Unite, cosmuintir of the hurling world! You have nothing to lose but your nabobs!
REMEMBER how, when Corporate Park in all its pomp and spectacle was being mooted, or fanfared, assurances abounded that, as time went by, every aspect of the project would be most minutely dissected and debated? Time has gone by, all right, nearly a decade of it and has provided dissection and debate manifesting all the intellectual rigour and independence of the earth's orbit round the sun, or the bluebottle's orbit round the cowdung.

The ideal, ambition, resolve of the GAA's founders was to bring recreation, health, self-reliance and communal pride to the cosmuintir; in defiance of the usurpers and racists and their toadies and flunkies who monopolised and misgoverned every brand and branch of organised sport in the land. What the GAA's founders achieved is self-evident. But the methods and manner of the achievement the native genius and spirit of the meitheal: co-operation, service, voluntarism ah! there are pages to be torn from the history books and obliterated, if the "new" and "better" GAA is to be moulded in the image of the "successors" of Cusack and Davin.

When I was a garsún, both hurling fields in our parish were given free of charge, year after year, by their owners. What would the insiders of the Golden Circle, and the worshippers of the Golden Calf, have made of that? We routinely overloaded the cars of our few farmers and well-paid tradesmen, and never heard the word 'mileage'. The parish hall was built entirely by meitheal, in the early '50s. And, short years later, the oldest, 1845, school in the place was converted, by the same means, into another terrific community centre. None of that was exceptional; it was, if anything, commonplace, the length and breadth of the land.

Ten years since, the outlines of Corporate Park began to shift from the desks of sundry draughtsmen to the desks of persons 'behind the fluted columns of the Bank of Ireland, which lots thought was the Temple of the Holy Ghost, but that was all bankum, and it was a mighty den of highly respectable, and greatly honoured, thieves' as the literary and insightful Mr O'Casey once put it. By then the GAA had moved or had been "modernised" or misled far from the bedrock of its founders. The official GAA was a bedmate of Power, private and State. The GAA was preaching and practising sponsorships and endorsements and VIP boxes and premium seats and suchlike ordinances springing from the three sovereign commandments of the new state religion: Thou shalt magnify and obey no other god than 1 The Market; 2 Privatisation; 3 Globalisation.

Thus any critique of the Corporate Park project coming from outside the principles of the state religion became outright unthinkable or, at the very least, subject to stern interdict. You probably know how it works: to be respectable, the critics remain inside the framework of permissible thought; they restrict their critique to matters of tactics or percentages that arise within the framework.

A perfect current example: the more the GPA and the opposing faction of initials in Corporate Park, and their respective militias in the media, wage war over percentages and proportions of pelf for elite intercounty players, the more the doctrine of maximum money for those with the power to extract it the Eircom executive syndrome goes unquestioned. Simultaneously, fundamental matters such as egalitarianism, the role and worth in the community of a benevolent society of the sort the GAA used to be, where the GAA and the community are heading, or drifting, go utterly unaddressed. Thus those "critics," who observe the commandments, become primary contributors to thought control, i.e. brainwashing, and are duly honoured and rewarded.

(Just try to recall how many award schemes, run by big business, for every conceivable and inconceivable species of journalist, are currently operating in this distressful country.)

By departing from the model of the meitheal, by pandering to and relying upon the gluttony and ostentation of power and privilege ensconced in Corporate Boxes, by monstrous admission charges, Corporate Park has become an instrument of exclusion and oppression of the cosmuintir. It is the very antithesis of what the GAA was founded to establish and advance.

PLEASE ponder a single example, no, make it two inside a fortnight: the hurling and Gaelic football finals of 1999. Just how many tens of thousands of genuine followers of Cork, Kilkenny, Galway and Kildare were denied the ecstasy of watching their counties? Now ponder the hurling final of 2000 and how the Minister for Maximum Tolerance of Dodgy Drivers was able to get six tickets No Bother! for a brood which has achieved neither fame nor notoriety for hurling rabidity.

Corporate Park is an ethical slum. Those who are excluded from it are precisely the same who were excluded from any sort of consultation about its construction; it is a manifesto of, and a monument to, discrimination.

Which makes it just perfect for modern Irish rugby. This is the floundering business which taints itself by denying the rights and claims of its own club members in order to flog club ticket allocations to Mike Burton, or whoever the main man servicing corporate hospitality is at the moment. The design of Corporate Park is perfectly in tune with the class gradations i.e. pathetic snobberies of the business. And the FAI and the hordes of supporters (Gawdhelpus!) of Manchester Child Labour Merchandise Monopoly, would, with a bit of application, soon make themselves at home in the home of vulgarity. And then Bernard O'Byrne and Brendan Menton could kiss and make up.

And it is in Baretea's constituency! Instant immortality beckons! Now is the time for him to present the GAA's nabobs with an offer they can't refuse or a compulsory purchase order. Thereby allowing the GAA to get back to Thurles, to its ideals, to its roots, to its true nature, to its comity, to its service and simple goodness. For if that is not done the GAA faces revolution, or professionalism or extinction, which is the same thing as professionalism.

Two years since, the present writer was all alone when ruminating along those lines. Now, no less a hitter than Liam Griffin has come on board. Soon the movement will be unstoppable. Cosmuintir of the Hurling World! Unite! You have nothing to lose but your nabobs!

Let's begin with a referendum on what we've discussed here. And, finally, would self-styled pragmatists who aver that the maintenance of a people's stadium for 200,000 souls in Thurles would be impossible, please explain how they find that maintenance of an excrescence of grandiosity in Dublin 3 will be no trouble at all?