IF GAA regulations still prevented British soldiers and northern police officers from joining today, it would be completely understandable if the issue was the subject of prolonged and angry interventions by prominent unionist voices.

As it happens, when the Rule 21 ban was actually in place a quarter of a century ago, most unionists were largely disinterested and made little or no contribution towards the intense debate which eventually led to its deletion.

I have clear recollections of the developments which reached a climax in 2001, because, as the then editor of The Irish News, I had to supervise the passionate arguments which were played out in our columns.

The paper took the stance of pressing firmly for the deletion of Rule 21, on the basis that it might have had some meaning after partition but was hopelessly outdated in the post-Good Friday Agreement era.

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Opinion polls indicated that most nationalists endorsed our position – although some did not, and attempted to apply public and private pressure on us before the prohibition was finally removed by a special congress, just as the RUC was replaced by the PSNI in November, 2001.

Going back many years further, I also dealt regularly with former unionist leaders, and found that their preoccupations were wide-ranging but very seldom extended to the GAA.

I began in journalism in the late 1970s, working for the Antrim Guardian and the Ballymena Observer when the two largest unionist parties were headed by the MPs for South Antrim and North Antrim respectively, James Molyneaux and the Rev Ian Paisley.

My role necessitated contacting them, with Molyneaux by some distance the quieter and more reserved of the pair, although he was occasionally capable of producing understated humour.

While campaigning in the 1979 UK general election, he told reporters in his constituency that, before leaving Westminster, he had chatted to English MPs, many of them in marginal seats, about their prospects at the polls.

When asked about his own outgoing majority, he received expressions of sympathy when he said ’38′– only to clarify that, in a bygone period of overall unionist domination, he actually meant 38,000, and could be reasonably confident that he would indeed be returning to the House of Commons.

Paisley was obviously a much more ebullient character, although it was striking to find how much he relied on his softly spoken and always polite wife, Eileen, who is now 94, and has outlived him by over 11 years.

It was she who, in the days before digital and even fax communications, telephoned in eve of publication press releases to the weekly newspaper offices, where I was among those who used an ancient set of plug-in headphones to type up contributions, which could stretch to thousands of words and which the Ballymena titles had a policy of effectively running in full.

Mrs Paisley was always friendly, asking how I was settling in to my new job, expressing regret about the length of statements and giggling as she explained some of her husband’s more colourful terms – “mugwump”, referring dismissively to a political opponent, was one which initially caused particular puzzlement to me.

Both party leaders would not have been well disposed towards the GAA, but in my experience it rarely featured in their public utterances.

Their successors, David Trimble and Peter Robinson, also declined to target it, with the latter instead actively engaging with the association on a number of well-documented occasions.

It is only recently, as Gaelic Games have grown exponentially, that some high-profile representatives from the three main unionist parties have become obsessed with culture wars, using the Casement Park saga as an excuse and denouncing the GAA without regard for either community relations or even proper research.

The GAA, like all large institutions, has its faults, but is generally a strongly positive force in sporting, cultural and social terms across our society, and most of the outspoken criticisms directed against it are either out of all context or simply wrong.

While some individuals do organise competitions locally commemorating republicans without the approval of Croke Park, as this column has previously pointed out, an equally unofficial soccer tournament for the Bobby Sands Cup was staged in front of large crowds in west Belfast every summer for decades.

Unionists rightly avoided denouncing the Irish Football Association over an event in which it had no involvement, but have not been prepared to exercise the same restraint when it comes to the GAA.

Although they could have justified participating much more centrally in the exchanges of 25 years ago, there is little logic or fairness to much of today’s aggressive commentary.

n.doran@irishnews.com

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