Middle class D4 types more Irish than GAA fans

Hairy Homer

Heard some wiseass on Morning Ireland this morning (click on the sports news link on this page) as part of an admittedly jokey rant about the change of theme music for the Sunday Game decrying the presence of fair-weather supporters at Croke Park.

These could be identified, he says, by their first names which include Fionn and Sorcha.

He's quite right. If you have an Irish name nowadays you are almost certainly middle class, speak with a Dort accent (if you live in or near Dublin) and are contemplating whether to vote PD or Fine Gael in the forthcoming election.

If on the other hand you're called Nigel or Darren or Keith, you probably live in North or West Dublin in some sink estate, wear an Arnott's jersey and will probably vote for the Shinners.

Then you'll head down the pub and declare over a few pints that you'll never let Croke Park be host to 'foreign garrison games'


Roddy Doyle has spotted this anomaly. All his heroes have names that could come from any homogenuous lower middle class household anywhere in the English speaking world. In the film the Snapper, one of the main characters was called Craig (Has anyone ever met an Irishman called Craig who didn't wear a Rangers jersey and play in an Orange band?) It was an exaggeration but the observation was well made.

Meanwhile in When Brendan met Trudy, Oisin and Fiach were the progeny of a couple who had a car sticker declaring 'middle class and proud'.

Thank God for Dublin 4 rugby types who make sure there's plenty of Girvans, Shanes, Donnchas and Ronans flying the flag for native culture.

Leave the Grahams, Trevors, Nigels, Colins and Darrens to Gaelic football.

Oh and hey. Keep Croker clean of foreign influence, eh.

Asok

Roish! Dublin to galway in 10 minutes I ****ING FLOORED IT FINTAN!

Hairy Homer

Hey, loike, you're so not allowed in this forum with your collar up, man.

Waylander

Ill take this oppotunity to point out that the character in the book the Snapper is actually called Jimmy rabbite, same as in the commitments. They had to change the family name and that characters name for the film because The Commitments had copyrighted the names. Also I have an Irish name and come from middle class Dublin but I do not have a dort accent and certainly am not contemplating voting for any of the parties you mentioned above. I do however wear an Arnotts jersey quite frequently. To sum up, I think you are talking utter arse!

Mighty_Mouse

That went completely over my head. What you on about Homer?

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Waylander
Also I have an Irish name and come from middle class Dublin

Well natch

but I do not have a dort accent and certainly am not contemplating voting for any of the parties you mentioned above. I do however wear an Arnotts jersey quite frequently. To sum up, I think you are talking utter arse!

There's an exception to every rule. I'm generalising. But I'm not the only one to spot the correlation between Irish names and the Middle Classes in modern Ireland. So has the GAA fan whose rant was broadcast on Morning Ireland today.

Who would have thought that a supporter of the organisation that gave us the ban on foreign games, ostracised members for attending 'foreign dances' and boycotted the last Irishman to win an athletics gold medal at the Olympics because he belonged to a 'partitionist' federation would poke fun at compatriots for being called Fionn or Sorcha?

Waylander

Do you not think you are being a bit pedantic bringing up the foreign dance ban and the likes. These are hardly examples of modern GAA attitudes. I know the point you are trying to get across but you are going way over the top here. By the way what Olympian are you referring to? I do not think it is Michael Carruth anyway but I could be wrong.

There's an exception to every rule. I'm generalising. But I'm not the only one to spot the correlation between Irish names and the Middle Classes in modern Ireland. So has the GAA fan whose rant was broadcast on Morning Ireland today.

I could list of the names of the lads I knock about with who would all be from within a few minutes walk from my folks house, and all middle class. Not a Fionn in sight! Sure enough a few of them would vote Fine Gael, but they are the second biggest party in the country, traditionally at least. However there would be a few Fianna Fail, and a couple of labour\green\independent in there too. Are we all exceptions to the rule? Better still go through the Irish rugby team one by one and I do not think you will see an inordinate amount of the type of names you mention apart from Donnacha (I do not think Ronan falls into the brackett yuou are going for), and these guys are all at least middle class backgrounds. I know a fair few of them have GAA backgrounds, yet they wear Ireland rugby jerseys not Dublin Arnotts jersies!

