I WAS sent a story by a man from Leitrim about a mate of his who has been living in Canada. The Canadian government locked down completely there and he was out of work with nowhere to go, so he decided to come home to Leitrim.

At the start of this week, he flew into London. Then got a connecting flight to Dublin. His elderly father, who was there to pick him up at the airport, wouldn’t approach him at all, and when they went outside to the carpark, he saw that the old man had the cattle trailer attached to the jeep, which he proceeded to open, then usher him in like a cow.

He drove him the whole way home to Leitrim in the cattle trailer, without so much as a cushion in the back. The message was accompanied by a video of the immigrant bouncing about in the back of the trailer, the dance music going full blast. Desperate times.

It reminded me of when I played with the Dungiven u-14 footballers, captained by Mickey McGonigle junior, who had a body like Mr T from the ‘A’ team and bore the permanent expression of a man who would tear your head off if the need arose. Once, he was involved in a ferocious fist-fight with Paul ‘Czar’ McCloskey from Mitchell Park, who had very large hands as I recall. There was no particular reason for the fight, or if there was I forget it now, other than the fact that Paul Czar was the king of Mitchell Park and Mickey his royal counterpart in Priory Road.

Anyway, at the appointed time, we all gathered in the play park and the rules were laid down. They would fight in the sandpit, and to ensure strict observance of the Marquis of Queensbury’s Rules, they would remove their shoes before battle commenced. The tension was unbearable and as they tore into each other I could barely watch, as I was (and am) very fond of both boys, but particularly Mickey. As was the tradition, as the fight unfolded, some of the audience members peed in their shoes. In the end, when the two boys were exhausted and neither was in a position to continue, they shook hands, a draw was declared by Coppel Mullan and their sodden shoes were handed back to them. “You dirty rotten bastards,” said Mickey, smiling, the blood trickling down his nose.

By that evening, we were all friends again. Or rather, friends in the manner of such an intensely close-knit community as ours was in those days, where we would defend one of our own to the death against outsiders but might not even like each other.

That evening, Paul Czar and Mickey were to play midfield for our u-14s in the league against Ballinascreen. The St Canice’s club did not have a minibus and in those days parents did not hang around their children like a bad smell, so to make the journey across the mountain we were jammed into the back of Mickey McGonigle senior’s pick-up, which he used to transport his sheep. The sole safety feature of which was a steel cage over the back. Every time we passed anyone on the road, we bleated together in chorus. ‘BAAAAAAAAAAAAA’. Anyway, the journey did us no harm. We administered the traditional beating to the ‘Screen and returned home, bleating triumphantly all the way. Innocent days.

That innocence is coming to an end. A barrister friend texted me yesterday to say “This is like the start of any disaster movie ever made.” The streets are eerily quiet. But with the UK government and NI Executive so slow to act (it is still impossible to get tested here), GAA communities all over the North have been forced to look elsewhere for leadership, and the GAA has not let us down.

On March 12, when the GAA sent out an edict to every club to halt all games, training and gatherings, and close social clubs, we took matters into our own hands. On that same date, the Taoiseach finally announced the closure of southern schools to start on March 13 (and advised that there should not be public gatherings of more than 500 people or private gatherings of more than 100) but it was another week before the Northern Executive followed suit and shut the schools (partially).

It is hard to blame the people, when Boris Johnson was telling the population (until the March 23) to carry on as normal and everything would be fine. What are people to make of it when he said things on national TV like “I’m shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody and you’ll be pleased to know I continue to shake hands.”

The “It’s not really going to be as bad as the WHO is saying is it?” and “I’ll bet you £20 it will all blow over in a fortnight” (a lawyer said that to me in a packed Derry court on the March 16, the courts thankfully have since closed) stopped and insofar as we could, we began to take measures in accordance with best practice elsewhere.

We looked south and with great pride saw Croke Park stadium opening as a Covid-19 mass testing centre. We locked down our elderly, arranged grocery deliveries for them and ensured they had remote social contact, grandchildren coming to the window, waving and chatting from outside, setting them up with Facetime and Skype.

My club St Brigid’s now has a team of 120 volunteers organising help, collecting prescriptions, buying and collecting groceries, setting up the elderly with Skype etc, providing I-Pads and tablets and all the rest of it. Again, the problem is that because there is no government help and no compulsory measures, we are a little confused ourselves as to how to go about this with maximum safety.

The correct safety masks are not available to the public (unlike say South Korea and Taiwan where there is mass distribution), and in spite of the fact that we are being told that healthy people with Covid-19 can be asymptomatic, there is no mass testing here. Nor is it possible to find hand sanitiser, perhaps the most crucial commodity on earth at this moment.

We are all immensely proud of what the GAA nationally is doing. When we see Croke Park operating as the biggest mass testing facility in the country, it is, as the great Kerry forward Paul Geaney said during the week, a source of pride for all of us. Reacting to the video of the first drive thru, Paul wrote “The usual goosebumps of driving under those stands are replaced with goosebumps of trepidation watching this video. But pride also in the reaction of our organisation.” Nowlan Park, the spiritual home of our greatest hurling community, has also come on line as another mass testing centre, one of 22 such centres in the South. Meanwhile, in the North, we have none.

So, we wait in our houses, living like old age pensioners in a retirement home. In one of Fr Ted’s most famous scenes, the three priests go to Fr Larry Duff’s caravan on their holidays. It is raining heavily, and after an hour the novelty of being in the tiny caravan has worn off.

Father Ted: Did you bring the travel scrabble Dougal?

Father Dougal: I brought the normal scrabble and the travel scrabble, Ted. The travel scrabble for when we were traveling, and the normal scrabble for when we arrived!

Father Ted: Good man!

Father Dougal: Ah, no, wait a minute… now that I think of it I didn’t bring either of them! God, I’m an awful eejit!

I thought of this when we found ourselves playing scrabble this week. “Will we have the tea now, or will we wait until after the scrabble?” “We could have it now?” “Maybe it would be better after, the tea might get cold if we are concentrating?” “Fair point. After so.” Having lost the first two matches, I finally got THE WORD. Halfway through, my opponent left a stray R at the bottom of the word SCAR. And there it was. All seven letters used, to form the word RARIFIED. 39 points for the word. 50 bonus points for all seven letters used. 89 points. Game over, and a feeling of triumph not experienced since the last few seconds of the 1998 Ulster final. You see? Everything comes back to the GAA.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Association to us, particularly at times like these. My father said once “Don’t be too hard on the free staters son, some of them are nearly as Irish as we are.” A fluent Irish speaker immensely proud of his Irishness and of the GAA, he was of course joking. But like all the best jokes, there was a hint of truth in it. What he meant was that whereas people in the South quite naturally take their Irishness for granted, we have to work much harder at it up here, where we have often felt frightened, alone and cut adrift.

The GAA is our fun and recreation. But it is something far more than that. It is what nourishes us and keeps us together. It gives our communities strength and provides us with a sense of identity that overpowers everything else.

And in the North, with the people being thrown to the wolves by the government, the GAA is all we have.

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