London in the Connacht Final is a Cause for National Celebration

London’s remarkable achievement in reaching this year’s Connacht Final means that the game on July 21st is now bigger than football. It’s no longer a sporting contest – it’s a unique occasion for the nation to stop and take stock, to celebrate what we did, make reparation for what we failed to do, and to look proudly to the future.

These opportunities don’t come along often in Recession Ireland, and we should make the most of them.

Firstly, the Connacht Council should get on the phone to the London Board first thing this morning and find a stadium to host the Connacht Final. They have three weeks, which is loads of time to cut a deal with one of the twenty stadia in London that have capacities of more than 10,000.

The tennis courts at Wimbledon or Queen’s club could be a bit delicate for football and we’re in the wrong time of year for the 30,000 capacity Lord’s Cricket Ground or the 23,000 Surrey Oval. Wembley or Twickenham are a bit on the big side but a stadium like White Hart Lane (36,000), Upton Park (35,000), Selhurst Park (26,000) or maybe even Loftus Road (19,000) should be considered.

This wouldn’t be cheap, of course, but in this year of The Gathering it would be interesting to see if the Government is willing to put its money where its mouth is and underwrite the operation.

Why go to the trouble? Because we, the nation, owe the Irish in London. We owe them big-style down the years and now that a unique opportunity has arisen, where an English team is playing a high-profile match in the most Irish of entities, the All-Ireland Championship, that gives us an opportunity to celebrate, remember and look forward.

This is a chance for a second Polo Grounds, and if it’s not grabbed it will be gone. But it’ll be bigger than the Polo Grounds in its way, because the Irish were always welcome in America. They were not always welcome in England – no blacks, no Irishmen, no dogs, as the signs often said.

And what was it like to be an emigrant? Well, it wasn’t great. Dónall Mac Amhlaigh wrote a poignant memoir of his time as a navvy in England in the 1950s, Dialann Deoraí, and he records a hard life with a surprising and noble absence of bitterness. Some Irish got on well in England – no sign of the famine on Graham Norton, and more power to him – but some found it a struggle.

And why wouldn’t they? All through their time in school the Irish of that forgotten ‘fifties generation were told that all Ireland’s woes were the fault of the English, the godless, heathen English. To suddenly find themselves in that same godless place, in a cold room in a terraced house that was as alien to them as pitching a tent on the moon – what on earth were they to do?

A lot became insular, and drank to ease the pain, as it was the only thing they knew how to do. They didn’t mix, because mixing would be an occasion of sin and this was, after all, a godless country. And they loyally sent money home, money that in part helped build the GAA and that very few of them ever saw again.

The Irish are emigrating again as the recession stalks the land, but it’s not the same. The world has gotten smaller. We know what the world is like since we were children, because we’ve seen it on the television.

But that lost generation of the 1950s hadn’t a clue. In this era of victims and survivors and compensation, who ever thinks of the innocent Irish who were turned from their own country and had to find a living in one that they had been taught to always think of as the enemy?

The country had its arm twisted during the Queen’s visit to believe that we’ve all moved on. Well, now let’s see Ireland’s greatest cultural association do its bit for the maturity of the nation.

Let emissaries go to London and spread the word that Gaelic games are coming to the city of Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, of Christopher Wren and Issac Newton, of David Beckham and Bobby Moore. Proclaim it through the host that it is the Irish nation’s shame that the emigrants where were nearest to us were furthest away, but that we now make reparation, and celebrate our brothers and sisters in England just as we do those in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and elsewhere.

This is bigger than football. Colm O’Rourke and Pat Spillane were sniggering on the Sunday Game yesterday about the prospect of London being in the Connacht Final. They don’t get it. They never get it. The GAA was never just about sports. It is about Ireland first, and the celebration of Irishness, that one strange thing that makes all Irish people so very different from anywhere else.

If the Gathering is anything other than the shakedown or an exercise in Paddy-whackery, the 2013 Connacht Final is an opportunity, Heaven-sent, for Ireland to send a cultural message in the other direction, to make the Gathering a two-way street. For once, let’s try to see the big picture. Up Mayo.