The Rooster

I've often seen Michael Carruth and his brothers on the Hill. Carruth was paraded to the crowd in Croke Park after winning his gold medal.

I may be forgetting someone, but I think the last Irish male athlete to win Olympic Gold was Ronnie Delaney. But thats ancient history.

I remember the huge cheers that went around Croke Park the day of the 1987 Leinster final between Dublin and Meath when the stadium announcer said Stephen Roche had won the Tour de France. The Artane Boys Band made themselves into a big "R". Great stuff. Then we got stuffed!

The first post on this thread is abigloadafookinsheight.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Waylander
By the way what Olympian are you referring to? I do not think it is Michael Carruth anyway but I could be wrong.

Carruth was a boxer, not an athlete. I was talking about Ronnie Delaney, winner of the 1500m in Melbourne in 1956. The last Irishman (or indeed person) to win an athletics gold medal at the Olympics.

Did you know that when he returned to Ireland via the US he was given a motorcade from Shannon to Dublin and was rapturously greeted in many towns along the way? However, a few towns in the GAA heartland boycotted the festivities and would not put on a reception for him because of his sporting affiliations.

Their problem was that Delaney was a member of a club affiliated to the BLE, not the GAA-approved NACA (National Athletics and Cycling Association) which was allowed to use GAA premises. The BLE, you see was 'partitionist' in that it de facto recognised the border, which of course the truly republican NACA would absolutely not do. The NACA insisted on being able to represent all of Ireland, despite the fact that most contestants from Northern Ireland were quite happy to compete for Great Britain.

The Olympic movement has a horror of getting involved with political disputes and normally cracks down hard on anybody who tries to use the games as a platform for political agitation. So it refused to recognise the NACA as the legitimate athletics body for the Republic of Ireland. Several clubs then tried to set up their own organisation called the BLE to represent Ireland. Of course, the NACA could get its GAA cronies to freeze them out of facilities--on the grounds of not being sufficiently Irish--and so the BLE only had a chance of getting off the ground in the large urban centres like Dublin and Cork where there were enough of them to set up their own facilities.

But of course there was bitterness between the NACA/GAA and the BLE 'West Brits' who put competing for their country above the burning issue of national reunification.

So when Delaney had the temerity to actually win his event, there was no question of the die hards doing anything so generous as actually congratulating him. He wasn't a proper Irishman as far as they were concerned.

At that same Olympics in Melbourne there was a kerfuffle at the start of the cycling event when a team of NACA cyclists, including a notorious IRA man, attempted to compete in the race. It ended in a punch up.


Want to know the ultimate irony?

Only two former NACA athletes ever won medals at major athletics championships. One was a former UCD student called Victor Manning. On graduation, he went back to the land of his birth, reverted to his original name of Wieslaw Maniak and won a silver medal for Poland in the 4 x 100m relay in Tokyo in 1964.

Another was a guy called Jim Hogan /ne John Cregan who won the 1966 European Marathon Championship for .........Great Britain.

So the organisation that wouldn't let you dance to the Beatles on the grounds that they weren't a Ceili band produced a gold medal for Britain and is now apparently supported by people who like to poke fun at those with Irish names for not being real people. Did you listen to the Morning Ireland clip?

Oh irony.

go through the Irish rugby team one by one and I do not think you will see an inordinate amount of the type of names you mention apart from Donnacha (I do not think Ronan falls into the brackett yuou are going for), and these guys are all at least middle class backgrounds. I know a fair few of them have GAA backgrounds, yet they wear Ireland rugby jerseys not Dublin Arnotts jersies!

What I'm saying is that in today's Ireland, having a gaelic name (like Ronan, or Donncha, or Fionan, or Brendan or even Eamon) is an indication, no more than that, that somebody is from a comfortable middle-class background. Just as if I meet an Irish person of my generation (early 40s) called Trevor, Nigel, Graham or Keith it's almost a certainty that they are from the Anglo-Irish Protestant community.

