Fuck that. Heâs well able to dole out the abuse week in week out. And expect his targets to just take it. Like I said if conlon had written this targeting Marty Morrissey or someone fair enough. But donât be the school bully and then go home for your father when someone decides to fight back and you donât like the fact that they are kicking and biting
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Those he doles it out to are welcome to take him on. Those who he gives it to, can take him to the courts if they find any of it factually inaccurate. I doubt Brolly minds anyone fighting back. Joe jabbed, someone countered, and left themselves open to a knockout. Which Joe duly delivered.
Good snap of joe there. We finally agree on some thing
Bullshit.
Not even remotely. Tommy stuck his head up, and had it clean taken off.
Brolly is entitled to defend his character against rubbish written about him.
If those who Brolly offends have a contention with what he says they always have a right of reply, very few seem prepared to take up that option though.
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in fairness Dan, it deserved to be taken down. If Joe didnt complain about it, plenty more would have.
Cached version still up. For reference.
One day the GAA president is talking about a hypothetical future in which the tricolour and national anthem might be stood down as conspicuous symbols of the association.
The next day Joe Brolly is talking about a vicious past and citing it as good reason for proudly retaining the same rag and dirge.
His piece in last weekâs Sunday Independent was a tour de force of historical prejudice, tribal tub-thumping and emotional blackmail. His former Belfast neighbour, the late Rev Ian Paisley, would surely have been proud.
AogĂĄn Ă Fearghail had merely floated a notional prospect that in some sort of distant âagreed Irelandâ, the GAA would be âopen-minded about things like flags and emblemsâ. Of necessity, his thinking on the matter was entirely speculative. It was interlaced with all sorts of caveats and qualifications.
Yet it was a red rag, a Danish cartoon to Abu Hamza al-Brolly. He spent the day slapping his head with both hands and whacking a picture of Ă Fearghail with his shoe. Later that evening he was spotted on top of the Sperrin mountains chanting âPadraig Pearse Akbar! Padraig Pearse Akbar!â
Then he calmed down and the self-pity flowed out in torrents. Somehow from the presidentâs gentle comments, the Dungiven Wahhabi made a psychic leap back to the sectarian massacre in January 1976 of three South Armagh brothers.
Sez you, what has that got to do with the GAA and the flag and anthem? Well you might ask. But seeing as he dragged the debate back into that rancid swamp, it would be remiss not to acknowledge another few terrible spectres from that barbaric time and place.
Ten Protestant workmen were subsequently murdered by the IRA at Kingsmills in South Armagh. They were taken out of their van and mowed down by machine guns where they stood. This atrocity happened within 24 hours of the murder of the Reavey brothers. Joe somehow forgot to mention it.
In July 1972 our heroes planted bombs outside three Protestant businesses in the village of Claudy, then fled to Dungiven, 10 miles away. A mere nine people were murdered on this occasion: four Catholics, five Protestants, including Kathryn Eakin, aged eight. Joeâs buddy, Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, was deputy leader of the IRA in Derry at the time.
Kevin Lynch played underage hurling for Dungiven before he moved on to greater things. He decided to do a bit of killing for Ireland and, after that, a bit of dying for Ireland. He didnât join the IRA, on the grounds presumably that they were a bit slack in the depravity department. Instead he joined the INLA, which happily had an even more bestial disposition. Lynch died by suicide in 1981. He hadnât eaten any grub in Long Kesh for a few months.
Dungiven GAA subsequently named their hurling club after him. Abu Hamza al-Brolly thinks itâs a great idea altogether to name his hurling club after a chap who had no problem with the killing of men, women and children. Sure he was one of our own, after all, and a âgood Gaelâ to boot.
Croke Park should have stepped in long ago and banned this practice.
Whatâs to stop a club from naming itself after Dominic McGlinchey, the psychopath from south Derry who founded the INLA and boasted of his involvement in 30 murders? Maybe Brollyâs football club could be re-named the Dungiven Mad Dogs, in fond memory of McGlinchey. Or maybe he was a soccer man, in which case it would be unthinkable.
Unfortunately the GAA at national level was too deferential for too long when it came to Ulster nationalism during the Troubles. Admittedly the Association was placed in an almost impossible position during that era.
These were the years when it didnât know whether it was primarily a sporting or cultural organisation. It claimed to be both. But its cultural identity was the anchor that pulled it down into the morass of atavistic conflict. It never set solid boundaries. It allowed itself to be hijacked by forces that cared little for the GAAâs wider mission in Irish society. Like any sports body it should have been all-inclusive: non-tribal, non-sectarian, non-political.
A prime example was Rule 21, the law which prohibited Northern Ireland and British security forces from joining the Association. Rule 21 made bigots of the entire GAA membership. But time and again the Associationâs leaders deferred to the Ulster hardliners. They abdicated their responsibility to the organisation nationwide. The tail wagged the dog.
