the by:
Rationale
Our Senior Inter-County players provide the window through which our National Games are viewed nationally and internationally. It is recognised that the successful teams prepare and train to the highest international standards for team sports and that the current scheme of tax relief for professional sports people cannot be applied to Gaelic players because of their amateur status. The Minister therefore, via the Irish Sports Council, in consultation with the GAA and the GPA, intends to introduce schemes to recognise the outstanding contribution of Gaelic Inter-County players to our indigenous sport, to meet additional costs associated with elite team performance and to encourage aspiring teams and players to reach the highest levels of sporting endeavour. These schemes will be based specifically on Championship participation, the GAA’s blue riband competitions, commencing at the end of the National Leagues, and will operate as follows:
It’s hardly a hard sell unless you believe it fundamentally changes the amateur nature of the game. It could well be the thin edge of a wedge where the sport should really get it’s own money, but that as you point out, is not a great deal.
Two. The Tory thing is a piece of imaginative (not to mention vituperative) nonsense (although I’ve not the least objection to being thought of as a Tory). Your assertion that I am not a shill is about as credible as Paddy’s lame assertion that I am.
Wrong. If you are not a Tory, you do as good an impression on Brassneck as to make no difference. It is vituperative, though. I immensely dislike both the Tory and Republican parties. I know you know that, and I equally know you don’t care. Bit of light hearted windup, Mick.
At least Paddy had the decency to do his usual disappearing trick when caught out pushing a fraudulent line.
As I said, not fraudulent. And I don’t tend to run from a debate.
Watching the DNC from Denver. I’m done here.