On Saturday more than 600 of south Belfast’s finest, many of them ironically from Tyrone, Derry, Armagh, Fermanagh and elsewhere, gathered at Titanic Belfast in a fantastic celebration of a club and a new community, both its past and its future.
The evening, the 20th anniversary of St Brigid’s GAC, with its gathering of friends and supporters old and new, celebrated the achievements of a club that has done an awful lot in a short space of time. Together with the presidents of the three associations - ladies football, camogie and the GAA itself - players, parents, grandparents, coaches, partners, children and invited guests, some with no GAA background at all, came together for a fantastic night. The president of the GAA, John Horan, was in fine form, returning to Belfast after his launch of the brilliant GaelFast schools’ initiative, now headed by my old club mate Paul Donnelly from St Paul’s.
Horan is very impressive. I like him a lot. Like the speeches of Maire Hickey and Kathleen Woods on behalf of ladies football and camogie, Horan reached out graciously to the other codes and spoke of future integration. However, his main content related to community and was particularly aimed at the young people gathered. He had a captive audience, with a number of St Brigid’s teams there, including the senior ladies who lifted the Antrim Intermediate Championship last week.
Among the group also were nearly all of the lads who I helped to coach at minor level the year before last. On that squad was my nephew Matty Loane. We are all very proud of Matty in our family. He took a year off to teach skiing in Canada after his A-levels and having originally chosen to study in Glasgow, he changed his mind and has just started law in Galway. I spoke to a few of his mates on Saturday night. They are a brilliant bunch, and two in particular have stayed in Belfast, unlike so many of their contemporaries whose default university choices seem to be in one of four cities in GB -Newcastle, Dundee, Liverpool or Glasgow.
These two lads wanted to stay at home for the football. Probably needless to say, I loved that. I made the same choice nearly 30 years ago, for the same reason. Leaving St Pat’s Armagh, I looked at Queen’s University and it was the only place I wanted to go, not least because I wanted to play Sigerson Cup. That’s the leading university GAA competition for uninitiated readers.
And while I took a year off after university and went to California and then did another year studying a masters degree in England, my choice to stay at Queen’s, no doubt, guided my certainty about coming home afterwards. Even during those years away in the US and England, I played for Antrim in the Ulster Championship, flying home for three months from California the first year and commuting back and forth from England the following year. I don’t regret it. Far from it.
In my case, as with the two lads on Saturday night, we have had a very powerful bond to keep us here, gaelic football. It’s a good illustration of the power of the GAA and the love of a great sport guiding a young person’s decision-making.
For many though, particularly among Belfast grammars, both in the Catholic-maintained and state sectors, the immediate decision for large numbers of school-leavers is to go away. The latest figures show that nearly one in three of our young people going to university will choose to leave this island. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be ‘importing’ in the same numbers. Of the 2016/17 intake into all higher education institutions here, 84.5 per cent of the students were from here with the remaining 15 per cent being split fairly evenly between Ireland, GB and non-EU countries with only 0.7 per cent from the rest of the EU. I wonder what will happen to that figure post-Brexit?
What’s maybe more damaging (and saddening) is the fact that last year’s statistics from the Department for the Economy showed that over two thirds of those who leave here to study won’t come back. And what I find most acute living in south Belfast is that while the overall figures quoted apply across Northern Ireland, I’d say the percentages relating to Belfast are a lot higher. Going to an English or Scottish university is like a rite of passage if you’re leaving Methody, Victoria, Rathmore, Aquinas and the like.
And yet, those that stay are very optimistic for the future. Despite what we may see on the news about our seemingly intractable problems, Brexit, political uncertainly and the thunderously embarrassing (and yet fascinating) debacle that is the RHI inquiry, a recent survey shined a sharp light on the truth: people here remain overwhelmingly optimistic. They believe in this place. Almost 70 per cent say they think our best years are still in the future. That is far more optimistic than anywhere else in the UK.
I should say that none of this is, in any way, to criticise those who leave. Getting away and spreading their wings in a different environment is hugely beneficial for our young people. So many of the kids of my friends are building fantastic careers all over the world, it’s brilliant to behold. But we also have an economy and society here that needs our best people to build it. Those that are here have a responsibility to help to deliver that and to be fair, many of those types of people were in the room on Saturday night. It was a pleasure to be part of it.
:: Paul McErlean (paul@mcepublicrelations.com) is managing director of MCE Public Relations Ltd
:: Next week: Conor Lambe