Where's Your Pride? The Problem with The Gathering

Gabriel Byrne’s visceral attack on The Gathering, the five million Euro tourism initiative which started last night outside the site of Grattan’s Parliament, touched a nerve in the country. Some people said Byrne was a begrudger. More said it was sour grapes on Byrne’s part that he wasn’t the head buck cat of the whole show himself.

But maybe the reason so many people remember Bryne’s attack in November, and why so many people are apprehensive about this whole Gathering project, is that it touched on a deep need and yearning in the soul of the nation.

What do the Irish want more than anything else? It used to be an Ireland united, Gaelic, and free, but at some stage in the past fifty years the twenty-six counties embraced partition as the natural order of things. We all would like to see a deal on the banking debt but we are now in the fifth stage of our fiscal grief – acceptance – and will be simply grateful for any easing of the yoke that our diplomats can wrangle. And at the personal level, we all have our own individual aims, from parents that want their kids to go to college to those poor souls who pray that their kids can somehow stay out of jail.

But the one thing that unites the nation is this: we all want to be proud of Ireland and of being Irish. A people who invented the notion of the hunger strike have nothing to learn about pride and how pride can be more important than life itself.

That’s why there was such a row over the singing when Ireland were getting slaughtered at Euro 2012 this summer. The Singers thought the signing reflected the spirit of the Indomitable Irishry, while the Silent thought the singing shamed the nation by portraying the Irish as happy victims instead of a warrior race raging to the last at cruel fate. But both sides of the argument were motivated by love of country; the only thing that divided them was how that love would be perceived abroad. The patriotism itself was never in doubt.

Which brings us to The Gathering. The idea itself is laudable, both as an acknowledgement to our huge emigrant population (which An Spailpín still insists should be described as a “deoraíocht” rather than a “diaspora,” by the way) and as a much-needed revenue source for one of our few indigenous industries, tourism.

But what’s worrying Gabriel Byrne and a lot of other people is how Ireland is being portrayed abroad by this particular jamboree. Does The Gathering portray an Ireland that is, in Pearse’s words, “august, despite her chains,” or an Ireland of hucksters and gombeens that is a cross between The Irish RM and Killnascully?

The early signs are not promising. The website is badly designed. The idea of a website as a venue for users to take over and make their is a good and modern one, and very much of the zeitgeist in terms of the social web. But it’s badly expressed and it’s not at all clear that that’s the purpose. The first language is also notable by its absence – there’s a little bit there, but certainly not of sufficient quantity to frighten the horses or suggest that we’re all that different from Bradford, Boston or Brisbane.

The chief worry about The Gathering is that it’s going to be cheap and make the nation look cheap in consequence. There’s a troubling section on the website called “I Love Ireland,” that contains a list of things that are meant to cause us to swell with pride. Your faithful narrator swelled with something else entirely on reading “25 things you never thought you’d miss about Ireland.” If that’s what Ireland is like, give me Syria every time. Horrible.

That list of twenty-five things is not who the Irish are. It can’t be. That’s the Irish as seen by the sort of pond life that buys those awful “Little Book of Your Mammy's Bloomers” books. Your correspondent wants no part of them, and doubts he is alone.

In 1916, an IRA battalion took command of St Stephen’s Green, which includes buildings owned by UCD. Liam Ó Briain describes the rebels’ forlorn attempts to barricade their position in his memoir of the Rising, Cuimhní Cinn, using materials found in the surrounding buildings. At one stage, a soldier found some big, old, thick books and suggested they be used in the barricade. Ó Briain recognised the books as copies of the Annals of the Four Masters. “We can’t use them,” he told the soldier. “If we’re fighting for anything, we’re fighting for those books.”

Tourists come to Ireland to have fun, not to read about long-dead monks or the works of those long-dead monks themselves. Of course they do. But at the same time, we should present ourselves as being more than the best little country in the world to get drunk. We should have it within us to realise it’s not all about money, and show some little bit of pride.