If the GAA want to split Dublin in two – or in three or four – they shouldn’t stop there.
They should take themselves down to Laois and look at the disparity between Portlaoise and Arles Kilcruise, two clubs of very different magnitude playing against each other in the senior championship.
They should go to Derry and look at some of the rural primary schools which have as many as eight children in a given year group.
Think of it this way, you’re involved in the senior men’s set-up, you’re safeguarding the future of the club and that primary school is all you’re working with. Eight children, four of them boys. How many of those are interested in football? How many of those will go on to be any good?
Compare that to the town teams, the clubs in the city, places who do no doubt have different battles but obviously not the same problems of gathering together a basic requirement of bodies.
Population has an effect on the development of GAA teams – it has an effect on the development of any organisation. Granted, you can’t deny that, relatively, Dublin – and any urban area, for that matter – has a bigger issue with rugby and soccer and athletics and the arts and all these other activities than rural Ireland does but it’s a laugh if you think that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s actually any sort of a problem when Ballyboden have more under-14s than Leitrim.
But this isn’t something that Dublin needs to concern themselves with because it’s so much bigger and goes so much deeper than their recent dominance of the inter-county football championship.
No-one was whinging about their population for the decade and a half they were described as startled earwigs. Back then, they just – like they do with every ‘town’ team – relished the prospect of rolling up and putting them in their box. It’s a nationwide culture – never mind sporting norm – that areas and clubs are of all different shapes and sizes. Pride of place, identity, these things are some of the basic instincts of being human and they’re actually the main pillar of the GAA now.
And population hasn’t proven to be the secret of Gaelic Games success. Kerry and Kilkenny have the pick of the 15th and 21st biggest counties in Ireland. Slaughtneil is on the side of a mountain with 300 families in what you probably couldn’t even call a village. Crossmaglen has a population of 1500.
What it is, is just another stick to beat the all-conquering Dublin football team with. Listen, a by-product of the population at that level of the game is something far more influential for the short and long term – money. Dublin are in the capital city, they sell the most jerseys and the most seats and they attract the biggest sponsorship deals. The Bush Hotel can’t compete with AIG and it’s not fair that Dublin reap those rewards that other counties simply never could.
The solution is not cutting the population in half – history has taught us that that’s not really the problem. The best thing the GAA could and should do is pool all the sponsorship money that all counties accumulate and divide it equally amongst every set-up.
Because, in reality, no-one really cares about how many people a certain area has compared to the other – they do now because one of them is winning. But redefining age-old boundaries would upset the very notion of club and community, it wouldn’t really address what people want addressed – the money – and most wouldn’t be in favour of it anyway because of a very simple, primal sense of place and appetite to take on the big population or take a scalp in the city.
Besides, resetting borders to sort a population problem would mean that every county’s border would have to extend onto the east coast to make up a fair share of it.
That’s not what people are asking for though. They just want Dublin split in two. Because they’re winning.
But if the GAA or anyone were ever actually considering that instead of just pooling revenue, they’d better be ready to start answering serious questions of why the hell wouldn’t they do it throughout the whole country and really level the playing field.
Dublin aren’t the only ones in this game with a bigger population than others. Split them and how could you justify not doing the same thing all over?
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