Travel writer Bill Bryson once had an idea to take a road trip through the history of Planet Earth. What resulted was his bestselling A Short History Of Nearly Everything. Reading it again lately, I found myself wondering if GAA President Jarlath Burns keeps a copy alongside his other essential bedtime reading like An Treoir Oifigúil or the 10th edition of the Disciplinary Handbook. There is a memorable section where Bryson describes 4,500billion years of life on earth condensed into a single 24 hours. “Life
begins very early, about 4am, with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next 16 hours,” he writes. “With less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures appear. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11pm and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. “Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds. A single
human lifetime, barely an instant.” It’s a dizzying vision of life at warp speed, and one you suspect would be wholeheartedly endorsed by a vote of GAA congress. The association in its wisdom has taken a cosmic wrecking ball to the slow ancient rhythms of the Irish summer with its breakneck new 16-week-long calendar. In truly D’Unbelievables style, it has decreed that its greatest treasures should get up as early as possible to have a good run at the day. Nothing captures it quite like
the frenetic 24-hour Big Bang blitz that starts from 3pm on the longest day of summer this Saturday. The mandarins have placed a shootout between the two favourites for the All-Ireland, Kerry and Armagh , behind a Killarney paywall and put the highlights on youtube in orde to screen the Ivory Coast playing at the World Cup (maybe they’ve mistaken the tricolour for our own like those July 12th bonfire builders). They’ve scheduled an eagerly awaited smackdown between Jim McGuinness’s Donegal and Ger Brennan’s Dublin
as a bit of light 1.15pm brunch, the morning after a 7pm twilight trip to Tipp for the capital’s hurlers. Meanwhile, will anyone notice that the best-supported team in the country – Cork’s hurlers – have a clash (that bookmakers peg them as 1/25 favourites to win) in the old primetime Sunday Game slot of 3.30pm? Apart from those, you will need a wormhole in the space-time continuum should you want to try catch sight of the footballers of Meath, Mayo, Westmeath or Monaghan –
while the off-Broadway Tailteann Cup will enjoy star billing at Croke Park and on the national airwaves. When the dust settles there will remain three games in the All-Ireland hurling season and three weekends of football, before Jones Road is surrendered to Bon Jovi, the Weeknd and Eddie Hearn. If the GAA did Bloomsday Ulysses would be a short story, a brisk stroll around the streets of Monto. If it was in charge of other national treasures it would run off the winter solstice at
Newgrange before the sun comes up in order to get everyone home in time for breakfast. The FAI should outsource the running of its game with Israel to Croke Park so no-one will notice it is happening. The GAA season has become the Ryanair of the Irish sporting calendar with lightning turnarounds and no frills. Which would all be well and good if it was just overseeing a calendar of games. But for many people it is much more than that. Those days of high
summer are their sacred third space where they commune together to feed from that well of identity and place that grounds them to life on earth. A report out this week from the anti-alcohol lobby group Drinkaware condescendingly branded the practice of middle-aged and elderly people – mainly men – gathering in pubs to discuss sport over a pint as an empty kind of “small talk”, one that is bad for their wellbeing when they should really be in cafes discussing emotions over lattes. They
fail to get that what they see as small talk others regard as the sacred stuff of connection. When the GAA shutters its main street shop window from July to February, it is also sending those connections into deep hibernation. But we won’t hold our breath for them to change course. Unless it is to replace the hurling championship with a Poc Fada shootout. And run the Sam Maguire off a as a few rounds of rock, paper, scissors. Subscribe to our newsletter for the
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GAA, 16-week calendar, Kerry, Armagh, Donegal, Dublin, Cork, Tailteann Cup, Sam Maguire, Sunday Game, Drinkaware, Irish sporting calendar