Deep down, everyone knows that if the smart lads of the GAA were tasked with running what we gamely refer to as the Irish State, there is a fair chance that things would turn out okay for us all. True, we would not all have partied quite so much, at least not before a motion to do so had been strenuously debated and then passed by a two-thirds majority. But the grittier stuff like the health service, the nutso-housing issue, the ailing national pension fund and “Saturday Night with Ray” would be mere putty in the hands and minds of the combined GAA secretariat. They have a knack for knowing what to do. The GAA would not only have burned the bondholders; they would have had them out collecting for the U-8s in Scotstown on the first Sunday of the McKenna Cup.
Right now, the Dublin county board is like the super-athlete of the GAA's administrative division. John Costello does not run around as flamboyantly as Hannibal in the A-Team of old, lighting up a Cuban and glorying in the latest success but it's clear that he loves it when a plan comes together. It's hard to pinpoint precisely when exactly is started but, sometime over the past decade, things began to go terribly right for the Dublin GAA and if someone does decide to chronicle the harnessing of the city game, then the only reasonable title would be: How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Southside.
The details of how all of this happened are hazy because in the last few years, the terms of engagement with the media became limited to clearly defined hours and consequently the Dublin GAA became a more remote organisation. Costello has overseen an operation relentlessly driven to problem-solving and then moving on. The Dublin senior football team became the front of house act for the values and culture of Dublin GAA as a force and what an advertisement; like an ongoing show in the Gaiety playing before a full house, 365 days of the year.
Once, the city’s football team had been a conundrum as successive generations of footballers failed to live up to the omnipotent aura created by Kevin Heffernan’s 1970s revolution. The speed with which that problem was solved has created a very specific sensation in Gaels and would-be competing counties. GAA people outside the city regard the Dublin football team with a conflicted feeling of admiration for the way they play it along with envy at their long run of success, fear that they may be uncatchable, resentment at the growing suspicion that they have all the financial and corporate advantages and, finally, resignation at not being able to produce a team capable of competing with them.
All of that has happened since 2009, when Pat Gilroy took over the football team, winning a first All-Ireland since 1995 just two years later. Confirmation that Gilroy has been this week installed as Dublin senior hurling manager has undoubtedly prompted an emergency meeting in the war rooms deep beneath the Marble City.
Imminent threat
The threat is real and imminent. Gilroy’s return to the sideline is like a declaration of intent. The next task for Dublin GAA is to put its senior hurling team on the same plateau as its footballers. It was Gilroy who implemented the titanium mentality within the football team, replacing the streaks of flash and peroxide with an essential toughness of mind and soul and, also, a kind of coldness. Those qualities were in place when Jim Gavin stepped in to apply the kind of precision engineering of coaching and ethos and an emphasis on the collective that is unlike anything the GAA has seen before. It is why some people are uncomfortable when watching Dublin now, as if they are less a GAA team and something dreamed up in the laboratories of Apple.
There is something hauntingly heart-of-the-matter about the observation made by Colm Cooper that no matter what you do when you play this Dublin team, they ignore you: “It’s as though you don’t exist.” What’s a team to do if they can’t even provoke the bit of hate or resentment? How better to nullify all the old enmities and rivalries than by behaving as if your opponent simply isn’t there?
The challenge now, for Dublin GAA is to establish the city’s bona fides as one of the leading hurling counties. Yes, hurling has always had its strongholds within the city and yes, it has its six pre-second World War All-Irelands and the renaissance of the county team under Anthony Daly’s passionate stewardship was a joy to behold. However, even as we watched that 2013 Leinster championship win, it was hard to escape the feeling that the project was fuelled by the Clare man’s unnatural levels of passion and emotion: that the players somehow conspired to produce that performance because they couldn’t bear the idea of looking “Dalo” in the eye if they lost. That’s all very fine for a one-off furnace of a season. But it is not the foundation on which to build a legacy and a tradition. It’s not logical or sustainable, which are the two qualities applied by the Dublin board in turning things around. And that’s where Gilroy comes in.
The immediate stories about the tussle for Dublin’s excellent dual players – Diarmuid Connolly and Ciarán Kilkenny among others – are good for fun and speculation. But they miss the point. As Gavin has demonstrated with repeated calculation, Dublin is not about any one individual. In fact, if music-head Kevin McManamon convinced Cian O’Sullivan, Con O’Callaghan and Michael Fitzsimons and to drop the aul’ gah-and-career lark so the four of them could go away and form the next great rock band (just four kids from the southside with a dream . . . ), well, they’d be missed for at least a month. And then Dublin would just keep on trucking. (That said, if they convinced James McCarthy that his true vocation lay in besting Stewart Copeland at drums, then all bets are off. McCarthy’s the exception which proves the rule).
Consistently competitive
It might take longer than two years for Gilroy’s hurlers to elbow their way into contention against a rejuvenated All-Ireland Galway squad, a smarting Tipp, a gathering Kilkenny. But the system will be put in place and Dublin hurling teams will become consistently competitive, then consistently good and finally consistently excellent. We may judge the Gilroy project on where the team finishes at the end of the 2018 or 2019 championship. Be sure that Costello and Gilroy himself will not: the state of the city hurling team in 2025 is the important thing.
The high-end of the GAA season will slip into ballgown and tuxedo mode for the next few months while the foot soldiers – the club players – finally get their day in the rain, battling through winter mud for county and provincial glory and trying to get it all done before darkness falls at four o’clock.
Meanwhile, the fixtures for next year’s inter-county season are out. The whole shebang starts up again almost as soon as the Christmas decorations have been boxed away. A January 27th double header in Croke Park featuring the Dublin hurlers and the All-Ireland football champions: that’s entertainment. It has become Dublin’s show because the GAA decided that the malfunctioning city team was a problem that needed sorting. That’s done now, which is just as well because once the Dubs really get motoring, the GAA is going to have 31 new problems on their hands. They have to leave running the country to the amateurs for a while yet.
