TO rural Ireland, the GAA is a best friend and a worst enemy.
It survives in outposts because of our bond with home. In turn, the villages themselves find existence from our attachment to the sports.
You live where you come from and if they can, your children live there too.
Most rural villages would capitulate completely without the GAA and its power to span generations. If it's in the family then so it shall be.
An example if you'll forgive it. The class registry for the year 1891 in the local primary school at home, St Mary’s Gortnaghey, contained 22 children.
They bore the names of O’Kane, Colgan, Brolly, McCloskey, McReynolds and McCartney.
A century and a quarter on, those names all persist strongly in a hamlet of 200 people.
The struggles of rural Ireland barely need repeating.
Pubs barely raise a hum on a Friday night. The churches are empty on Sunday morning. The banks are all going online, the shops are closing.
People can't afford houses in the town but still the planning authorities won’t let people build houses in the country.
Football, hurling, camogie, it’s all there is in places. It makes Crossmaglen and Kilcoo and Slaughtneil into somewhere to be admired rather than ignored, and their rising of the tide lifts everything around them.
Rural Ireland retains a bit of its youthful soul, barely visible behind sagging skin.
A lot of young people don’t want to live in small villages where the only people around them all remember World War II. They want to have more than one nightclub and one potential wife to choose from.
So playing for the club can become a curse. If you’re young, fit and any way able at all, having any other ambitions for your weekend makes you the worst in the world.
Don’t you even think about tasting this big old oyster until you’re done.
Which brings us to Shane Walsh.
It’s nine days since he scythed his way through the country’s meanest defence in an All-Ireland final.
Walsh was man of the match in the final, regardless of RTÉ having to give it to David Clifford for the look of the thing.
After the game, my colleague Andy Watters mustered up the Dutch courage to ask him for a few lines. Shane Walsh, having just lost the biggest game of his life, was not only obliging but took the time to write a personalised note for Andy's son.
It was a mark of class, to have such thoughtfulness in a moment like that.
With the dust settled, Walsh found himself right back in the spotlight over the weekend past after news emerged that he is to seek a transfer to Kilmacud Crokes.
The Galway man confirmed the news in a statement yesterday.
If Shane Walsh wants to pursue a life in Dublin, that’s absolutely his right. It’s a five-hour, 360km return trip home. That is an exhausting commute, and one he’ll continue to do to play for Galway. Many others do it for their club, but many don’t.
There's a good chance he won't get his transfer on account of being a student in Dublin and the rules being different around third-level residence. Allowing permanent transfer based on student accommodation could open a vortex that rural clubs would never recover from.
But if it's a longer-term intention, as his statement intimates, it would be wrong of his club at home to try and guilt-trip him out of a switch. The shoulders of one man is no place for a whole village to sit.
There's a particular pressure to being a big fish in a small pond. A pressure to always be on, to be constantly present, to be public property. To be perfect. It's a privilege, but that doesn't mean it's not exhausting.
If Shane Walsh wants to live in Dublin permanently and play football there, that should be his right too.
He just shouldn’t be allowed to play with Kilmacud Crokes.
The issue here is not with Shane Walsh, it’s not with Kilkerrin-Clonberne and it’s barely even with Kilmacud.
The Dublin champions were in last season’s All-Ireland club final and ought to have won it, only for the hands of Miceal Rooney and the concession of a fairly mad stoppage time goal at the end of extra-time.
Kilmacud’s All-Ireland final squad had nobody from outside the club. They had six sets of brothers. Their names were Jones and Pursell and Mullin and McGowan and Kenny and Dias.
In a piece for the Irish Independent two years ago, journalist Conor McKeon noted that of the 90 players listed for Kilmacud, Ballymun and Ballyboden squads for the Dublin semi-finals, there was just one import among them.
St Jude’s, the other semi-finalists, were the exception with a big contingent of outsiders.
McKeon noted that at one stage, Pat Gilroy had estimated that "for every four players he adjudged as possessing the basic minerals to play for Dublin, one of them was ineligible,” referencing the time barely a decade ago when having big names from outside the county playing was commonplace.
But even through their own means, Kilmacud are a superclub.
They have 4,800 members. They have seven adult football teams and five in hurling. Their U19 and U17 football and hurling teams are top of the pile in Dublin.
The GAA has done nothing really to adapt to the imbalances created by the shift from rural to urban.
Urban areas, not just Dublin, are subject to a complete lack of regulation.
Whereas villages have gone to war over in who has rights to the two houses either side of the burn that splits them and their neighbours, the cities are just a free-for-all. Pick your lot and play.
Successful urban teams tend to be the ones best at hoovering up talents from locations they shouldn’t have their hands near.
The magnetism of victory only swells bellies that don’t care they’re already full.
A lack of green space and objections from existing clubs obstruct the formation of new clubs.
Boundaries need to be drawn so that, as rurally, players play for the club they’re ordained to. You might think that unfair but if we didn’t have that system we’d have nothing at all.
We rely on the balances, and even the imbalances, of parish boundaries to keep law and order.
There also needs to be a limit on transfers and a draft system put into play.
Established senior club with a big membership, in any urban powerhouse not just Dublin, simply should not be allowed to take in transfers. Full stop.
It’s abusing a system set up to give people a chance to move their life away from home.
Those clubs already have every advantage of population and finance that their country cousins can’t match. They can’t be allowed to cherry-pick and tap-up from the outside too.
Footballers that genuinely want to transfer their allegiances to a club in Dublin have to be made come in at intermediate level and to clubs with more modest membership numbers. Even those transfers need capped.
If clubs then grow with them, so be it.
The ability to transfer is a must but it has to be for the right reasons.
Transferring just to win silverware, more particularly at close range to your home club, runs against all the ideals.
The freedom to move your life from Galway to Dublin is a basic human right that Shane Walsh is just as entitled to as anyone else.
If he is intent on that, it would be hard for Kilmacud to idly watch him sign for a rival.
Just because they've done nothing wrong doesn’t mean it's right.
Kilmacud Crokes shouldn’t be allowed to take in any outsider, whether it’s Shane Walsh or Pandy Walshe.
As an aside, are the means by which big-name transfers have happened in the past all strictly above board? We’ve all heard the stories.
And that is a serious issue if it is happening, but no more than what’s being allowed to pass in New York and Philadelphia. There’s so many blind eyes being turned that you wonder can we see at all.
Sheughs and streams and fields and rocks and roads bring natural order to the rural GAA but it’s time someone took a pen to the towns and cities and split them up properly.
You play where you live. That has to apply to the cities too.
