There is a narrow salient of the county of Meath that stretches finger-like South Westwards towards Kildare, Offaly and Westmeath, and the tiny village of Clonard is its epicentre, writes An Fear Rua …

For many GAA fans, Clonard is just a typical tiny Midlands village – a few decent pubs, a school, a church, a few shops – of the kind that you speed through on your way to and from the West of Ireland. It is a tiny, isolated sliver of Meath, probably no more than a few hundred metres wide, bounded on the East by the river Boyne, to the West by the fleshpots of Kinnegad and bisected by the busy N4. The village is literally boxed in by the counties of Kildare, Offaly and Westmeath.

Clonard was once a major monastic settlement, founded by Saint Finian, a Carlowman, considered to be one of the great fathers of Irish monasticism. Clonard was a training centre for many great saints – Columba of Iona, Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, the great Voyager himself, Brendan, and Nathy. Legend attributes many miracles to Finian. He was a great man for ridding animals of parasites and vermin of all kinds and, once, it was said he fended off a bunch of Saxon raiders by causing an earthquake to swallow their camp.

Apart from its proud historic tradition, like many another small village, Clonard portrays all that is best in Dis Great Assooosheayshun Of Ours and all that is worst about this Ireland of ours at a time when De Man Dey Call Ahern is intent on squandering more a billion of taxpayers’ hard-earned Euro on a ‘national sports complex’, to the West of Dublin.

An Fear Rua had occasion recently to visit that same village of Clonard to witness the local team play Dunsany in a Meath Under-12 Division 4B football match. The enthusiasm and the warmth of the welcome of the local people could not have been greater. But the home ‘dressing room’ consisted of a massed concrete lean-to with red, corrugated roof – a building of the type more usually used to house cattle in some of the poorer parts of the country. The visitors’ dressing room was a venerable goods container of the kind that seems to clutter up so many of our roads these days. Showers were only things that happen when the weather is bad and a bulb was something you plant in your front garden in the hope that a daffodil might grow. The pitch rose and bumped at a steep angle of at least fifteen degrees away from the narrow entrance and was bracketed at either end by goal posts that were more rust than white paint. Yet, it was a fine, sunny May evening. The teams were evenly matched, the football was good and Dunsany ran out winners by 4-7 to 1-12, so we enjoyed ourselves.

In struggling with inadequate facilities, Clonard is far from unique among the parishes of the GAA. Its geographical isolation probably worsens its prospects of getting funding from any external source, since a glance at a map confirms that it is like a child orphaned between Meath, Kildare, Offaly and Westmeath. Yet, a mere twenty or so miles to the east of it, while the children of Clonard continue to prepare for games in a cow shed and a disused goods container, it is proposed to spend one billion Euro on an 80,000 seater ‘national sports complex’ that nobody really seems to want. There may well be ‘a lot done’ in some parts of the country, but there is certainly ‘a lot more to do’ in the likes of Clonard.

It really makes you wonder whether or not politicians live on the same planet as the rest of us. Sure, a proper national stadium is needed to house soccer and rugby internationals, but not with an eighty thousand seat capacity … not with velodromes and other minority sports facilities tagged on … and certainly not at a cost of one billion Euro.

AFR fully accepts De Man Dey Call Ahern’s contention that a society enjoying the kind of prosperity we have seen over the past five years is entitled to spend a proportion of its wealth on sports facilities, rather than entirely on hospitals, schools, road or rail. But within that contention, there has to be a sense of proportion and of priority. And spending hundreds of millions of Euro on Der Nationale Sport Centrum in Abbotstown, while thousands of children throughout Ireland are still without proper, basic facilities shows no sense of proportion or priority. A mere €10,000 or €20,000 in a government grant would set the likes of Clonard to rights in no time. Multiply that over, say, seven hundred clubs in dire need, and you’re talking about an expenditure between €70 million and €140 million. As Charvet J Haughey himself once remarked contemptuously when someone timorously criticised one of his budgets: ‘Sure, you’d lose that amount in a tot!’ You could spend all that and still have enough change left over to build a decent national stadium.

It is also, of course, up to the powers-that-be in Dis Great Assooosheeayshun Of Ours to articulate the needs of the Clonards of this world with the politicians and not just pocket tens of millions of Euro towards the refurbishment of Croke Park. Maybe the next time De Man Dey Call Ahern, or Gerry, Jackie or one of his other handlers, rings up looking for stand seats at Croker, they might be offered instead a couple of tickets to attend a Junior B football match at Clonard?