That doesn't apply any more. A few years ago Meath won the All Ireland with a team containing a Graham, a Trevor, a Darren, two Nigels and a Colin. In the 70s, if you saw an Irish team sheet with names like that you could bet your bottom dollar it was a cricket or hockey team.

Trojan

Well done HH, pure class!

Waylander

Yet another valuable contribution to the GAA board form Trojan! Keep coming back please. Homer, I have gotta be honest and say I know nothing about the Ronnie Delaney incident you speak of but the way you tell it you are holding a grudge against the GAA fans of today for the actions of some extremeists from almost fifty years ago. Now you are accusing us GAA fans of living in the past in the other Croke Park thread. You can't have it both ways here. As regards the GAA heartlands you speak of, these areas would also have been IRA heartlands at the time also. If this is the case there is a strong chance that it was the IRA encouraging this course of action and not the GAA. I am aware that back then there would have been close ties between both but they were still seperate organisations. You talk like they are one and the same and this is not and was not the case. Obviously the misguided people in IRA would have been GAA members as there would be a link to Irish tradition and history but they would not have been representative of the general GAA membership. As for the Beatles dance ban, again you are referring to a few extremeists here, and I think you are being a bit unfair painting me with the same brush!

As regards the name thing I am not really sure what point you are trying to make. I understand what you say in your last post, and agree to a certain extent, but I will point out this could be down to regional preferences for names. 30 years ago Meath did not win many all ireland titles so they may have had players by those names in their team and we would not know.

The Rooster

More rubbish from Hairy Homer.

A few individuals does not mean the whole GAA were anti Delaney. There were literally thousands of GAA people who celebrated Delaney's feat.

The name of the country that currently represents us in the Olympics is "Ireland", meaning all 32 counties. No border is recognised. Individuals in the North have the choice as to whether they represent Ireland or the UK in the Olympics. Almost all choose Ireland, regardless of religion. Wayne McCullough being the most recent Protestant Northern Irishman who won an Olympic medal for Ireland.

For the first time ever, the UK included the word "Northern Ireland" in their official documentation regarding the upcoming Olympics. Pat Hickey of the Irish Olympic Council insisted they remove the wording.

The IRA in the 1950s was not a terrorist orgainsiation, like the scumbag provos of the 70s, 80s and 90s. That mention was an irrelevance.

The stuff about names is the height of nonsense.

kaimera

...tick tock tick tock...

Trojan

Is a sense of humour considered a foreign influence, and thus banned within the GAA?

Or did he just not get it?

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Waylander
Yet another valuable contribution to the GAA board form Trojan! Keep coming back please. Homer, I have gotta be honest and say I know nothing about the Ronnie Delaney incident you speak of but the way you tell it you are holding a grudge against the GAA fans of today for the actions of some extremeists from almost fifty years ago.

I'm not holding a grudge against GAA fans of today Waylander. There is much to admire about the GAA, especially the way it bases its organisation on the community down to parish level. That's why I think it has nothing to fear from soccer which is increasingly a globalised game where it is almost demanded that one's affections are directed to a few big teams (United Arsenal etc etc)

What I'm doing is pointing out that there is a legacy in the GAA of intolerance to other sports and indeed to other communities, and that this legacy comes from the rulemakers of the GAA (not the lunatic extremist fringe) who passed and kept on their statute books intolerant aggressive laws such as the ban. These rules were stupid, and like all stupid rules were widely ignored by sensible people, even at the time. Today they seem almost incredible and I have never heard a person of my own generation or younger defend them. They've been discarded and we move on.

However the 'sharing facilities' controversy is a vestige of those attitudes and times and the powers that be in the GAA, although I believe most of them want to proceed on the basis of common sense, are very much afraid of being seen to be soft on 'core values.' Which is the only reason that there is a debate at all on sharing facilities with other sports. In other countries and other codes the idea that each game HAS to have its own expensive infrastructure for everything it does would be ridiculous.

