When Tradition and Freedom Take the Knife to the Eye

Filed in Other by on December 5, 2010

“Fifteen minutes later we had out first taste of whiskey
There were uncles giving lectures on ancient Irish history
The men all started telling jokes and the women they got frisky
By five o’clock in the evening every bastard there was pissed”
-The Body of an American, The Pogues

Sport, for all its fun and drama and entertainment and excitement and thrill and escape, is nearly always overstated in its meaning. For all its import it is, at the end of the day, predominantly only a game. In the real world of life and death and love and beauty, sport is relatively unimportant. It elicits screams of frustration, tears of pain, the laughs of victory and the crystalisation of dreams. And we move on, still caring and sometimes until it hurts, to deal with our lives when the siren sounds or the final whistle blows.

This is no knock on sport. Sport is brilliant in its athleticism, its ability to act as a portal to escape and as an entertaining, never-ending drama. But so little of it is real, so few times does it actually mean anything of lasting import outside of trophy cabinets, public houses and sports radio. Rarely does sport come to represent anything meaningful.

Sometimes, however, sport comes to symbolize something very real. The murder of Phar Lap was the exemplification of human greed and came to represent the lowest period in Australian history. The ordered beaning of a nine year old cancer survivor in a Little League final by a heartless coach went to the core of human relations. The boycotting of the 1980 Moscow Olympic games by the United States was a statement against war. The deaths of Ayrton Senna and Fabio Casartelli and the many others who have died on their respective sporting battlegrounds meant so much more than the wins and losses and draws they have all accumulated.

And so it is with Croke Park, the largest stadium in Ireland.

Croke Park was the shining symbol of Irish tradition, a bastion of the Emerald Isle. It came to represent freedom and sacrifice and paid homage to men and women and children who fought in the name of patriotism. Croke Park was a peaceful protest against British imperialism and the oppression of a people. Through sport, it maintained the Irish way and honoured the country and the rights of a nation. As the stadium grew, it would represent the nexus between old and new Ireland, moving forward through looking back. Croke Park never lost its heroes; never let the deeds of yore slide into the black abyss of the forgotten.

Heroes such as Michael Hogan and the warriors of the Easter Rising are all honoured at Croke Park, their beliefs and their contributions and their role in Fenian history standing tall within the walls of Old Croker. Michael Hogan, the captain of the Tipperary Gaelic football team in 1920 and a known Irish nationalist, along with thirteen spectators that included a woman due to be married in five days and three children aged under fifteen, were massacred on the emerald grass of Croke Park during a match between Tipperary and Dublin. They were gunned down by a British Auxiliary Force . One of the children was so badly mutilated it was believed he was attacked with a bayonet. The massacre was revenge for the assassination of the Cairo Gang, a collection of fourteen British agents who had infiltrated the Irish republican movement and were ordered dead by Michael Collins. The following day, the “Black and Tans” marched to Croke Park and opened fire upon a fleeing crowd. It was a day that would go down in history as Bloody Sunday. Today, the Hogan stand rises above the Croke Park pitch as a monument to a tragic event.

“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace” Patrick Pearse

In the Easter week of 1916, the most significant uprising in over a century against British rule was staged. This was known as the Easter Rising. The Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers went about seizing key buildings in the centre of Dublin with one of the leader’s, Patrick Pearse, reading the Proclamation of the Republic outside the GPO. British soldiers were quick to quell the rebellion and summarily executed not only the leaders of the plot and the signatories of the Proclamation but other perceived Irish nationalist radicals. The tragedy and the heroes of it- Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas McDonagh, among others- were quickly honoured at Croke Park with the fabled Hill 16 built out of the rubble of the Rising. Hill 16 still stands tall today, a tribute to the very real pursuit of freedom.

It has not only been the physical structures of Croke Park that have been used to pay tribute to some legends of Ireland. The Gaelic Athletic Association had in place a rule up until the 1970’s that any GAA member could be banned from participation in Gaelic sports if caught playing cricket, soccer or rugby. And up until recently, rule 42 prohibited the playing of British sports at Croke Park. The Croker was an icon of Ireland and it would not be tarnished or diluted by foreign games.

That was all until recently, when the GAA gave up over a century of tradition and tribute to allow rugby and soccer to be played at Croke Park. With Lansdowne Road, the home of Irish rugby and soccer, closed for reconstruction, the modernists wanted Croke Park to open up. And in February of this year, it did. Ireland hosted France in a Six Nations match. That match in itself was offensive to many who deemed it a slap in the face to recent Irish history and the men who had been laid down for the cause of freedom. But it paled into insignificance to February 24, when the England rugby team marched into Croke Park and God Save The Queen rang out across not only Croke Park but Dublin and Ireland and The Cause. A stadium built on the Irish spirit and the blood spilt in pursuit of liberty had meekly spat in the eye of history.

Your saddened author spent a great deal of youthful existence listening to the tales of Ireland and the shining green heroes of an isle where descendants once called home. The Rising. Bloody Sunday. Patrick Pearse. Michael Hogan. And it is hard to accept that this can all be forgotten in pursuit of a cheap dollar.

Croke Park was once a towering tribute to all beautiful and pure and loyal and symbolic of the Irish way. Now, it is just another stadium.

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