A few weeks back RTE Sunday Game pundit and Cork hurling legend Donal Óg Cusack sparked off a wave of discussion, debate and derision in equal measure, with his suggestion that Ulster field a composite team in the Liam McCarthy Cup.

To be fair to Donal Óg he was only restating a position already articulated by the GPA, of which he is a prominent member. But. . . anyone that uses words the three words ‘promote’, ‘hurling’ and ‘Ulster’ in the same sentence can expect everything they get from the local hurling cognoscenti.

One of the arguments for the idea was that a combined team would help promote the game of hurling in the province. Currently only Antrim play at the tope level in hurling and despite Loughgiel’s clubs success the county team are struggling to make their mark at that level.

The idea is that a regional team would draw upon hurlers from the likes of Down, Derry, Armagh, Tyrone, Donegal and Down to field a combined squad at Liam McCarthy level. Depending on what model you ascribe to, Antrim would continue to go it alone or would joint the Ulster pack. Supporters of the idea point at the abysmal record of Antrim county teams at minor, u21 and senior level when they venture south.

Given Ulster hurling’s relative isolation in geographical terms it is always going to be hard to get consistent competitive action against quality opposition under the current format

But, it’s not that long ago that Derry’s hurlers performed creditably in taking consecutive Ulster Under 21 titles and travelling south to take on a Tipp side littered with current senior players, and a Dublin team that contained several of the personnel currently making waves in the 2013 championship.

Amidst Dublin’s recent success we shouldn’t lose sight of the massive injection of funding for coaching and other support that the GAA contributed. Their march to the Leinster title and a second All Ireland semi final in three seasons hasn’t been accidental.

It goes without saying – if you invest in something it will grow. There are lessons there for those that would use those three words: ‘promote + hurling + Ulster.’

Hurling needs more coaches and more teams. In Derry we have seen clubs spring up in Roe Valley and Castledawson to augment the eight already in place. There are still major centres of population in the county that have no hurling club. And there are major clubs that have no hurling. And there are major figures in the GAA locally that have no interest. These are facts. In Cork there are over 100 hurling clubs, many operating multiple teams at different grades. How can we complete with that?

It is a feature of hurling nationally that unless there is some sort of serious intervention, the rich will get richer and the poorer stay where they are. There are hierarchies in hurling and the unique nature of the game means it is harder to develop than football.

Within Ulster Antrim are the strongest county but they have their own sorrows to seek. Hurling is under pressure in Belfast. Currently in the senior championship Loughgiel have two maybe three realistic challengers in Cushendall, Dunloy and an emerging St John’s team from Belfast City. Other clubs in the city are having difficulty holding players and others are struggling to field.

It does not bode well for the long-term development of the game. The question is if we adopt Donal Óg’s idea, would the local supporters swing behind a provincial team in the way the rugby supporters have supported the Ulster Rugby team. Is it time to Stand up for the Ulster men in hurling as well as rugby. The same two sports are the big passion in the likes of Cork and Limerick.

Is it an idea that we need to try for a pilot period before we dismiss it out of hand? The GPA , Donal Óg and co seem to think so. Others are less convinced and some local hurling men are totally and implacably opposed.

The fact remains, this weekend four Ulster football teams take part in the All Ireland senior football championship quarter finals. It is difficult to imagine the day when even one Ulster team will contest an All Ireland hurling quarter final. Maybe, just maybe that Ulster team will have to be an Ulster team.

One thing’s for sure, if Ulster says no, we’ll never know.

Last Sunday Derry GAA officially opened the latest phase of its Owenbeg training complex outside Dungiven. It is an impressive place, featuring a championship grade playing pitch, 5000 seater stand and a main building complex with medical room, strength and conditioning suite, mini restaurant, laundry room and multiple extensive changing facilities.

For anyone who hasn’t been along to visit they should go down and have a look around. It is a superb example of the Art of the Possible.

Derry GAA PRO Dermot McPeake explains: “Back in 1993 when Derry won the All Ireland for the first time, there was only one pitch with floodlights in the county at Glenullin. Most clubs had only one pitch and seeking pitches for winter training was troublesome.”

Something visionary needed to be done.