So if you want to claim, as I suspect you might, that the GAA deserves support for Croke Park because of its hard unpaid work in organising hurling and football matches for people of all ages in every nook and cranny of the country, I'll agree with you. But I will also point out that a lot of the 'anti sharing' argument has its roots in attitudes that most people, even in the GAA have left behind.

Now you are accusing us GAA fans of living in the past in the other Croke Park thread.

Actually I'm not. I'm saying you're prisoners of the past. And I'm illustrating it with the points I'm making here. I encourage you to break free of it. :-)

As for the Beatles dance ban, again you are referring to a few extremeists here, and I think you are being a bit unfair painting me with the same brush!

Them's was the rules at the time Waylander. You seem to be quite disgusted by them. Just as in a few years' time a future generation will be amazed that soccer and hurling players couldn't share the same sports hall.

As regards the name thing I am not really sure what point you are trying to make.

First names can tell you a lot about people. Direct marketers know this very well. If you're called Percy or Herbert, they'll assume you're a gentleman of a certian age and that age would be different to somebody called Wayne or Gary.

20-30 years ago, certain names in Ireland indicated that you were from the Protestant community. (eg Trevor, Nigel, Colin, Heather, Graham) Nowadays that no longer applies. In fact, I'll bet there's a lot of kids from England under the age of 10 called Ronan thanks to the success of Boyzone.


I just found it ironic that the guy on Morning Ireland identified people called Sorcha and Fionn as being middle class blow ins who would not normally be seen at a GAA match. He's right of course. Listen to the clip. It's about five minutes into the sports news item in the link above.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by The Rooster
More rubbish from Hairy Homer.

A few individuals does not mean the whole GAA were anti Delaney. There were literally thousands of GAA people who celebrated Delaney's feat.

Of course there were. A point I made in my original thread. And there were thousands of GAA members who ignored the ban. I'm pointing out that the rules at the time were intolerant and divisive. And I'm claiming that some of the legacy lives on in current controversies.

The name of the country that currently represents us in the Olympics is "Ireland", meaning all 32 counties. No border is recognised. Individuals in the North have the choice as to whether they represent Ireland or the UK in the Olympics. Almost all choose Ireland, regardless of religion. Wayne McCullough being the most recent Protestant Northern Irishman who won an Olympic medal for Ireland.

We live in more tolerant times, thank God. You might also have pointed out that a Catholic from Monaghan (Barry McGuigan) won a boxing gold medal for Northern Ireland in the Commonwealth games in 1978. Having people from all Nine Counties of Ulster elegible for the Commonwealth games is part of what can be achieved with a 'give and take' attitude.

The IRA in the 1950s was not a terrorist orgainsiation, like the scumbag provos of the 70s, 80s and 90s. That mention was an irrelevance.

Not the right thread to debate that point.

The stuff about names is the height of nonsense.

Is it really?
Then why did the GAA fan on the radio poke fun at people called Sorcha and Fionn?

I'm not making the point. I'm just agreeing with him. And pointing out the irony.

The Rooster

Grand. I agree that your comments on the Olympics etc is all ancient history, everyone has moved on, and its of no relevance now in either athletics or GAA.

I dont agree with the names thingy. Irish names are very popular regardless of class and residence.

Yavvy

I agree with rooster and waylander... HH is full o' ****e.

nonsence... untterly..

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Alany
HH is full o' ****e.

nonsence... untterly..

No he isn't and it isn't.

So there.

thirdmantackle

While we are on the topic of D4 types and all that - why can't we have a few decent country accents on the TV and radio for a change? If there's one thing I hate its a big D4 type commentator trying to get excited about GAA...

Hairy Homer

Drive through Waterford and tune into the local radio during the hurling season. There's some guy does hurling commentaries there who's straight out of Radio Roy.

thirdmantackle

we have a few of them out West as well... I'm talking about RTE though. A few 'cultured' accents on the airwaves would do no harm!!

