It should be noted that whatever else it might be, the controversy over the proposed re-naming of Páirc Uí Chaoimh is not the dumbest re-naming controversy in Ireland over the last year or so: That singular honour still belongs to the denizens of Trinity College Dublin, who fought a civil war amongst themselves over whether the Berkeley Library, named for 17th century Anglican Bishop George Berkeley, should be “de-named”.
The best bit about that particular re-naming controversy is how it currently stands: It was agreed that Berkeley should have his name posthumously stripped from the library. What was not agreed is what the library should be called moving forwards – which has left us with the hilarious position where the official Trinity College website now refers to – I kid you not – “the former Berkeley library” while it awaits an as-yet-to-be-decided new name. One hopes that His Grace sees the humour in that, from whatever part of the afterlife he might currently inhabit.
The practice of naming, or re-naming, sports stadia after sponsors is increasingly commonplace across the world. My own beloved New York Jets play in Metlife Stadium – named for an insurance company (that in truth should be paid by the Jets for being forced to be associated with serial failure) who sponsored its construction. Barcelona’s famous Nou Camp is now the Spotify Camp Nou. Arsenal football club traded the magic of Highbury for the soullessness of the Emirates Stadium, and it’s a cinch that their hated rivals Tottenham Hotspur, who abandoned White Hart Lane, will soon find a new name for the “Tottenham Hotspur Stadium”. England’s most romantic cricket ground, the Oval, is the Kia Oval these days. Even the GAA has not been immune to the trend, as fans who troop to Kingspan Breffni Park to watch Cavanmen valiantly trying to keep up with Monaghan will tell you.
Whether this bothers you is ultimately a matter of taste, but the GAA is an unusual sporting institution in the extent to which it remains bound up with the traditional pieties of Irish nationalism, which are made more relevant again by its status as an amateur sporting organisation. For GAA nuts, there’s always been a more than vague sense that taking to the field is about more than sporting competition, but is in fact an homage to the romantic traditions of the gael. There aren’t many sports in the world where such a high proportion of the clubs, let alone the stadia, are named for political figures.
That makes this, more than in most sports, ultimately a debate about morals: What’s more important to the GAA? Who and what it represents, or how it is funded? That has been the basic dividing line in every GAA controversy of recent years, ranging from the question of paid intercounty coaches, to the involvement of Sky Sports, through GAAGo.
The job of a columnist, ultimately, is to tell you what he thinks, so in that spirit here’s what I think: Names and history matter.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers that your correspondent is, at best, a very bad Irish republican, by which I mean I struggle to differentiate my Connollys from my Wolfes Tone and my United Irishmen from my Fenians. One example of that is that until this week, I had genuinely no idea after whom Páirc Uí Chaoimh was named. Not being from Cork, I had no real reason ever to wonder. I do remember, as a child, though, asking my father why the GAA team for my local town (and our hated rival in the parish) was called “Ballybay Pearse Brothers”, assuming that these Pearse fellows must have been locals or something. It was the name that first drew my curiosity, and set me on a path to learning about why the team was named what it was, and whom it was named after.
This is the purpose of dedications: To remind us of those who have gone before and their contributions to who we are, as a people, today. It is a way of honouring certain people with a form of immortality for contributions to society that those who lived with them, or shortly after them, thought to be worthy of remembrance.
What right do we, who did not live in their times, have to strip them of that honour? I’m not sure we have any.
SuperValu is a fine brand. But their brand is not, in my view, of sufficient significance to merit the displacement of somebody who was deemed worthy of the honour of having Cork’s home stadium named after him. To do so would be an act of cultural, and historic, vandalism.
Yet this principle should be applied equally. In recent years, there have been those who have proposed de-naming certain Dublin and Cork streets because they were named for people who served the government of this country in the years before independence. There are those too who would, for example, demolish or re-name the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park.
Those people, and those streets, are just as much a part of this island’s history as Pádraig Ó Caoimh was. If I might be forgiven a moment’s po-faced preaching, I would say that we all have a duty to preserve and protect the monuments and the memories of generations passed. If for no other reason than in centuries to come, we might hope that others will do us the same courtesy.
Cork GAA should find some other way of raising money. Names have meaning and significance, and should be treated with the respect they deserve.