On Tuesday
22nd July 2014, 58 year old father of four Mick Wallace was arrested
with his partner Clare Daly, formerly of Newbridge, County Kildare, on the
runway at Shannon Airport. After being brought to Limerick Garda Station, the
two of them explained their presence on the tarmac was part of a plan to
inspect US Military Aircraft who land there to refuel and ensure the planes
were not transporting any armaments, as such an act would, in the opinion of
Wallace and Daly, compromise Ireland’s neutrality. A file on the afternoon’s
events was prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions and the two were
let go without charge.
By the
evening of Friday 25th July 2014, Wallace had brushed off the residual effects of his
afternoon in custody, spent two further days in the witness box of the Central
Court in Dublin while pursuing a private
prosecution against former Justice Minister Alan Shatter for revealing details
on an RTE chat show of a fixed penalty Wallace had accrued for using his mobile
phone while driving, and was secure on his home patch of Ferrycarrig Park in
Crossabeg; doling out complimentary glasses of red wine at half time,
complaining about the first period performance and generally working the room
in his role as founder and ex officio owner of Wexford Youths FC in
their League of Ireland fixture against Shamrock Rovers B. Mick’s rhetorical
imprecations to the assembled guests and friends who hung on his every word,
must have had some effect on the home side, or manager Shane Keegan’s half time
tactical advice may have borne fruition, as the pink shirted Boys of Wexford,
whose motto of 'Life's
short, work hard, play hard' is the same as the slogan of Mick’s firm Wallace
Construction, comfortably
took apart the big city visitors by a less-than-flattering 2-0 score, while at
the same time as Shamrock Rovers first team were losing 1-0 at home to
struggling Drogheda United at Tallaght Stadium in a League of Ireland Premier
Division game.
One
important detail that should be pointed out is that Daly, a former employee in
the catering department of Aer Lingus who presumably knew her way around a
plane and Wallace, a philosophy graduate of University College Dublin, who made
and lost a fortune in the Irish property bubble that brought the country almost
to its knees in 2008, are both Teachta Dála. In other words, they are sitting, independent members of
the Irish parliament. Clare Daly, representing Dublin North, is part of the
United Left Alliance, a broad campaign mainly centred around the rapidly
expanding People Before Profit party, having resigned from the increasingly
marginalized and discredited Socialist Party, while Wallace, who was
forced in 2013 to pay the Irish revenue
a sum of €2,133,708 in respect of unpaid VAT (presumably as a trained
accountant Ms Daly may have helped Mick work out his complex financial
affairs), represents his home town of Wexford in Dáil Éireann. In the county
most famous for the heroic struggles of the United Irishmen in the 1798
Rebellion against the British occupying forces, commemorated beautifully in the
folk song “Boolavogue” and the affecting Seamus Heaney poem “Requiem for the
Croppies,” Mick Wallace is a local hero. Despite his tax affairs, complex
personal life, litigious nature, he is incredibly popular in Ireland’s south east
strawberry growing region, where even his atrocious fashion sense (he still
boasts a shaggy mane of loosely permed peroxided hair that would not have
looked out of place in a soft metal band circa 1983 and insists on open necked
pink shirts, from whence Wexford Youths adopted their club colours) is accepted
with an indulgent smile.
As far as
I’m aware, the main focus of Stand is not Irish politics, but
football; however, in the case of Wexford Youths versus Shamrock Rovers B, the
two themes are intertwined and the existence of such a game is instructive in
the light of Greg Dyke’s discredited League 3 proposals. Ostensibly, the game I
watched on a glorious summer evening in the south east corner of Ireland, was
between a vanity project and a glorified reserve team; neither the kind of team
one would ever wish to see in the English pyramid on either sporting or moral
grounds. However, look closer; as in almost every instance, attempting to view
Irish affairs through an English lens leads to a blurred picture. To understand
the need for both Wexford Youths and Shamrock Rovers B in the League of
Ireland, you have to grasp the nature of Irish sporting culture.
The biggest
stadium in Ireland and the largest in Europe not used for football is the
headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), Croke Park in north
inner city Dublin; on consecutive September Sundays it will always be filled to
its 82,300 capacity for the All Ireland hurling and football finals. At the
time of writing my beloved Cork are in the last 8 of the football and the semi
finals of the hurling, having already won the Munster title. While 18 of the 32
counties play senior hurling, the most successful of whom Kilkenny are the only
county not to play football, showing it is undoubtedly the case that sports
under the auspices of the GAA have the highest level of interest in terms of
both playing and spectating across the entire
island of Ireland, as well as cultural importance and reach. De Valera may
be long gone and the idea of football as a “garrison game” of the Saxon invader
an anachronistic view held only by the most diehard Republican, but it is a
fact that geographically and demographically speaking, what we call football is
nowhere near as common a spectator sport in Ireland as one might expect.
