The Gaelic Athletic Association, Ireland’s largest sporting body, issued a statement yesterday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict that rages between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Whatever one’s views might be on that conflict, we can all agree, one might hope, that statements from the GAA are highly unlikely to be at the forefront of the minds of those with the power to bring a ceasefire into effect. The statement in question is unlikely, I think we can agree, to feature in President Biden’s daily intelligence briefing, or to be drawn to the attention of Prime Minister Netanyahu by his ministers of sport or foreign affairs. It is unlikely to carry much weight at an EU council meeting, or be mentioned at daily prayers in one of the Mosques of Riyadh.
It did, however, make the Irish Times. So that’s something.
It is easy to mock such statements for their utter and entire futility. It might be more interesting to ask why they are made.
In the first instance, the GAA is not a political organisation. It makes this entirely clear in its rules and ethos, which impose suspensions of up to 24 weeks for any entity within the GAA that takes part in supporting any party political movement. Indeed, all the way back in 2015 there was a substantial, though now mostly forgotten, brouhaha about the GAA’s refusal to take a stance on the constitutional recognition of same-sex marriage, with one Dublin GAA star “breaking the rules” by holding up a “vote yes” badge in Croke Park.
The irony here is that the GAA is non-political precisely because of the immense power and influence it holds here at home, within Ireland: A candidate for office wholly and entirely backed by the GAA would immediately become a front runner. A GAA that started endorsing candidates or issues on the domestic front would rapidly be torn apart by internal squabbling. Thus the rule that it be apolitical is a good one, for the GAA’s own wellbeing.
The irony of the rule though is that the GAA is unable to exert political power where that power might make a difference and feels free to make political statements where they are guaranteed to make no difference at all, such as in relation to Gaza.
Part of it is, of course, political safety: Imagine the GAA was to issue a statement saying that in its view, Government immigration policy was harming rural communities, many of which are the life-blood of the GAA, and that in the view of the association, the Irish culture and character of rural Ireland should be preserved and that large transplants of people of other cultures into those towns risked undermining their Irish character.
There would, of course, be an utter meltdown. There will be no meltdown for an intervention on Gaza, precisely because the GAA’s words carry no influence whatsoever.
When you can speak without fear of your words actually changing anything, you can speak freely, according to the established rules of Irish society. But where your words might be a threat to the established order, you must exercise caution and restraint. This is, broadly speaking, the set of assumptions under which most of the Irish media, and a good portion of the Irish people, generally operate.
The main lesson to be learned here, though, is the ability of small but vocal groups to get what they want by simply being loud and persistent. The Irish Times reports that the GAA statement came after the President and other senior figures met with a group within the GAA called “Gaels against Genocide”. This is a group with, at the time of writing, some 988 followers on Elon Musk’s X website, and a membership of unknown size or scope. We can reasonably surmise, I think, that its intense activism for a GAA statement on Gaza does not reflect the shared enthusiasm of a majority of GAA members, but that unlike most GAA members it was willing to jump up and down and make lots of noise until it got its way. Perhaps “Gaels against Immigration” might be equally successful in securing a meeting with the GAA top brass, though I have my doubts. In fact, even if a group called “Gaels against Immigration” had twenty times the membership of “Gaels against Genocide”, we can be absolutely certain that the GAA top brass would not meet with it or consider its demands.
The reason for that is simple enough: There is no social cost to airing one’s views on Gaza, so long as those views are in line with those of much of the media and political establishment. At the same time, there is a great social cost to airing views that are in line with public opinion, but not in line with much of the media and political establishment.
This, by and large, is why Ireland is such a conformist and consensus-based society, and it exposes the problem with that: There is little cost to being a conformist and consensus based society when that consensus is organically formed through the views of the majority of people. However, in Ireland, consensus is largely imposed from the top of society down.
In this example, the GAA calling for a ceasefire in Gaza is not about, in any way, bringing a ceasefire in Gaza into effect – the GAA has no power there. What it is about, by contrast, is reinforcing the urgency felt by a small group to ensure that their views are the officially adopted views of everyone in the country, and increasing the social and cultural costs of challenging those views.
The GAA has now set a precedent that it can, and will, be pushed around into making political statements. That was a mistake. And not one, even, that will do a single thing for a soul in the Gaza strip.