“She’s handsome, she is pretty, She’s the girl from Belfast City …”
Two grey-haired crusties are twanging out the old folk tune on a banjo and a guitar, amid a general uproar that includes shouted slogans and victory chants by a crowd of marching schoolboys decked out in blue and white.
But the three of us are not in the shadow capital of Belfast. We are in Dublin, outside Ireland’s Wembley, Met or Eden Gardens — Croke Park.
The Royal Canal swirls past the stadium, a futuristic 17-storey palace of steel trusses, bracing members, purlins and raking columns that is the stronghold of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Gaelic sport. This includes hurling, the country’s oldest, fastest, most dangerous and second most popular spectator sport. The excitement is tangible.
One survey found that it is watched by a quarter of the population, with Gaelic football outstripping it at 34%, association football coming in third at 16% and rugby union a distant fourth at 8%. It is played throughout the Irish diaspora, especially in the US.
This afternoon, men and women of all ages throng Croke Park’s echoing concrete tunnels, together with a scattering of noisy, careering, bright-eyed nippers.
We buy beer from the stores at the stadium entrance, only to discover — against expectations in a hard-drinking country — that alcohol is banned inside the grounds.
With 45 minutes to go before the throw-in, we drink up in the affable company of Jimmy Loonam, a man from County Offaly, who drove more than an hour to watch his boys cross hurley sticks with Laois (pronounced “leash”) in the final of the Joe McDonagh Cup.
A yearly inter-county contest for teams ranked 12 to 17 in the All-Ireland Senior Championships, the cup forms the second tier of senior hurling.
This afternoon, it is raising the curtain for the provincial final between Dublin and the hurling superpower, Kilkenny. But GAA sport is all about intense local patriotism and Loonam seems to have little interest in the main event.
He explains that Offaly (Uibh Faihli before the English colonists mangled the name) has never won the McDonagh cup and last won the seniors 26 years ago.
An ancient Celtic pursuit linked to the arts of war-making and mythical warriors such as Cu Chulainn, hurling was repeatedly banned by the English and nearly died out after the Great Famine.
It was revived and formalised in the late 1800s as part of the Gaelic renaissance that fed the swelling tide of the independence war.
During the struggle of 1919 to 1921, British troops tagged hurling “the Irish Republican Army at play”. They notoriously fired on Gaelic football supporters at Croke Park on “Bloody Sunday”, in an apparent revenge massacre that left 14 dead, including three children and a bride-to-be. (See sidebar)
The ground is as Loonam described it — a rectangle longer and wider than a rugby field with rugby posts at both ends, crossbars surmounting football-style nets.
To score a goal for three points, the sliotar, the yellow, leather-bound, cork-centred ball, must be whacked past the keeper into the net. A strike above the bar through the uprights earns a single point.
Doing the striking is the hurley — a hip-high ashwood stick with a curved, spatulate end (bas) used both for carrying the ball and hitting it for distances of up to 110m at speeds of up to 150km/h.
The first thing that grabs the newcomer is the stratospheric height attained by defensive strikes, which seem to overtop the 17-storey stadium.
Then there is the furious sprinting of the attackers, who try to balance the sliotar on their hurleys while besieged by markers in every sector who swat at the ball with their sticks and shoulder-charge them. (Holding and tripping, though, are not allowed.)
In theory, it is possible to run the length of the field in this way, but facing a 15-man side (including six defenders) it rarely happens for long.
An airborne sliotar can be caught but held in the hand for no more than four paces. It must also be hand-passed — struck with an open, free hand — rather than thrown. (In the match programme there is much huffing and puffing about the “modern scourge” of throwing passes and referees’ soft line on this abuse.)
Goals, we discover, are about as frequent as in football and the scoreline expresses this by stating them first: in our game, 1-13 (Offaly) played 0-15 (Laois) after the first half of 35 minutes.
This is a brutal game — 40% of the sports injuries treated in Irish hospitals come from hurling. Since 2011, helmets and facemasks have been mandatory, but shin-guards are not, and lower-limb injuries are common.
Cricket-style genital protectors are also not required, exposing players to “blunt scrotal trauma”.
But given the long list of dos and don’ts, there are surprisingly few stoppages — the rules seem to have become part of the players’ DNA.
The confrontation between Offaly in green, white and gold and Laois in blue and white is a tense affair.
Offaly, which we are supporting purely on the strength of our acquaintance with Jimmy Loonam, pulls clear of the opposition but is reeled in on 11 occasions.
At half-time the women in front of us look strained. Offaly’s two-point lead “is not good for us”, one laments.
What keeps Laois in the chase is its regular stream of single-point conversions from every angle; its undoing is the two goals netted by its opponents within seconds of the referee’s throw-in at the start of both halves.
The first is a thing of grace, hitting the top right corner of the Laois net.
With 20 minutes to go, it opens up daylight between the sides, which now stand at 2-19 to 0-18. But Laois bounces back.
For the terraces around us, the four minutes of extra time are a lengthening elastic string of hope and dread as Laois presses again and again for a winner.
But Offaly hangs in with a few single-pointers of its own. At the final whistle, it keeps a razor-thin margin of 2-23 to 0-26. All around us, joy unbounded …
The Gaelic Football Association
In early 2007, the Gaelic Football Association (GAA) made a highly significant gesture when it allowed the playing of “foreign sports” — football and rugby — at Dublin’s Croke Park stadium for the first time in its 123-year history.
The GAA was founded specifically to promote the Gaelic sports of hurling camogie (hurling for women), Gaelic football and women’s football.
It was approached to throw open its gates when the standard venue for rugby and association football, Dublin’s Lansdowne Road, was closed for redevelopment.
The GAA’s resistance to “foreign” pastimes hardened on 21 November 1920 when British forces, spearheaded by the notorious Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, fired on a 5 000-strong crowd gathered for a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, killing 14.
The massacre, still remembered in Ireland, was a decisive event in the Irish War of Independence which further besmirched the British occupiers.
It followed a string of assassinations of British operatives by a secret unit called “the Squad” under the command of Irish Republican Army intelligence head Michael Collins.
The British forces at Croke Park said they had been shot at — a claim accepted by a subsequent British inquiry but not borne out by key witnesses.
They compounded the massacre by blocking all exits to the stadium, precipitating deadly, panic-stricken crushes.
The British commander, a Major Mills, described the security forces as “excited and out of hand”, adding: “I did not see any reason for firing at all.”
The GAA’s policy reversal was seen as a gesture of reconciliation to the many Irish people who play non-indigenous field sports.
Although Gaelic sports command more spectator interest, in the early 2000s association football had the highest levels of participation, at 8.8% of the population, compared to Gaelic football at 3.4%.