While there
are sofa and bar stool fans of the Premier League in every Irish town and
village (witness an enormous “Come On You Hammers” sign in claret and blue
outside a house in Allenwood, County Kildare), the sheer blanket coverage of
the game only became popular throughout the county after the exploits of Jack
Charlton’s side in the Euros of 1988 (beating England always helps) and
especially the World Cup of 1990, which coincidentally made Ireland a prime
target for the Premier League publicity machine. Prior to the seismic sporting
shift of 1992, the game hardly featured outside of its Dublin stronghold in
large parts of the country. Even now, the 18 senior Irish sides (10 in the
Premier and 8 in the First Division) are from only 13 counties; furthermore, 6
teams are from Dublin with Bray Wanderers only just over the county line into
Wicklow, and Dundalk and Drogheda from Louth, the next one north of Dublin.
Consequently 50% of the clubs are situated within an hour of the River Liffey,
showing a geographical imbalance that indicates the varying levels of interest
in the game throughout the country.
Of course
comparatively isolated towns and cities, in terms of their proximity to League of Ireland
opposition, such as Derry (in the league for political reasons), Limerick (the
home of Irish rugby), Cork (City are the fifth side from the banks of my own
lovely Lee to appear in the League of Ireland) and Waterford are actually
relative strongholds of the game. Sadly though, recent Irish footballing
history is littered with the names of clubs who went out of business because
there simply wasn’t the local interest or money to keep them going; Kildare
County, Kilkenny City, Sporting Fingal, Dublin City, Monaghan United and the
intractable problem with football on the Corrib that has seen Galway United,
Mervue and Salthill Devon merge, swap names, change grounds and eventually go
back to being Galway United, in an attempt to keep the game alive in the City
of the Tribes. The disappearance of Salthill and Mervue in Summer 2013 allowed
Galway to return, but created the vacancy that Shamrock Rovers B accepted,
simply because they were the only side willing and able to meet the annual
€20,000 League of Ireland membership fee. That may be depressing, but frankly,
Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank didn’t put the continued existence
of football teams high on the agenda when working out the €64 billion bail out that kept Ireland afloat
in 2010 that has reduced the status of the people to economic penury for
generations to come.
One
positive effect of the arrival of the Premier League was the funding by Sky
Sports for floodlights at all League of Ireland grounds. Historically,
games had been played on Sunday afternoons, but with the advent of player cams
and Andy Gray, attendances almost disappeared, so to keep the game going,
Murdoch’s minions paid for ground improvements, with teams generally switching
to Friday nights. The crowds had gone though, even at such great old clubs as
Bohemians and St Patrick’s Athletic, so the decision was taken to adopt summer
football from 2013 onwards. Sadly, this had made little real difference,
despite a few encouraging showings in Europa League games, such as Shamrock
Rovers advancing to the ground stage in 2010/2011. Interest in the English game
remains at a very high level, with thousands of fans boarding Ryan Air flights
each weekend to attend all manner of games, while the domestic game atrophies
and remains a very poor second in terms of interest to GAA games.
Consequently,
while the existence of reserve teams in the league is not be applauded, it
remains a necessity in terms of filling the gaps. From what I saw, Shamrock
Rovers B is basically an under 21 team, with young lads going through the
motions in the hope of a call-up to the senior side and very little team ethos
in their play. Meanwhile, a crowd of about 300, many of whom wearing Mick
inspired pink scarves and shirts, with a band of about two dozen Wexford
Ultras, complete with flags, drums and a half decent songbook (“Wallace for
Taoiseach” being my favourite) may not represent a club on the verge of a major
breakthrough, but they are in the semi finals of the EA Sports League Cup,
having reached the final in 2008 only to lose 6-1 to Derry City, and they’re
going well in the league, as demonstrated by Aidan “Roxy” Keenan’s
match-winning double over Shamrock Rovers B. Most importantly though, Wexford
Youths offer a structure in the south east, with over a dozen junior sides,
both boys and girls, as well as a Women’s team, all bankrolled to an extent by
Mick Wallace. Avoiding paying VAT may be seen as a criminal offence in the UK,
perhaps punishable by a custodial sentence, but in Wexford it is seen as a
necessary course of action, because on the banks of the pleasant Slaney and in
the eyes of the FAI, Mick Wallace can do no wrong.