“Johnny Burke of Claudy, Colm O’Kane and John Heron and other GAA men began discussions and land was purchased at Owenbeg at Dungiven to create a home for Derry GAA. In 1994 Derry trained there for the first time that year. Since then small elements were added with Go Games in the mid 2000’s bringing clubs in. The new phase brings club championships and completes the circle of usage of the site.”

The top quality playing pitch is capable of hosting inter county gaelic football, hurling and camogie matches. This summer it has hosted Ulster Championship Camogie Finals and Derry’s All Ireland qualifiers as well as Christy Ring Hurling. Year round it is the home base of Derry GAA, Ladies Gaelic and Camogie teams. Development squads at u14 through to senior all train there. More importantly week in week, out it hosts small-sided games and blitzes for underage players from clubs and schools across the county for all age groups from U8 upwards. For those involved in sport it is a home from home.

The Owenbeg complex has become the envy of other counties who dream of having their own ‘Owenbeg’ when they’re not kicking themselves for not having thought of it first. Even Tyrone with the slick Club Tyrone fundraising machine, have had to go cap in hand to clubs, schools and councils to provide training venues for their teams. Until this summer that is, when the impressive Garvaghey complex opened its doors. Antrim have a similar centre for excellence in the pipeline in Dunsilly and Monaghan offer a similar complex at Cloghan.

In the Triangle we can learn a lot from the Owenbeg model. When the Eoghan Rua Camogie team won All Ireland titles in Croke Park in 2011 and 2012, they required a mammoth training effort from December to March to prepare the squad. Had it not been for the excellent cooperation and generosity of the rugby club in offering to hire their floodlight pitch the first year, and the University of Ulster facilities being available the second year, it is unlikely the team could have succeeded.

Their experience locally is not unique. For an area that’s steeped in sport, the provision of places for sport in Coleraine is not at all ideal. In the Triangle area we have successful teams in rugby, soccer, gaelic games, hockey and athletics not to mention world class and Olympic standard rowing. We have seven secondary level schools and numerous primary schools.  We have hundreds of children playing sport competitively every week.

Our council provided pitches are groaning at capacity to handle to the load. From my own Gaelic games perspective the Eoghan Rua club fields 23 teams across four different codes and has its own pitch plus whatever is available to hire from the University. If it weren’t for the University pitches for hire we could not function and for years their fields were our home pitch.

The local soccer leagues have over a hundred teams, which means hundreds and hundreds of players need pitches every single week. The participation levels locally are testament to the enthusiasm of volunteers and the passion for sport in the triangle area. There is a constant demand for places for sport.

Where does Owenbeg fit into this picture? Well the lesson from Owenbeg is that whilst it requires money to get a training facility up and running, when you have a place for sport in established, it also attracts money and interest in its own right.

The Derry County board haven’t finished with Owenbeg, there’s more to come. A 4G pitch and hopefully a hurling wall or two will complete things. But its legacy is as much in what others can learn.

The talk around the Triangle for the last while has been about the Coleraine Rugby Avenue development and what it will mean to the sports clubs of the area. We know what it means. The clubs of all codes are crying out for it. The lesson of Owenbeg is build it and they will come.

And for sport in Coleraine? Build it. Its time has come.

Campsie Playing Fields Omagh. Field of Legends.

Today it was school sports day for the children. A scorcher of a day for a change, the blue sea shimmered in the distance as the kids tried their hand at throwing a foam javelin, running with bean bags, the penalty shoot out, throwing bean bags.

All modern games for sportsday they are, with the focus on participation rather than winning. Parents stood around watching benignly and sipping coffee and munching on a muffin or two. No-one made a bollix of themselves disputing a photo finish or calling foul after a false start stopped their kid winning some dubious race. It’s the way of the modern sportsday. No-one gets to be a dick. Everyone wins. The children are happy. It’s all very genteel. There’s not even a parents’ race.

The parents can go home safe in the knowledge that their beloved child has seen them see them come fourth in the sack race, last in the egg and spoon and first in the beanbag throw. A bit like a politician electioneering, you’ve gotta be seen to be there.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter whether little Jim Bob, Jimmy Ray, Tabatha or Delfina win one of these benign inoffensive little races. No-one remembers and everyone forgets. If Big Mickey, Jimmy Ray’s dad took a psycho, wrecked the joint, busted the teacher, kicked over the bean bag holders and fucked everyone out of it in a moment of sportsday rage, now that would be memorable. Sadly, if nothing else on entertainment grounds, that doesn’t happen.

