Celebrate this victory in a sensible manner: Irish Media and the Restart of Gaelic games in Ireland

This chapter follows on from where our contribution to Volume One ended. It examines the media discourses surrounding the Gaelic Athletic Associations (GAA) restarting of club and inter-county Gaelic Games competitions in Ireland. The timeframe covers the period from the end of May until the mens All-Ireland Gaelic football final on December 20th. As previously stressed, although Gaelic games are amateur they are the largest participant and spectator sports in Ireland. As non-professionals their players and administrators are interconnected with all spheres of Irish society. For this reason the media discourses surrounding the restarting of competitions highlight how the combination of a pragmatic, measured approach to emerging from the pandemic nationally with enduring anxieties regarding the risks involved was acutely registered in the GAAs proceeding with both club and inter-county competitions. The chapter begins by examining coverage in print and broadcast media of the risk containing measures implemented by the GAA in the early summer period. It is then mainly structured around three focal points. The first is the ways in which local outbreaks of Covid-19 were connected to the restart of club competitions. The GAA had been widely lauded for its exemplary role in sustaining national morale during the Spring 2020 lockdown, with its local rootedness as a key factor in its members contributions to charitable activities and community voluntarism. However, as apparently spontaneous local celebrations of club victories became minor scandals the GAAs virtues as embodiments of local and national symbolism were seen by some commentators as risk factors. We examine the ways in which the media wrestled with the contradiction between the principle that, as amateur activities, Gaelic games are primarily perhaps solely symbolically meaningful in the presence of local spectators and the GAAs position that individual and collective service to local and national communities could only be sustained through discipline and as typified by the later inter-county championship the absence of spectators. To illustrate, we focus on national and local media (and related social media) discourses concerning the Cavan intra-county football championships. Though a sparsely populated rural county, Cavan experienced some of the highest rates of Covid-19 infection, which were related in media discourse to the countys GAA football championship. The second focus is the restart of the elite level inter-county championship, with a particular focus on the GAAs Bloody Sunday centenary commemorative event in Croke Park on November 21st which preceded the Leinster football championship final between Dublin and Meath and the Munster Football Final the following day between Cork and Tipperary. Tipperary was one of the counties featured in the events of Bloody Sunday in 1920 when British forces fired upon players and supporters at a Gaelic football match in Dublin, killing fourteen. Although the games were played without spectators, this key events connection of the GAA with the War of Independence, and with Irish nationalism, contributed to the rhetorical justification of the competitions being held as national morale boosters, despite a second Covid-19 wave that had led to a six week tightening of restrictions country-wide that only concluded on December 1st. That the GAA somehow represented the nation, both metaphorically and metonymically gave the competitions their `point, in spite of the risk involved not least that the players are amateurs, with local, daily family and work-related connections. Finally, we focus on the performances of the GAA administrators and players in Irish media in the latter stages of the inter-county championships in promoting Government messaging regarding safe practice. The rhetoric of collective discipline in sacrificing celebration following victory and exhorting supporters to do likewise exemplified the modelling, the embodiment of an idealised Irish cultural habitus with which the GAA is inextricably associated.