Coming ... to a bill board near you!

Not since since Dominic ‘Fats’ Donnelly returned home from serving in the American army in Korea in the early Fifties, with a black ‘friend’ in tow, has there been such a hub hub in the village of Gowlnacalley, writes An Fear Rua …

Oh, the billboard is there to be seen alright, at the top of the Main Street … plain as the nose on your face, so to speak … A Tipperary hurler and a Galway hurler locked in what seems like arm-to-arm combat. At a distance, some of the Gowlnacalley-John Redmonds’ boyos thought it was just a variation on the Guinness billboards we had on display before the All Ireland, ‘Not Men, but Giants!’ Or maybe it was a new version of the Bank of Ireland billboard ‘Ask Not What Your County Can Do for You!’?

Then, fellas started pulling in their trucks, four-wheel drives and ’92 Mazdas onto the hard shoulder to take a closer look. Far from being locked in combat, the two lads were in the middle of a hurling field, engaged in a degree of snogging that would have had any couple immediately thrown out of the Gowlnacalley Royal cinema in the old days, even if they had been doing it under cover of darkness, in the far corner of the back row. There it was, staring at us, just opposite Saint Mathilda’s parish church, at the junction of the road to Horse-and-Jockey. And a very appropriate place for it indeed, as one wag remarked later that night in the back ‘shnug’ of Ma Molloy’s famous drinking emporium.

Well, twasn’t Guinness the two lads had on their minds at all. The billboard is the first in a series going on display nationwide advertising a new magazine called ‘GI’, aimed at Ireland’s gay community. Apparently, there’s another version of it that shows the unlikely scenario of a Dublin footballer kissing a man in a Kerry jersey. Now, even casual GAA followers know that’s something that’s unlikely to happen whether the people involved are ‘gay, straight or indifferent’, as Albert Reynolds might have said. Instead, it looks like the Armani-suited, pony-tailed ‘creatives’ in the advertising agencies who dream up – sorry, devise - this type of campaign haven’t exactly done their homework on the true state of relations between Dublin and Kerry folk.

The publisher of the new magazine, John Ryan, is a talented writer who has either edited or established some very successful magazines in the past. John believes the so-called ‘Pink Pound’ – that is, spending by gays in Ireland – is worth around IR£700 million a year. And he wants to get his hands on a slice of that. John says: ‘We wanted to capture the epitome of Irish masculinity. The GAA footballer and hurler are the last word in Irish manhood’. (Sounds like John has never come across the likes of Keith Wood or Mick Galwey!).

However, in the next breath, he reveals the real reason for showing male GAA players kissing each other: ‘Obviously, the advertising campaign is about publicity’. In fact, AFR hears that - far from wanting the bill boards to stay in place over the coming weeks - John and the lads (and, yes, it is mostly lads who are working on the magazine) were hoping the billboards would be banned, thus creating even more publicity for the magazine’s launch. You’d imagine some of the ‘lads’ themselves might have known that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults has been entirely legal in Ireland since 1994! So, the chances of them being banned were about as high as Waterford pipping Galway in the All Ireland senior football final next year.

The whole idea of featuring GAA players on these billboards seems to be predicated on a hoary old out-of-date assessment that ‘units of Dis Great Asssooosheeayshun Of Ours’, in a Pavlovian reaction, would rise to the bait, start attacking the posters and call for them to be banned. It just shows you just how out of touch John Ryan, his advertising agency and the more tabloid sections of the national ‘meeja’ (‘The Star’ and 98FM Radio, for example) are with the reality of the GAA today. There was a time, ten, fifteen years ago, perhaps, when some county boards might have convened emergency meetings to demand the demolition of these billboards, with copies of ‘GI’ magazine being burned in bonfires on the sidelines of Junior C hurling matches the length and breadth of the country, while decades of the Rosary were recited nearby.

But those days are long gone in the GAA. Most people – and that includes the vast bulk of GAA fans, players and officials – will look at these billboards, shrug and say ‘So what?’ There will always be the handful of religious fundamentalists and the odd Gaelic Ayatollah or two who may ‘have a go’ at the Association for not opposing the ads. But the GAA powers-that-be have responded admirably to a cheap, lazy shot at provocation. ‘But they haven’t said anything!’, you respond incredulously. Precisely. Just as Holmes once dryly pointed out to the ineffably bumbling Dr. Watson, the real significance of the hound that didn’t bark in the night was … that the hound didn’t bark at all!

The GAA still has a long way to go in resolving the issue of Rule 21 on the prohibition on members of the Northern Ireland Police Authority and, possibly even, on the acceptance of Protestants wholeheartedly into the Association’s activities, but in matters of discrimination on racial, gender and sexual orientation grounds, AFR believes the GAA’s heart – and head – are in the right place and it may even be something of an example for other sporting organisations to emulate…

Related Topics:
GAA Founded in Gay Sauna? – Shock Research!
‘Speak Out! DB Thread on this topic