Occidental

Originally posted by Hairy Homer

What I'm saying is that in today's Ireland, having a gaelic name (like Ronan, or Donncha, or Fionan, or Brendan or even Eamon) is an indication, no more than that, that somebody is from a comfortable middle-class background. [/B]

This would be all very well if it wasn't for the fact that the estates of Dublin are awash with Brendans and Eamos and middle class they aint.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Occidental
This would be all very well if it wasn't for the fact that the estates of Dublin are awash with Brendans and Eamos and middle class they aint.

Well I wouldn't know that. I'm a Dublin 4 rugger bugger.

But I've never met a skanger called Oisin.

:-)

Trojan

HH, you're the kind of guy who ruins the image of rugby for us skanger players. We know where you parked your Porsche...

I'm a northsoider (by address, and somewhat by upbringing).

I tell ya, there's plenty of Oisins, Sorchas, Fintans, Donnachas and Fionns, I meet them everytime I go down the Beachcomber or the Goblet for a pint... :rolleyes:

Haven't heard this phenomenon of D4 GAA commentators.. this is on RTE Radio 1?

Al.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Trojan
HH, you're the kind of guy who ruins the image of rugby for us skanger players. We know where you parked your Porsche...

That's not my Porsche. It's my boss's. And he's a northside skanger.

Mine's the decrepit old Escort round the back. My car, that is.

The Rooster

Is Ger Canning from Dublin? I didnt think he was. He's an embarrassment to whatever county he's from.

Is there anyone else on RTE GAA from Dublin. I dont think so. Its a culchie clittered zone.

Marty Morrissey
Michael Lyster
Pat Spillane
Colm O'Rourke
Joe Brolly
Bernard Flynn
Tony Davis
Micheal O'Muircheartaigh
Cyril Farrell
Ger Loughnane
Liam Griffin

And I'm sure there's a few I'm forgetting.

How many more feckin culchies do you want?

Paul Curran is on this year too, so finally after about 20 years, there is one Dub who'll get an opportunity to have a say. And while he's a southsider, he's certainly not D4. A Tallaghtman good and true!

Stoner

I have an Irish name and I live on the northside, I have been called a scumbag many a time , and I also have a Dublin shirt, In fact all my family have Irish names , all the brothers and sisters and all the 21 grand children, and most of them would be GAA supporters living on the northside of Dublin.
However I do take your point

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Stoner
I have an Irish name and I live on the northside, I have been called a scumbag many a time , and I also have a Dublin shirt, In fact all my family have Irish names , all the brothers and sisters and all the 21 grand children, and most of them would be GAA supporters living on the northside of Dublin.
However I do take your point

Maith an fear/cailin!

Evil_Bilbo

I may have completely missed the point of this thread.

Actually - I have.

Was it that D4 types (ie fair weather supporters) have irish names these days, and the northside posse (by n large into their GAA) have the posh names?

Everything else kinda went in one ear and out the other (perhaps this is because I'm not a dub)

Well?

Yavvy

MY vote for post pointless Thread evarh !


The only thing I agree with is we need a few Culchies with big thick bogger accents commenting of Gaelic games, entertainment value alone from those fellas would get people to tune in.

ahem: The legend

"Stephen Byrne with the puck out for Offaly....Stephen, one of
12......all but one are here to-day, the one that's missing is Mary,
she's at home minding the house.....and the ball is dropping i lar na bpairce...."

"... and Brian Dooher is down injured. And while he is, i'll tell
ye a little story. I was in Times' Square in New York last week, and I was missing the Championship back home. So I approached a newsstand and I said 'I suppose ye wouldn't have the Kerryman would ye?' To which,the Egyptian behind the counter turned to me and he said 'do you want the North Kerry edition or the South Kerry edition?'... he had both...so I bought both. And Dooher is back on his feet..."

Waylander

Al you plagurising fecker. They are from my post of Michael Muireartigh quotes from about a year and a half ago!

Yavvy

I said ... Ahem: the Legend

Michael Muireartigh is the Legend at GAA commentary..Thats what I was saying
And yes I dug up your old post for those quotes