Nowadays the GAA is a lot clearer about its remit. It is a sporting organisation doing magnificent service for the community. But it will take generations to shake off its tribal baggage.
Ă Fearghailâs comments should be seen as the beginning of that journey. Or maybe it began with Jarlath Burnsâ civil and decent intervention last year. The former Armagh captain is a GAA man to his core. He grew up in the tradition - all âthe sacramentalsâ of flag and anthem and culture.
âIt wouldnât cost me a thought,â said Burns, when asked if he would contemplate getting rid of the old emblems. âThey are divisive. All they say is, this is me, this is what I am. Itâs not about reaching out to anybody else. People are more important than flags and anthems and all those things.â
You would think that this much, at least, should be obvious, after all the damage done. But no: weâll damn well cling to the rag and dirge, even if it kills us.
Sorry old skin. Iâll have to disagree with you on this one. Tommy Conlon is in the Roy Curtis league of journalism.
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The Sunday Indo has mugged everybody off here good and proper. Sales of coffee tables must have exploded in last two weeks.
and for further clarity, the article Brolly wrote. I can never understand what goes on in the north with the communities on both sides, so it is one area of discussion I stay well out of. I do find it interesting reading about how people there went and played the GAA under very hard conditions. Brollys piece maybe flowery in its prose, but thatâs hardly unusual for him. Itâs not a bad piece, if a bit over the top and dramatic.
Just over 20 years ago, the people of Slaughtneil decided to create a community strategy covering all aspects of life. Social cohesion and Irish identity were the foundation stones.
So they quickly established the first rural Bunscoil outside the Gaeltacht areas. They now have a flourishing Bunscoil and Gaelscoil. Everyone under 21 is fluent and an increasing number of the older ones use their native tongue.
To spearhead the communityâs move towards self-sufficiency, they founded the Carntogher Community Association, the twin brother of the GAA club. They have their own purpose-built theatre. They run their own community post office. They are about to receive planning permission for a wind farm which will provide all the energy needs of the parish. They have purchased the ancient Carn woodland and a sprawling farm.
The Carn is now used by them as an amenity, with its beautiful woodland trails. An English family with Slaughtneil roots has been brought in to manage the farm for the benefit of the locals.
Every night there are classes in Irish, computer studies, French, Spanish - the works. Go down there at any time and you will see the children wandering about with hurls in their hands, chatting in Irish, playing music or dancing. Moves are afoot to classify Slaughtneil as an official Gaeltacht area. Their chairman, SeĂĄn McGuigan, who is prone to shedding a tear when Slaughtneil win big matches (he has taken to buying Kleenex in bulk), will tell you that their success on the field is merely a by-product of community cohesion off it.
They are loyal, generous people, with a peerless sense of place and identity. During the hunger strikes of 1981, they famously withdrew from all club competitions as a mark of solidarity. How could they play our games while their neighbours were suffering so badly?
The whole point of their community strategy is to create a bulwark against the bland, consumer world most people live in. A world where our identity is created by advertisers and products. The rest of the planet supports multi-national corporations like Manchester United or Chelsea or Real Madrid, where support is a one-way street and being a supporter means nothing more than being a consumer of the brand.
Culture is what comes through the iPhone. Leisure is mostly shopping or Weight Watchers or spin class. And if a neighbour is suffering, or has fallen on hard times, fuck him. Heâs just another stranger.
In January 1976, three of the Reavey boys were sitting in their house in Whitecross, South Armagh. There are 12 Reavey boys and girls in all. The others had gone with their mother and father to visit their auntie in Camlough. The three boys had wanted to stay behind to watch Celebrity Squares, the 1970s equivalent of The Chase or the Weakest Link. They were settled in the living room when a group of men with guns walked in and shot them to pieces. John Martin (24) and Brian (22) died where they sat. Anthony, who was only 17 years old, fled into a bedroom and hid under the bed.
The assassins followed him in and methodically riddled the mattress. They had expected to find the whole family but, disappointed in their grim task, they carried out a quick search and left. Anthony, barely alive and drenched in blood, crawled from under the bed and somehow managed to drag his shattered body up the lane to the OâHanlonâs.
Two hundred long yards. When Mrs OâHanlon opened her front door on this bright Sunday evening, she cradled the boy in her arms, weeping. âTheyâre all dead,â he whispered, âtheyâre all dead.â Three weeks later, at the ripe old age of 17, he was dead himself.
The Glenanne Gang did it, a notorious loyalist/RUC/British Army gang that operated in the area with impunity. Their base was the Mitchell farm on the outskirts of Whitecross. They knew the Reavey family was big even by the standards of the time and they were intent on a massacre of a GAA family that would echo down the ages. Billy McGaughey, an RUC man in the âSpecial Patrol Groupâ, later admitted involvement. At that time he was serving life for the murder of Willie Strathern.
