In the history of the GAA, only two clubs have won both All-Ireland Senior Club championships in Gaelic football and hurling. There are many things that separate the St Finbarr’s and Cuala teams that managed this feat – most notably, the St Finbarr’s teams won both championships more than once and featured many dual players, while the Cuala teams that did the same featured just one dual starter. As city clubs, both benefit from some of the largest playing populations in Ireland, St Finbarr’s in the Togher area of Cork city, and Cuala in the area around Dublin’s Wicklow border encompassing Shankill, Dalkey, Glenageary, Sallynoggin, Killiney, Ballybrack, and Cherrywood. Yet while St Finbarr’s base their operations out of the expansive Neenan Park, purchased via an interest-free loan from former player Connie Neenan in the 1960s, Cuala, a club that draws on some of the most affluent and heavily populated areas in the country, do not have a single adult-sized pitch to their name.
This is a fact that is never far from public conversation when Cuala are discussed – how can it be that a club with such wealth among its members does not have a permanent home suitable for their senior players to play home games? Cuala’s Dalkey pitch is not big enough for senior games; for the most part, their senior games are played on council-owned pitches in Shankill, and training done on pitches rented from the nearby Bray Emmets. The club does own pitches in other areas, such as Thomastown, but none of these are of the right quality or size for senior games. In my four years of playing for Cuala, I played home games in Shankill, sometimes in Bray, and once on the Dalkey pitch, an unavoidable situation that was an awful experience. Cuala have raised millions of euro aiming to rectify the situation over the years – a groundshare deal with Blackrock RFC fell through in 2014 and the club are currently pursuing the purchase of grounds in Carrickmines from Bective Rangers FC.
The reasons for Cuala’s frustration appear to be simple enough: land big enough for a club comprised of approximately 3,200 members is both rare and comes at a significant premium, especially in south County Dublin. In a country experiencing a long-term housing crisis, such greenfield or brownfield sites are also needed for large-scale housing development.
Cuala’s pitch situation was brought to mind again recently by the publicity campaign embarked upon by Prime Arena Holdings, a company who have purchased a three-hectare site in Cherrywood with the intention of building a €190 million development featuring two full-sized Olympic ice rinks, one with 6,000 seats that will be home to a professional ice hockey team, and a 1,500-capacity conference space. The project has submitted a business case to the Government “seeking sizeable State investment” according to Minister of State Charlie McConalogue. The successful model of the Belfast Giants – founded in 2000, constant winners of silverware in the Elite Ice Hockey League, and hosts of regular sellouts in the SSE Arena – has been cited by Prime Arena Holdings as an example of what can be achieved should the project be delivered.
False inclusivity
It can be easy to scoff at the Giants and at the idea of replicating the model in Dublin – who in Ireland can be said to actually care about ice hockey? Who plays it? The answer, of course, is very few people, likely less in the whole country than the number of members Cuala have. As a resident of Belfast, I have attended many Giants games over the years, and to give them their due, it is one of the best nights out available in the city. This is in no small part aided by ice hockey being one of the few sports on earth comparable to hurling in terms of its combination of technique, speed, and toughness. In saying this, enjoying a Giants match does also require a suspension of some sensibilities due to the fanfare that surrounds the matches – most of which have little, if anything to do with the actual sport of ice hockey – that includes Subway cannons, inter-period mini-games, and cringeworthy, American-influenced fan choreography.
The Giants have been heralded as a success story of the peace process, not least by Prime Arena Holdings CEO Dermot Rigley. In a recent episode of the Second Captains podcast, Rigley spoke positively of how the Giants operate a policy of no tolerance for jerseys that could be construed as indicating a side in the North’s ‘sectarian divide’. The jerseys in question – presumably Celtic and Rangers jerseys as I can personally attest to seeing GAA gear at Giants game – are cultural signifiers of what side in the political struggle for Irish national liberation a given person takes. The importation of American professional sports and the pursuit of consumer culture in this case serves as an attempt to obfuscate the political reality that still structures the North’s society.
The North’s divide is not a sectarian one of hatred based upon religion. While religion undoubtedly plays its part, it is at its core a question of who should rule the northeastern corner of Ireland. The Belfast Giants function as spectacle, the apex of consumer culture in the city; few people play ice hockey, the amount of homegrown players the Giants have had in their 25 years could be counted on your hands. The team is there to be watched. That they would be feted by some as a cultural solution to a legitimate political divide is directly in line with Debord’s contention that the spectacle presents itself as “a part of society, and as a means of unification”. In the 26 years since the Giants were founded, the so-called sectarian divide has remained as strong as ever, leaving those congratulating themselves on the inclusive nature of the SSE Arena trapped in a false consciousness that is, in reality, wilful ignorance.
Whose country is it?
While the national question may not be as central to the on-the-ground daily politics of Dublin as it is to Belfast, the central question of whose country this is remains key when considering the prospective ice hockey arena. That a vanity project for which there appears to be no organic demand could be built with public money in a catchment area in desperate need of servicing the local chapter of the country’s biggest community organisation speaks to the type of culture preferred by Official Ireland, one of passive consumption rather than active participation.
The ideal south County Dublin resident in this imagination is one which takes the DART or Luas to the city centre, works at a multinational tech or pharmaceutical company during the day, and spends their weekends in the Prime Arena. There they would be joined by American tourists, paying Dublin’s overpriced pint and hotel rates.
The arena will be defended by those who will argue that it could also cater to niche winter sports, especially relevant given the recent Winter Olympics. This argument is reminiscent of the whitewater rafting fiasco where Dublin City Council, seemingly unwilling to act on the fact that there is not a single senior GAA pitch between the two canals in the city centre, decided to pursue a project that was doomed from the beginning. Niche sports are of course worthy of their place and should be properly funded, but at a time when the most popular sporting organisation in Ireland is struggling to answer its demand, then surely it should be prioritised.
Cuala’s situation does not draw much sympathy within the GAA. Centuries of concentrating Ireland’s wealth and population along its eastern coast have left clubs in Dublin and Belfast facing the exact opposite problem of rural GAA clubs – the former have too many people and too little space, the latter an abundance of space and an ever-dwindling membership. Different solutions would need to be proffered to address the rural depopulation that is the base cause of the rural clubs’ plight. The decentralisation of the Irish economy away from the eastern corridor and the spreading of wealth and industry to towns such as Kilkenny, Athlone, and Carrick-on-Shannon is the only sustainable way to arrest the decline of the rural population, and the GAA membership within these areas.
Arguing for the proper funding of Cuala is not an argument for the prioritisation of city over country. It is instead an argument for the prioritisation of one of the few communal organisations left in an era of severe social alienation over what a small number of Irish people might watch. A perfect Ireland could have both, some spectacle to indulge in after a day’s work, but in the Ireland that exists today, surely what people do and what brings them into meaningful social structures should be prioritised. We know that life in the capitalist system means that what is needed does not always correspond with what is profitable, but where state money is involved, investment should follow the people. When what the people are engaged in is the preservation of centuries-old games and culture unique to our country, the choice appears very easy.
Odrán de Bhaldraithe is an Irish writer, journalist, and political commentator who writes on colonialism, culture, and socialist republicanism in Ireland. His 2023 debut book, Neglect in the North of Ireland, offers a trenchant examination of how British rule has shaped systemic underinvestment in the North’s health, housing, and political infrastructure