The GAA provides an outlet for thousands of children throughout Ireland

By John Hughes

I do club notes every Monday night. I did a word count on it this week. It came in at over 2,000 words. If I kept that up I’d have a novel written in less than two months.

Clubs across the country have emerged from a period of semi-dormancy and are back with a vengeance.

That 2,000 word count is a brief chronicle of a week’s worth of activity in one club. Multiply that by the 2,300 odd clubs there are in Ireland and you get some concept of just how huge a part the GAA plays in Irish life.

Last Saturday morning in Ballyshannon was an example. We had under 8 and under 10 boys and under 12 girls all playing over the course of the morning. The players were watered and foddered as well and despite the cold there was plenty of warmth on and off the pitch.

Just taking into account our own club teams, we had over 90 young players in action in that three hour period.

Sometimes you have to stand back and just wonder at the glory of it all.

No one had to pay to use the facilities. All the food and drink was provided by voluntary effort. All the coaches were there from the love of the games. Managers and supporters got behind their teams, but I can’t think of one occasion when someone might have stepped over the mark and abused someone.

Some of the things we worked on in training came off a treat. But of course there are other aspects of our play we know we have to work on over the next few weeks as a result of what we saw in our first competitive games of the season.

We won some games, we lost others. But, by and large, players and management dealt with victory and defeat with impressive maturity. How they’ll deal with winning and losing when there’s a bit more on the line might be a different matter, but right now there’s a great equanimity about the final whistle.

All in all it was a wonderful thing to be part of.

The fear is that, although we had brilliant numbers last Saturday morning, there are still many more children who spent their Saturday watching TV, or browsing Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

Obviously there are more ways to express your creativity and identity than just sport, but when you see the massive emotional, physical and psychological benefits of being involved in being active, particularly at a young age, it seems almost a form of abuse that children are allowed not to engage with it.

All kids have their own personalities, and some are more physically literate and eager to compete than others. But just because a child says they don’t want to go play a game doesn’t mean that should be where a parent lets the matter rest.

Consider this stark headline which appeared in the Guardian last month.

“Three-quarters of UK children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates.”

What this boils down to is a survey of 2,000 parents of 5-12 year olds which found that 74 percent of children spent less than 60 minutes playing outside each day. Isn’t that quite something?

Last Saturday morning close to 200 kids were able to enjoy the benefits of being out and about in the fresh air. And yet it seems that most basic of freedoms is something we take for granted at our peril.

To quote from the Guardian piece.

“The truth is we are enclosing our children,” said Mark Sears, at The Wild Network, which works to increase wild play. “We are stifling their ability to be free, to be at their best as children and it is having significant impacts.”

This trend has implications for mental well-being as well as the remorseless rise of obesity in the population. When one considers these worrying patterns, the GAA does an invaluable job, one which is radically under-estimated and under-appreciated by the authorities.

So the next time someone starts slabbering about the Grab All Association, you might start your rebuttall by pointing to the colossal sum the Association is saving tax payers in terms of dietetic and mental health services.

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