Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Did you ever pull your hair out looking for something?

You’re sure you had the thing, positive you left in a drawer but then you go and root around for it, all the while dreaming up all the other places you might have thought to put it just in case you were foolish enough to lose it. And like a bad dose of Murphy’s Law you search everywhere, annoyed that you’re getting worked over something so trivial as a voucher but frustrated because you know your mind won’t rest until you find it.

And when you do find what you’re looking for you can only smile at yourself because the person who decided to put them in this new, easy-to-reach position seems a million miles removed from the slightly insane maniac that has the room turned over and his brow bleeding from the furrows creased on his forehead.

I get the impression that Mick Wallace goes through this routine every day of the week. You only have to look at his hair. A rock star maybe, but a property developer definitely not.

But Mick Wallace is much more than a property developer with a haircut designed for a Led Zeppelin reunion. He looks like a man who tears his hair out every morning because he can’t understand why everyone else can’t simplify the world the way he does; why everybody else can’t see the value of sport the way he does; and why everybody else can’t see how it’s been possible to run a successful Irish club soccer team in the premier league. As he wrote in an opinion piece in last Friday’s Irish Times; soccer is an “area that has been so consistently under-funded through the good times and bad.”

It’s not just soccer but sport as a whole that has been under-funded in Ireland. And as much as people look at GAA clubs and bemoan the vast sums they have produced and devoured in new clubhouses and pitches, sport as a collective idea has never been fully embraced by government.

Sport is as small as the tidy towns committee and as big as Croke Park but both are just as important. Sport is limitless and because of that sport can achieve things that aren’t possible otherwise. It only takes a body of people the size of your average tidy towns committee to build community halls, all-weather pitches and an atmosphere that creates goodwill and pride where it wouldn’t otherwise exist.

Government funding helps these projects to bloom but smart people on small committees with big ideas made the GAA as impressive as Croke Park is today. Who would dare plan a similar project in the economic recession of 2009? Croke Park as it now is was dreamed up in the late 80s when Ireland was full with people queuing for the exit doors.

Mick Wallace has a dream about his soccer club, Wexford Youths, that is founded on his belief in the benefits of sport and the community sport builds around it.

Having spent €6 million to start a club that has a gym, an all-weather pitch, a restaurant and a team bus, Wallace has earmarked another €4.5 million for a 2,500 seat stand. The players are local amateurs and the crowds average at nearly 1,000 people every game, which is a huge achievement when you think that Kildare County – a similar project to Wexford Youths – has seen attendances drop to less than 200, and with none of the assets or the pride and goodwill that the Youths have generated.

That doesn’t mean County couldn’t resurrect their fortunes, they would and so would the rest of the sports clubs that are struggling with money and emigrating players, if they had Wallace’s vision and Government backed funds. If we can bail out banks that were reckless with their customers, surely we can stop tearing our hair out about Irish soccer, and Irish sport, by giving our clubs a similar investment?

The higher profile Irish soccer clubs that have their financial woes on full public display are not a million miles removed from the local soccer clubs, the local rugby clubs and the local GAA clubs that are currently struggling.

Money spent on sport is not like buying a playstation.

“It’s an investment in the infrastructure of people’s lives.”

Government support and Mick Wallace’s vision will fuel dreams as grand as Croke Park, and though smaller in scale and narrower in outlook, those glories make us rich even when everyone else tells us we’re poor.

Tags: Croke Park, GAA, Irish soccer, Irish Times, Kildaer County, Led Zeppellin, Mick Wallace

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.