GAA Slur
Friends, readers, new mammies who typed cuddlepot.com incorrectly, I’d like to put to you a theory that you may find contentious, even contemptible. You may shoot me down if you wish, but know that I mean no harm, nor blasphemy, nor inflammation of the craw or spleen.
I submit to you …
… that just because somebody comes from Galway, that does not make them an automatic GAA fiend.
Yes, I’ve been mistaken for Someone Who Cares more times than I’d care to mention, even on this blog, where there’s not a lot I haven’t cared to mention, big attention whore that I am.
But here’s one for you: Hi, I’m from Galway, and I don’t like GAA.
I have far more interest in the mating rituals of threadworms (traumatic insemination, as it happens) than I do in the sweaty thuggery of off-duty bank managers, belting lumps out of each other while egged on by their GHD’d, roaring fiancees. Really. I just proved it by looking up mating practises of threadworms in Wikipedia, whereupon I got lost in reading about the unusual sexual practises of various animals (did you know that bottlenose dolphins have been known to gang-rape their womenfolk?). I’d no sooner get lost in reading about GAA than I would scale Mount Everest on fucking rollerskates.
But y’know, I don’t think this should be taken as a nasty slur on the GAA and their ruddy mannerisms, for not only have several members of my immediate family been very proficient GAA demi-stars, but I once quite fancied a fella on the local hurling team. Very handy swinging a firm bit of wood, he was, although there didn’t seem to be anything resembling wit churning about in his presumed-present brain. Still, all the fresh air had produced in him an acne-free visage, so credit where credit’s due. It never worked out between us, possibly because I was always too wedged into any available afterparty to spend my Sunday mornings knee-deep in a wet grass verge, watching him trundle through the chunky opposition with the grace of a donkey derby winner.
No, I don’t like GAA for the same reason I don’t like pretty airheads or people who listen to Cascada: I’m a filthy snob.
My point is that just because one has been reared in the rocky soil of south county Galway (the lesser slice; at least north county Galway have their own local anthems and a breathtaking border with those fuckers in Mayo), does not mean that they’ve been reared on a deep love of the Sunday Game. I fucking hate the Sunday fucking Game. It’s a bit of a Pavlov’s Dog scenario, to be honest; I hear the theme tune to the Sunday fucking Game and I get the taste of overcooked carrots and Erin Gravy Rich on my tongue, and I retch, and suffer severe gripes and grousings.
In fact, I wonder if the connection between my mam’s distinct lack of culinary flexibility and my lack of tolerance for excitable culchies in matching shorts is worth further examination? Certainly, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for my appalling disregard for our national pastimes, not when I come from an area so rich in outdoorsy, hulking lunatics and ponytailed, flushed bangardai. It could be the dinner, lads. It could all be psychosomatic. It’s not you, it’s me, and so on and so forth.
Whatever the rhyme or reason, it stands that leering about how “We’re going to bate you off the pitch on Sunday and what’ll you say then?” is hardly the best way to get a reaction out of me. I might object to the actual leer, but I couldn’t give a fuck about the bait. I couldn’t give a fuck about the GAA. I don’t care who’s on the football team, who’s off the hurling team, who’s tickling the bainisteoir, who’s scoring off the pitch, who’s in the seminary in real life, who’s just been granted planning permission for their two storey on the coastline thanks to their sterling work with this year’s under 21s. And talking over my trying to put you straight on this will not change my mind. I might be from Galway, I might have the accent, the immunity to midges, and the practised lightness of foot over limestone pavement, but I don’t give a toss about the fucking GAA. Alright?
Honestly, it happens me all the time. It’s stereotyping, kids. You’re all a bunch of feckless racists, h’up ya boy ya.
Another glorious diatribe from the feckless wan that is Sweary. I constantly marvel at your hilarious rantings. Constantly. You ol’ dote.
I once went to school with a fella who refused to play hurley based on his belief that it was a loyalist game!! He thought that anyone who ever invented a sport where you give 22 young Catholics sticks and sent them in to a field to thump 10 tonnes of shite out of each other was bound to be a loyalist!
btd
I can remember a week on the mackerel with big Tam Noonan and his Barlinnie posse not so long back. It was to Oranmore we travelled where the holiday let was supposed to be.
It wasn’t long after we crash-landed that we visited the first bar to be found since leaving Galway airport, with its penchant for single prop planes and no bar onboard during the flight. Glesga to Galway was the longest and driest 25 minute flight of our lives.
I’d stayed behind to talk to the pretty barmaid, while Tam and the boys went looking for photies of Athenry and its low fields out there in the mud. A lovely wee filly she was, all jutting breasts and ful of the talk about her love of the words.
There was a tip jar sitting aside the long brass neck of the Fosters Lager pump, the reflective light showed off the exquisite redness of her eyes as we spoke, and it was to be the fare to the bright lights of civilisation (Limerick) that the young McInerney lassie was surely bound for one day.
There was not many mackerel to be found that trip, sadly not even the fish could find their way to the pier at Gort, so it was off to to Clarenbridge for its oysters we went.
The rest of the trip was merely a blur, with its macramie demonstrations, ye auld pound shop, and of course the magnificent changing colours of the traffic lights of a night.
I still think back to that heady trip and my conversation with the budding wee writer, the McInerney girl, and often wonder…. did she give me change from a ten instead of a twenty?
I guess we’ll never really know.
It was a fiver, Jimmy. But don’t ask me how I know that.
Belfast Taxi, he’s got a point. Holy God, but he’s got a point. Had the uber-nationalist GAA stars in my family only known, it would have saved us a fortune in Deep Heat and that sticky stuff you wrap around the top of a hurley to give you a good grip. Duck Tape, I think it was.
Kevin, I’m really starting to think you’re taking the piss out of me. I’ll have words with your mammy, I will.
Didn’t RTE make an award winning series about cocaine snorting GAA/small town types?
Cool Mule twas called I think…
Gort has a pier?
Swe.Ge, are you sure you’re not thinking of Fair City? I always thought the subtext of that show is that everyone is horsing coke out of it just off-camera (to avoid the wrath of the pre-watershed censor), hence explaining their bonkers behaviour on-camera.
I’m telling you, Fair City is a cocaine dystopia created by the anti-drugs lobby. Turn up the volume of your TV and you’ll notice that every scene begins with the sound of someone doing a line just out of eye-shot.
Don’t be stupid, Flann. Fair City is a Dublin show. It’s smacked out of their trees they are.
GAAy
That were a recent novel, I think. It was about being gay in the GAA, funnily enough.
…only sayin’that cus you lost
For God sake the gaa is ripe for a harvesting by an E Annie Proulx. But then where did the people of Newfoundland come from mostly, but Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford and Wexford.
Or a Victor Hugo, anyhow either of ‘em. There would be nothing like a Les Miserables to nicely decapitate the bucolic Eden the Gaa attempts to perpetrate.