Time for an All-Ireland League

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Irish Voice Sport

Time for an All-Ireland League

December 13, 2007

by Cathal Dervan

THERE'S an Irish Voice reader somewhere in America who can afford a wry smile this week, but only if he can stay awake long enough to read through the next few hundred words on the concept of an All-Ireland football team.

Some weeks ago, on the occasion of my wife's 40th birthday to be precise, I successfully carried off my very best annual impression of an old romantic in honor of the occasion.

Being the secretive sort that I am, I told her we were off to London, a city we have lived in, never mind visited before, when in fact we were off to Venice.

Liz only became aware of this when I asked her to check the boarding cards on our arrival at Dublin Airport, but that's a story for another day.

What's relevant here is the fact that midway through the second day of our visit to the city of the canals and the gondolas my phone rang as we perused the delights of another touristic shop under the Rialto Bridge that spans the Grand Canal. (See, I did pay attention to the tour guide!)

The reception wasn't great, but I could just make out that the man on the other end of the line was an Irish Voice reader anxious to speak to me.

Normally I'd run a mile from such a call, because the only Voice readers who ever make contact with this column are of a disgruntled nature and from the Bronx, but not this man. All he wanted was to discuss the notion of an All-Ireland team, an idea that has been mooted on more than one occasion in the past on these pages.

Far from reading the riot act over Roy or Manchester United or the Dublin GAA team, said reader actually wanted to agree with me, a rare occurrence I can tell you.

Such were the circumstances -- i.e., I was in the middle of Venice and he was many miles away in America -- that a long conversation was impossible. Instead he promised to send his thoughts via old fashioned mail, and I promised to look into the subject again in this column.

I wasn't sure back then when the opportunity would arise. Such is the nature of sport on this island that you can never tell when matters of an All-Ireland nature will spring up in the wonderful world of Irish soccer.

At this moment in time items like the future identity of the next Ireland manager would appear to be more pressing, so you can imagine my surprise when the back page of Tuesday's Irish Independent offered a hasty re-introduction to the subject of cross border cooperation of a footballing kind.

The exclusive story -- and they were the only paper with it so the term was justified for once -- was written by my old friend Daniel McDonnell, known as Daniel O'Donnell to his journalistic peers, and it made a lot of sense.

Apparently a dozen top clubs, six each from north and south, have been in discussions for some time now in relation to an All-Ireland league. They have spoken to each other and they have even spoken to a TV company that is prepared to back the proposed league, a natural extension of the Setanta Cup competition that has served the game on this island so well in recent years.

Their plan, once they can come to an agreement, is to present such a league as a fait accompli to the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) and their Irish Football Association (IFA) equivalents in Belfast whom, they hope, will have no choice but to go along with the concept, if that is what the best clubs on the island of Ireland want.

Naturally, as someone who supports the idea of an All-Ireland team and has done ever since Derek Dougan brought the idea to life via a Shamrock Rovers side that played Brazil at Lansdowne Road in 1973, I am enthusiastic about this latest proposal.

Why should we labor under false expectation north and south of the border, as we did in the most recent Euro 2008 qualifiers, when an All-Ireland side could harbor realistic hopes of doing well in such a tournament?

Why should sport be divided when the likes of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness can sit in the White House as partners in government, as they did in the past week?

Why should soccer operate as two separate entities when the communities in the North are closer than ever before, and the bombs and the bullets are things of a bloody past?

Unity in life can only be helped by unity in sport, so I applaud the clubs north and south who are moving in the right direction with this plan and I wish them well.

Will they succeed? Will we see an All-Ireland league in the near future, followed by the inevitable All-Ireland team that is the wish of at least one Irish Voice reader in America?

I hope so, but I wouldn't bet on it just yet.

It will take more than the meetings of minds that has so obviously taken place in recent weeks to make this a reality, but I wish the clubs well. Anything that gets us closer to one team from island can only be a good thing, whether you're watching on from Dublin or Belfast, New York or Venice.

Now where's that number for Interflora?

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