Fallon's Town Talk: The GAA shouts stop to rural depopulation in landmark report
A documentary about Jack Charlton is an unlikely place to start an appraisal of the GAA’s National Demographics Committee report, but bear with me. The superb but plangent documentary, ‘Finding Jack Charlton’, was repeated on Virgin Media One last weekend.
The film melds together the salad days of Charlton’s time as Irish manager with footage of Big Jack as he struggles with dementia in his final years. Inevitably, Ireland’s penalty shoot-out win over Romania is the 1990 World Cup featured prominently.
In the aftermath of David O’Leary’s winning penalty hitting the net, the camera switches to the scenes in Dublin, one of which includes a scene where the camera pans in on a middle-aged, balding man who is weeping tears of joy.
Most viewers will see just that – a man whose outpouring of emotion reflected the mood of the nation on a joyous day. However, others, of a certain age, will realise that the man is John Healy who was one of the most renowned journalists in the country from the 1950s right through to the end of the 1980s.
Adding to the poignancy of the image is that Healy died just seven months after his tear-stained face became one of the indelible images of Italia 90, aged only 61.
Healy was from Charlestown and his lasting legacy is a famous book called ‘No One Shouted Stop (The Death of an Irish Town)’, which was published in 1968.
That Healy’s book still resonates 57 years later is shown by the decision of the GAA’s Demographics Committee to call its groundbreaking report ‘No One Shouted Stop – Until Now: The GAA’s response to Ireland’s demographic shift’. The title is a shrewd homage to Healy’s chronicle of the economic and social decline of rural life in the West of Ireland.
It’s shocking to think that the threat to rural life remains as stark almost six decades later, especially as Ireland is now economically prosperous, albeit a country experiencing a housing and homelessness crisis.
The GAA is trying to adapt to a changing country. Its visionary president Jarlath Burns and the committee he appointed, led by the wonderfully aptly-named Benny Hurl, recognises that this report is as much a social as a sporting document. The imbalance in the Irish population is the biggest challenge facing the GAA but it is also one of the major issues for Irish society over the next 20 years.
What it boils down for the GAA is that the association is strongest where the population is declining and weakest where the population is booming.
To coincide with the release of the report two weeks ago, RTÉ's Gaelic Games correspondent, Marty Morrissey, did a series of stories on Ireland’s demographic shift. Morrissey’s piece on rural depopulation focused on South Kerry where 83 pupils started in 12 national schools last September. South Kerry is representative of many other parts of rural Ireland which are being hit by the country’s falling birth rate.
One only has to look at the growth in amalgamations of clubs at underage level in Roscommon in the last five years to notice the trend of falling population and the numbers playing Gaelic Games.
While Roscommon has the joint-fifth highest level of participation rates among males and females, at 12%, it’s also true that not every young person automatically gravitates to hurling, football or camogie as they once did in Roscommon, even at the start of this century. Other sports are attractive and offer a pathway to success at elite level. Going off on a slight tangent, the drop-out rate among teenage girls is a major challenge for all sports.
Among the headline findings, the GAA discovered that 25.5% of all children five and under in Ireland are concentrated across just 50 clubs. More than half of that demographic are to be found in Dublin, Belfast, Down, Kildare, Galway and Cork.
One in three people now live in Dublin or within one hour in satellite towns. Yet, only 18% of the GAA's clubs are located in this area. In contrast, 78% of GAA clubs are in rural areas with declining populations.
The GAA has come up with proposals such as playing championships at fewer than 15-a-side, but confronting this crisis goes far beyond that. GAA knows it can’t tackle demographic shifts without government support. The report is as much a wake-up call to those in power as a warning about the future of Gaelic Games. The GAA is shouting stop, just as John Healy once did. This time, the authorities must listen or Irish society will change beyond recognition.