Willie was another Gael who played for the famous Bellaghy club and had a wee shop in Ahoghill. Late one night McGaughey came calling with his merry band. One of them shouted up to the bedroom window that he had a sick child and needed some medicine. Willie, a decent and generous man, agreed to open the shop and help a neighbour out. A few minutes later, he was dead. I played football with and against Willieâs son Kevin for years. He was a hardy boy who played for Maghera Watty Grahams.
Years later, John Weir, another RUC man, implicated a British soldier and two police officers in the Reavey murders in a sworn affidavit to the Irish Supreme Court. No one has ever been brought to justice.
The Reaveys, like the Stratherns, are steeped in the GAA. The three murdered boys played for Whitecross. When I was at the clubâs dinner dance a few weeks ago, they were celebrating the Armagh intermediate championship. Their brother Eugene Reavey is chairman of the club. Silver-haired now, in his sixties, he told me he feels the loss of his brothers every day.
On the big screens in the hall they were showing images of the trio. Captured forever in black and white with their long hair, shirt collars touching their shoulders and big smiles. Their flared trousers reminded me of a great line about Niall Hasson, the tailor from Dungiven (and a superb footballer with the St Caniceâs club).
It was said of Niallâs tailoring that âyou take two steps before the trousers move.â Eugene told me, voice faltering, that when he walked into the hall that night and saw those images, his heart âwent sidewaysâ and he had to sit down to get his breath.
Eugeneâs brother Seamus gave a short speech on the night. He is the club juvenile referee and over the course of 40 years has become a legend in the county.
When the county board sends out the pack of yellow, red and black cards at the start of every season, he opens the envelope and empties them onto the open fire in his living room. In 40 years, he has never sent a child off. In fact, he has never shown a card. Instead, his tools are coaxing and cajoling. Itâs a bit like inter-county hurling.
If a boy steps well over the line, he gets, as Eugene describes it, âA good cuff on the lug and our boy says to him, âHi boy, behave yourselfâ.â Sometimes if the offence is very grave, he sends him to the line for five minutes. According to the Whitecross boys, this unofficial sin bin works a treat. The Rules Committee should pay a visit.
Given what has been happening to the GAA at the higher level, it is no surprise that the entirely bland AogĂĄn Ăł Fearghail (in Dubai for the All-Stars junket) chose to say publicly this week that the GAA must consider the possibility of getting rid of the national anthem and the tricolour, in the interests of âharmonyâ.
Skyâs PR division could no doubt come up with something. Or maybe we could hire the creative geniuses at Hallmark Greeting Cards to give us an alternative that would allow us to feel anonymously corporate. The Coca-Cola song would be an ideal replacement. It is, after all, a company that perfectly embodies the ethos of the hierarchy.
You know the one: âWeâd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony.â Think of the goodwill this would create between us and Coca-Cola. Perhaps they could become the exclusive GPA/GAA soft drinks partner?
Alternatively, Phil Coulter could write one for us as well, another Hallmark job with one-syllable words that a two-year-old could sing. Hard to beat those unforgettable lyrics from Irelandâs Call, particularly the ingenious rhyming of âtallâ and âcallâ.
After we won the All-Ireland in 1993, we sang The Town I Loved So Well on The Late Late Show. A fortnight later, Phil (who as far as I know was never at a Gaelic match in his life) arrived at a team meeting wearing a lime green suit and lemon tie and presented us all with a signed photograph of himself at the Grand Piano.
Thatâs just the sort of man we need to write us a new three-chord anthem. On reflection, calling it an âanthemâ is aggressive, patriotic and unwelcoming. It should instead be a âjingleâ, a corporate branding song, lasting no more than 30 seconds.
As for the tricolour (which incidentally is a symbol of the green and the orange coming together in peace), we could replace it with a flag depicting little kittens tumbling about, made by our official GPA/GAA flag partner. An added bonus is that the GAA/GPA could use the image for their official Christmas cards.
The âSam Maguire Cupâ will have to go too. Maguire, after all, was a member of a team of IRB assassins in London. As Head of IRB Intelligence there, he was the mastermind behind the murder of Sir Henry Wilson in London in 1922. Glorifying the memory of a man who put bullets in the brains of Englishmen just isnât on.
I think perhaps that in future, it would be safer to call the trophy âThe AogĂĄn Ăł Fearghail Cupâ, on the basis that he has never offended anybody. On second thoughts, the Irish language is extremely offensive to many Northern protestants. DUP Minister Gregory Campbell causes howls of laughter in Stormont with his parodies of what he describes as âa political tool used by republicans to annoy the unionist communityâ.
