IT’S half-an-hour from Tullylish to Burren.
That stretch of road was home to one of the great sagas of the late ’90s, with James McCartan’s protracted angling for a transfer from the former to the latter keeping the papers in ink for months and months.
Tullylish fought it and the Down County Board spurned it for a long time but in the end he got his way and turned out in the famous white and green during the latter part of his career.
The world kept spinning, the GAA didn’t collapse and there was no spike in fellas heading boldly to their club committee with their transfer form in hand.
Almost 20 years on and we’re in a similar situation down in Mayo.
The drive from Ballinrobe to Castlebar takes 28 minutes, according to Google Maps.
Donal Vaughan has been living and working in plain sight in Castlebar the last couple of years, and the big difference is that means he didn’t really have to fight too hard to get his transfer.
With an abode in the town, there was nothing anyone could do.
Vaughan, who actually grew up in Cork, was unable to prevent Ballinrobe from being relegated to intermediate football and for him, that was the last straw.
After 12 years of championship football, he’s swapped their maroon for the red of the three-ina-row Mayo senior champions.
There was a distinct possibility that Vaughan could have ended a relatively successful playing career with not an awful lot to show or it.
Another All-Ireland final loss with the county – and one he contributed to in a way he’d much rather not have done with his sending off – keeps his Celtic Cross on ice.
And while Ballinrobe might make a push at intermediate level next year, the frustration of being there in the first place clearly gnawed at him enough to make him want a change.
So instead of digging in, he’s taken the shortcut to the top of the mountain and will unquestionably strengthen the Mitchel’s in their quest to stay there.
It’s a very hard thing to abide.
I can’t profess to know the man but I feel that his actions fly in the face of probably the last remaining essence of what the GAA was designed to be.
There has to be an onus on Castlebar Mitchel’s here too. Whether they pursued it themselves or not, ultimately they’ve accepted the transfer knowing what it will do to Ballinrobe, which leaves them open to serious questions.
Your own little place in the world is supposed to be everything in the GAA.
We can’t all be born in a Castlebar or a Slaughtneil or Rock Street in Tralee.
Envying your neighbours, dreaming of emulating them, driving yourself and those around you to do it – that pride and that competition is the very beating heart of the whole thing.
One transfer doesn’t stop it beating. All Vaughan has done really is tarnish his own legacy. Whether he retires with an All-Ireland or not, any medals he might win with Castlebar will be tainted.
Some men go the other way, the right way. They invest themselves in redefining standards and drag the rest of their club up with them.
Those are the actions of a real club man, of a real GAA man.
If every good player just upped tools and headed off to the nearest and most successful club, the last thread linking the GAA back to its original values would be snapped.
I was along with a crowd of men from Ahoghill on Sunday and their big concern was that, after many decades, Portglenone have pulled the pin on the Sean Stinson’s underage amalgamation that has essentially kept their club going in times of strife.
Ahoghill has never been the easiest place to sustain a GAA club and the football and hurling teams are essentially made up of the same players, with three or four families contributing the bulk of them.
It’s the essence of a GAA club and there are plenty of them who no longer live in the village but who wouldn’t dream of wearing anything other than their red and black.
Now they worry their underage players will have nowhere to play without signing for another club and that ultimately they’ll have no club in a few years.
But they’ll all take the option to dig in deeper again, because that’s just what you do.
The ability to transfer clubs is an option that always needs to be kept open because in certain circumstances, it’s absolutely acceptable.
You can’t have a scenario where players have to quit playing because they move so far away from their home club that they can’t commute.
But having it in place means that it is open to this kind of abuse, which leaves the whole idea sitting on a precipice.
The situation in Dublin is similar but not the same. The heavyweights hover and hoover up any incoming talent with little thought for their own. It’s just all about winning.
And with the migration of so much of the playing population towards the major cities, every case like this one frays the tie between player and club that little bit more.
It makes it that little bit easier to convince yourself that, even when it’s not nearly the last option, transferring clubs is acceptable.
When that pursuit of winning overtakes the pride of place itself, then we’re on a worrying road indeed.
