Brendan Hoban: Some traditional brands just can’t be sold                        

Western People  30.1.2024

In the All-Ireland Football Club final last year, Watty Grahan’s Glen (based in Maghera, Derry) fell short by one point. This year, after a titanic struggle that saw the same team snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, they edged over the line by a single point. It was an enthralling encounter, a great advertisement for club football as evidenced in the unalloyed joy of the supporters and the sense of communal pride that ‘parish’ still delivers in Ireland.

I wondered to myself: who was Watty Graham? What had Watty done to deserve to be so explicitly commemorated?

Watty, I discovered, was a Presbyterian elder – at a time when Protestants and Catholics were united in a common revolutionary purpose – who was executed for his role as a United Irishman in the Rebellion of 1798 with Watty mustering several hundred men to the cause.

I thought to myself ­– unlike Cork County GAA who have decided to rebrand Páirc Uí Chaoimh to SuperValu Páirc in an effort to control their ever-rising debt – that after their historic victory the Glen would never expunge Watty Graham’s name even if  a rebrand was deemed financially imperative.

Northern GAA, as with northern Catholics, are cut from a more resilient fabric. I suspect the signature ‘Watty’ name won’t be bargained away for any amount of dosh provided by any commercial advertiser.

It often strikes me that the GAA and the Catholic Church have much in common in terms of their membership. Both stretch across a broad spectrum from the traditionalists who treasure history and heritage and are ever loyal to the patrimony they have inherited from the past to those who welcome change and development and are happy, if circumstances merit it, to sell ‘the family silver’.

GAA traditionalists pine for the old days when the ban on foreign games was in vogue and ‘soccer’ or ‘rugby’ were anathema to the dyed-in-the-wool Gael. In much the same way, traditional Catholics pine for the Latin Mass, fasting from midnight before receiving Holy Communion on the tongue and uncomfortable with any deference to other Christian denominations.

This synchronicity between the traditional extremes in religion and in sport was nicely captured in the story about a bank official newly arrived in a local town with a significant reputation as a rugby player. When he appeared one Sunday in the queue at Mass for Communion, one elderly lady was heard to comment to another, ‘There you are now, Maisie, and you said he must be a Protestant!’

But to get back to Cork GAA. In debt to the tune of €32 million by virtue of their development of Páirc Uí Chaoimh, Cork GAA is  struggling to pay an annual interest of €250,000 a year and is now in discussions with SuperValu supermarket on a sponsorship agreement that could raise a million or two in return for rebranding Páirc Uí Chaoimh or SuperValu Páirc or some such hybrid designation. There are, as expected, mixed views, diverging along predicted lines. Traditionalists are appalled that Pádraig Ó Chaoimh who is revered for his huge service to the GAA ­­– he was secretary of Cork GAA from 1929-1964  – and for his role in the War of Independence for which he was jailed in England, is being sold for what the Bible in a similar context called ‘a mess of pottage’. (Genesis 25: 29-34 alludes to Esau, Isaac’s son, with short-sightedness and misplaced priorities, selling his birth-right for a meal of vegetable soup). Ó Chaoimh is designated in the definitive Dictionary of Irish Biography as ‘the architect of the modern GAA’.

But while there appears to be significant resistance in Cork to selling their brand, that reluctance bucks a growing trend in GAA and other sporting organisations for adopting as a policy what appears to many as a relatively painless form of fund-raising. Lansdowne Road, for decades the legendary Irish rugby headquarters, is now rebranded the Aviva Stadium. Mayo’s MacHale Park is now the unwieldy Hastings Insurance MacHale Park.

Nonetheless, loyalty to a traditional brand is persistent, especially in the GAA. This is compounded by the GAA’s pride in its amateur status, a bedrock belief gradually compromised and some would say undermined by payments, official and unofficial. Seeing sport as a commodity seems somehow to minimize its value especially to an organization like the GAA which prides itself on its traditional values – not least its pride in its parish base. Names and symbols matter because loyalty matters and tradition matters. People move supermarkets at will but a sporting loyalty can be a visceral thing, as they are discovering in Cork, touching depths still unplumbed by Lidl or even SuperValu.

Sponsorship of varying kinds is now a workable reality in Irish life. JP McManus, a Limerick millionaire, pours vast sums into Limerick GAA giving it an unfair advantage over less funded counties. The golfer, Shane Lowry, funds Offaly football. And yet even in areas like education and health while sponsorship is taken for granted, as a law lecturer wrote recently in the Irish Times, many people would draw the line at rebranding Galway University as ‘Supermac’s University of Galway’. 

What’s acceptable can vary across a wide palate ­– appropriateness, financial value, good taste and so forth, no matter how large the financial benefits that accrue. There is a line somewhere that determines that we reach a point where donations merge into embarrassment and exploitation. Who would ever suggest, for example, that Ballina’s signature building could be rebranded Ballina Guinness Cathedral no matter how much funds were needed (and they are) or how big the cheque might be? 

For sport as with religion, traditionalists will have to make their peace with sponsorship, especially when it represents a necessary engagement with  the real world. In different ways and in a changing culture, both the Catholic Church and the GAA are coming to terms with living in a different world. Survival means opting for change as a vital constituent in modern life.

For any institution, living in the past is no service to the present and a betrayal of the future.