âCurry my yoghurt can coca cola-yer,â (Go raibh maith agat Ceann Comhairle) he said in November last year, prompting great guffaws from the unionist benches. As this perennial poll-topper explained on the BBC news later that night: âI was merely exposing the fallacy and the nonsense of people who insist on using Irish in the chamber to begin every contribution, no matter what the topic is, when most people donât understand what theyâre saying.â Safer to rebrand it the Kentucky Fried Chicken Cup.
AogĂĄn is repeating the sentiments of another member of the GAAâs craven inner circle Jarlath Burns, who last year described the national anthem and the tricolour as âdivisiveâ and said he would support giving them up at GAA games if it would help to persuade some unionists to support us. âIt wouldnât cost me a thought,â he said. âIf I thought for a moment that Ulster Unionist MLA Tom Elliott would become our greatest fan, I would get rid of them surely.â
It is worth reminding ourselves that Tom is the man who proudly boasted at his Party Conference in 2010 that he would ânever go to a GAA game or a gay marchâ. And Jarlath thinks weâre the ones who should be ashamed of who we are.
The reality is that no appeasement would satisfy the Tom Elliotts and Gregory Campbells of this world. The point of a civilised society is to respect difference, not abandon what we are in order to satisfy bigots.
The world is awash with political correctness. Its main function is to make us feel embarrassed about who we are and what we think, and to create a world that is invidiously bland.
One Christmas, the novelist and journalist Keith Waterhouse wrote a newspaper column viewing the Nativity through the eyes of three wise social workers who had followed the star to Nazareth. When they arrived at the stable, they were so appalled by the conditions in the holy manger that they immediately made a successful emergency court application to have the infant taken into care. AogĂĄn would approve.
All those rebel club names will have to go too. The Donovan Rossas and the Roger Casements and all the rest of it. Kevin Strathernâs Watty Grahams could become the Maghera Tigers or Rhinos, or some other crap. Watty, after all, was a United Irishman who was hanged in the town by the British in 1798. And itâs high time his murdered fatherâs club Bellaghy Wolfe Tones stopped rubbing the Protestant peopleâs noses in it. What could be more offensive than a Protestant rebel?
Slaughtneil Robert Emmets will be a thing of the past too. Emmet was hung, drawn and quartered by the British for his part in the 1803 rebellion. In this day and age, we really shouldnât be embarrassing our English neighbours by reminding them of these things. Cutting his head off was the least they could do. In fact, we should all be wearing poppies, insensitive Fenian bastards that we are. Now thereâs an initiative AogĂĄn and Jarlath could spearhead.
Should the All Blacks abandon their haka, with its ultra-violent message? Imagine suggesting the British forsake their anthem? What with their Queen sending her troops happy and glorious to subjugate the world and âlike a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crushâ.
Eugene Reavey rang me yesterday. He has a hearing aid, so he shouts. âDid you ever hear the like of what AogĂĄn Ăł Fearghail said in Dubai?â
" No", I said. âI didnât.â
âThe worst I ever heardâ he said, âthe worst I ever heard. I look forward to singing the anthem. I love standing in respect for the flag. It is who we are.â
âI agree, Eugene.â
âItâs embarrassing Joe, to hear that coming out of the mouth of a GAA president.â
âIt is Eugene.â
I didnât bother asking SeĂĄn McGuigan what he thought.
Iv no issue with anyone saying article is tripe. It is. I said as much above. I just think itâs hypocritical out of brolly in the extreme
Itâs not hypocritical at all. The implications of sectarianism were clear and indefensible. He doesnât have to tolerate that, nor should it have ever been published, just because heâs opinionated.
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Cystic Fibrosis Ireland and joe are the winners here.The Sindo and that cunt conoln mugged off good and proper.
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Brolly 
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Brolly should run for president⌠We badly need a good northern sort to lead us home. The southern boys have lost their soul.
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Take it down from the mast
The original article was Brolly criticizing the views of two fellow northern souls. Nowt to do with the southern lads.
I donât agree with all of what Conlon said, but his tone and invective are actually very similar to brollyâs.
Iâve never heard of Conlon before, and have no idea who, or what he is.
A lot of what he writes there is reasonable enough though, and merely preached for the same height of pulpit as brolly uses. He seems to have an entirely different slant on what the president of the gaa had said. If Conlon was correct in this, then itâs brolly who has bent things out of shape, and painted o chongaile in a very poor light.
I donât see in the piece above where exactly he has called brolly a sectarian with any greater inference than brolly infers that the president of the GAA is a traitor to the Republic. Now Iâm completely on the side of a united Ireland, and I donât have much of a dog in the fight otherwise, but joe threatening libel action for an inference is indeed a bit rich. And I think brolly is a good man by and large, albeit a bit of abullshitter, with a narcissistic stripe. Reference the will Griggs is on fire fable).
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