cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand year old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall, his was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss. A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot. Irishness lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little. A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirt and little tashes, red faces, little slit eyes. Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly
The Informal Urchin-gurrier Choir of Hill 16 Gaelic Sports
Gaelic football is very much like rugby except the players’ bodies are smaller, their legs are bigger and their hair curlier. Until these travels, my only experience of the sport had been from fading posters in pubs showing hard-looking blokes with big squashed noses and heavy shoulders staring at the camera in the way they would if someone was eyeing up their wife or their tractor. All I could tell about the tactics was that one of the big lads would get hold of the football, belt it upfield, a crowd of big lads would chase after it and jump up in the air trying to catch it. The biggest lad would achieve this, to a great roar from the crowd, then boot it between the posts for a point.
Actually, the tactics and various styles of Gaelic football are far too numerous to mention here – sometimes, for instance, they will hand tap the ball to a teammate who then kicks it upfield to the big lad, roar from crowd, boot, point etc. Like Americans at baseball and gridiron, the Irish are world champions at all Gaelic sports. No-one else can touch them because no-one plays the stuff. So the All-Ireland champs could call themselves the World champs but, unlike their American cousins, the Irish are naturally more modest. In the last few years, however, this Gaelic monopoly has been challenged by a sleek, fast, tight-trousered new opponent in the shape of Australia. The method? The Gaelic Football-Australian Rules hybrid called Compromise Rules.
The games started up in 1984 (and a mini series is played regularly now) as a means of addressing the obvious similarities between Gaelic Football and Australian Rules. The latter, a late-eighteenth-century invention, takes many of its elements from Gaelic Football. In GF you get three points for a goal – i.e. in the net – and one for kicking the ball between the posts – like a combination of football and rugby. Hand passing is allowed but the mainstay is kicking a round ball. No tackles are allowed but you can block. In AR it’s three between the main posts, one for the outer sticks. Tackles are allowed. Marks (free kicks) are made when you catch the ball cleanly. It’s an oval ball. Compromise Rules seems to be 80–90 per cent Gaelic Football.
Sarah once took me to one of these compromise games at Croke Park, the cathedral of Gaelic sports. We walked from O’Connell Street then down Parnell Street in the north side, past flats and small seen-better-days terraced houses, kids sitting on steps with skinny dogs, little inflatable plastic footballs by their side. People were staggering around in the streets, shitfaced drunk and with huge grins on their faces. Most of the crowd I was following got in as students, although they looked as if they hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom for at least ten years. Inside I marvelled at the faces – thick-set, dark-browed, big noses, broken noses or wiry and ginger. Dublin shirts were prominent but there were also Galway, Clare, Ofally, Kilkenny and Waterford fans there too. It was a blustery afternoon and I was near the back left corner of Hill 16, the most celebrated terrace in Ireland.
Gaelic footballers dress in normal sports gear. Aussie Rules players wear underpants and tight fitting disco vests. ‘It’s so no-one can grab them and pull them over,’ said an Australian doctor I talked to.
‘No, it’s so they can show off their muscles to the crowd, isn’t it?’
‘No, no, no, you’re wrong, it’s a very practical outfit for contact sports.’
‘Like picking up dockers in backstreet gay bars?’
‘Hey, don’t knock it.’
Disappointingly for the crowd, the Aussie players weren’t wearing their trademark swimming trunks and skin-tight T-shirts but were in regular gear. The Irish players all had little bodies and big red legs – the Australians were all shapes and sizes, some stringbean, some squat, some normal, some athletic, some brawny – with a few surfer haircuts around.
The game started at a madly fast pace. Everyone agreed it was exciting to watch. Ireland dominated and, when they went twenty points up, the feeling was that it was going to be a bit of an embarrassing final scoreline. Behind the canal end, which at the time of writing has been knocked down, I could see rows and rows of terraced houses and behind that the Dublin mountains. It was a beautiful urban scene. Many big sports stadiums are now being moved to out-of-town sites, but their constituency will always be the heart of the city.
As the wind blew in our faces, the sounds of Irish voices came drifting down from the back of Hill 16. An informal Gurrier Choir, an ensemble made up of local grubby-faced urchins and midget wiseguys (though some of them might have been out-of-work jockeys) had perched itself high at the back of the stand and was responding to any Australian resistance in that part of the ground like a highly effective and ruthless military unit. Two portly Australian fans just a few rows further down had been spotted.
‘Skippeeeeee, skippeeeeeeeee Skippeeeee the bush kangaroo. Skippeeeeee, skippeeeeeeeee Skippeeeee my friend and yours too.’
One of the Aussies shouted ‘Come on Australia!’ Quick as a flash an urchin shouted out in a mangled Neighbours-style accent, ‘Cam on Awwstayyylyah … h aha ha ya fat Aussie bastard!’ As the Irish Tourist Board might say, one hundred, thousand welcomes.
Ireland were thrashing them. I’ll admit I started to get quite excited. All I can recall about Australian sportsmen over the last few years is them pummelling English rugby and cricket teams into the ground. Now they were getting pummelled. I thought about the losses at sport and the stereotypes of national characteristics. The English are Anglo-Saxon, slow-moving, cautious but well organised and focused. (If sport is, as some commentators suggest, a metaphor for warfare, is that how the Angles and Saxons fought their battles?) The Irish are ferocious and gung-ho. The Scots fast, skilful and angry. The Welsh pessimistic but mercurially skilled. The Australians ultra-competitive and athletic. And I suppose, if we’re going to really follow this through logically, the French are seductive and the songs they sing in the showers after the match don’t scan properly.
After the end of the second quarter, the refs made love. They must have done – and the gestation period for a young ref1 must be about fifteen minutes – because by the third quarter there were four refs on the pitch. Either they rubbed up against one another and went for it big time or maybe they are like those one-celled organisms which simply split in two to carry out the reproductive process. If the game had gone into fifth and sixth quarters the number of refs would no doubt have increased exponentially. This is the reason why these games have to stop after the fourth quarter. Also, refs do go on reproducing. This means that at the end of every game there has to be a ref cull. Refs are given a lethal injection in the dressing room. The danger for Irish society is if these refs escape into the wild and start to over-run the hillsides,
