The name Marx is not one readily associated with GAA matters, muses An Fear Rua …
You will search in vain the lists of All Ireland medal holders for a Paddy Marx or a Gerry Marx. Many fans will argue, however, that the spirit of the late Groucho Marx often hovers over Croke Park and other ‘units’ of ‘Dis Great Assosheeayshun Of Ours’ when decisions are being taken or games are being played. We have chronicled some of these already in detail on our Speak Out!’ Discussion Board (see Previous Related Topics below).

No, the Marx we have in mind this week is that kindly looking old gent, with the flowing grey beard, now safely buried under a big slab of granite in Highgate cemetery in London… Karl Marx, author of ‘Das Kapital’, ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and described in a classic Monty Python sketch as ‘The Father of Modern Communism’. While he may never have swung a camán or punted a football, the same Marx took a deep interest in Irish affairs at a vital time in our history, he wrote about it extensively and was reputed to be in close contact with the Fenian leadership. He is more famous world-wide, however, for his doctrine of ‘economic determinism’ – the proposition that, in the end, everything in life is subject to, and determined by, the economic forces at work. In his ‘Manifesto’, he reduced all this to a classic, titanic struggle between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

A glance at the ‘ofeeshal’ programme for the recent international games at Croke Park may help to illuminate the point under discussion. If, in a forthcoming edition of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire ?’, Old Uncle Greybo Himself asks you to name a country whose economy is dominated by the growing of trees in remote rural areas, turning these into sticks of furniture, with a little bit of sheep farming on the side and where copious amounts of electricity are generated to keep all this going … for £64,000 pounds would you reply ‘Scotland’ ? Yet, of the eighteen members of the Scottish shinty team who played in Croke Park recently, no fewer that eleven of them were ‘joiners’ or were involved in the generation or transmission of electricity! The rest included a landscape gardener and a shepherd/gamekeeper. (Poacher turned gamekeeper is, of course, a familiar concept in GAA circles). Hardly the profile of a modern, developed economy.

By contrast, let’s look at the Irish football team (hurling ‘occupations’ were not given, but shouldn’t be much different). The biggest category – thirteen - was people in ‘management’ positions, followed by seven ‘teachers/students’, four in the public service and two self-employed. The rest were scattered over trades likes welding and plumbing, but they included a ‘joiner’ and an electrician, just to make the Scots feel at home. This line-up of occupations is what AFR would term a ‘Celtic Tiger’ team – in economic terms only – their football was more pussycat than tiger. The spread of occupations, the emphasis on ‘white collar’ occupations, is a big change from the Ireland of even twenty years ago and it underlines this country’s recent economic surge compared with Scotland’s relatively more troubled economy.

It seems pretty clear shinty is confined to the more economically backward parts of West Scotland where furniture, sheep and electricity are the main economic products. The team’s average age was much higher than Ireland and, despite the best efforts of An Cumann Camanachadh, it’s hard to be optimistic about the long-term future of the game. In contrast, Gaelic football – and even hurling – are much more widespread geographically and both games are based in a burgeoning economy. Just as the Celtic Tiger is wreaking such a profound transformation in many aspects of Irish life, so also will it bring changes in the GAA as well. Fortunately, ‘D’Assosseeayshun’ is trying to get ahead of this by setting the Strategic Review Committee (SRC) under the astute chairmanship of the former Uachtarán CLG, Peter Quinn.

The strength of hurling, for example, has long been based on the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Irish agriculture - Tipperary, Kilkenny and Cork - with bits of Limerick, Waterford and Wexford thrown in. Agriculture as practised in the heyday of Ring, Langton, Mackey and Doyle is now obsolete… ‘Now Cork are ‘bate’ and the hay is saved…’ The new ‘Golden Triangle’ of Ireland stretches from Dundalk west to Mullingar and south to Greystones, encompassing counties Louth, Meath, Westmeath, Kildare, Dublin and Wicklow and touching parts of Offaly and Carlow. This is the heart of the Celtic Tiger, based on huge and sophisticated inward investment by ‘high tech’ multinationals. The sons and daughters of the farmers of the Golden Vale now work in the likes of Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Kodak and Hewlett-Packard.

This is the part of Ireland where population and prosperity is growing rapidly, while other parts of the country are in relative decline. If Marx’s doctrine is to be believed – that changing economic circumstances, in turn, alter political and social forces – then GAA power on the playing fields will increasingly pass from The Golden Vale and the West to the new economic powerhouses of mid-Leinster. It may take ten years for this to happen, but it surely will.

An Fear Rua respectfully suggests to Peter Quinn and the lads and lassies on the SRC that they will find it better to ‘go with the flow’ of these enormous economic and demographic changes than to try to stand in their way, King Canute-like. The ArdStiúrthóir Himself, Liam Ó Maoilmhichíl, has recognised that radical solutions will be needed in the face of demographic changes, even though his suggestion a few months back of merging so-called ‘weaker’ counties for inter-county competition might be a bit daft. But, for example, in an Ireland where there is increasing population movement away from people’s native places – for education and/or employment – and, indeed, a strong inward flow of immigrants, does a GAA organisational model based on the Roman Catholic parishes of the Nineteenth Century make any real sense going forward ? These are the kinds of issues of issues that will have to be fundamentally examined.

If Peter and the SRC get it right, then the GAA may avoid the truth of Marx’s saturnine dictum that ‘history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce …’ and instead remain ‘the opium of the masses’…