Was it ever thus. Roll it back 35 years or more to our school sports. Firstly, parents weren’t present, weren’t welcome and in fact if they had turned up at the sports day they would probably have been told to fuck off home by their children let alone the teachers.

My memory of Sports Days at St Colmcille’s in Omagh was of hard-bitten affairs down in St Patrick’s Park beside the river. I don’t remember the weather being good at all. Ever. The sports included proper manly activities like the Long Kick competition. That required you to root a big heavy brown size five football out from under the goal posts as far out the field as you could. Often the goalmouth in St Pat’s Park would be flooded so you would have to clear the water in the manner of a Ryder Cup golfer. After a few practice goes and then the real thing a whean of times, the knee ligaments would fair feel the strain. I think I did well in it once.

There was a bit of a sandpit maybe for the long jump. The grass overhang would be trimmed around for the sports. But none of us boys wanted to be Eamon Coghlan, or Alberto Jauntorena, Lasse Virén or even Edwin Moses. My heroes were Tyrone’s Eugene McKenna, Patsy Hetherington that played for Tyrone and Omagh Town, Gordon Hill and Steve Coppell of Man United. I still remember my first Tyrone match at the then Omagh St Enda’s standing on a grassy knoll with my brother John as Tyrone beat Sligo.

Moving on the Brothers the Sports Day raised a notch. Only just. Obviously there was some sort of schools athletics board for we were marshalled and entered into various events and it was taken seriously enough. Being a lanky hoor I was entered for the high jump and long jump. My later knowledge of sport confirmed that not being fast, in fact being downright slow, I would be incapable of jumping too much.

Improbably however I won the high jump with some mediocre clearance. The dubious prize was to represent the school in the Northern Ireland [sic] championships at the Mary Peters track. It was on a Saturday and off I set on the school bus with my gaelic shorts and football boots.

I was totally underwhelmed by the Mary Peters set up. For all the talk I expected some sort of stadium with spectators. It wasn’t that much better than Omagh St Enda’s in fact the Omagh ground was better because it had gaelic goal posts. My main memory is of a long bus journey. And sitting around all day. I was only in one event so I had to sit about while the other boys went through the motions in theirs. The only excitement really was the fact that some of the older lads were fellas we knew were good footballers maybe playing Corn na nÓg or Rannafast so when they spoke to us we felt a million dollars.

Suffice to say my performance was shite. The height I failed at was lower than the improbable but still mediocre height I’d cleared down at the playing fields in Omagh. It was no surprise. I didn’t know what I was doing, hadn’t practiced and was crap. Never again did I get selected for the school athletics team. And there was one simple reason for that. I was calculating and made damn sure I never won anything. Nothing, ever again.

That’s not to say even had I applied myself I would have been any use at running, hurdling, sprinting or jumping or indeed putting the shot, javelin throwing or firing the discus (Sadly we’d no hammer throwing for I had a few hoors I would gladly have aimed at. Yes, Tusa?). But my unremarkable field athletic career was firmly stamped with mediocrity.

I was happy playing gaelic football and hurling for the school. The other athletics were a dalliance, an excuse for a time out of school at sports day down in the playing fields. On the way there and back we might leer at a few Omagh Academy girls. We would tog out and go through the motions of whatever sports we had been forced to enter by Terry McGurk or Mick O’Kane. All teachers put their hand to the pump to help out. It was a great exercise in the whole school coming together in common purpose.

I remember Lewis Meenagh was always very diligent in running off the javelin competition. He never struck me as a javelin fan, and sadly I never got to ask him what he thought of Fatima Whitbread or Tessa Sanderson. Now that would have been a meeting worth seeing.

In upper sixth the whole thing took on a farcical new context. We would dodge about smoking, barely able to hide our contempt for the whole sports day participation thing. Taking the piss was the thing.

My good mate Decky Coyle had decided he would win the triple jump competition, merely to prove a point. He had practiced his technique is Strabane [probably chasing women] and loudly proclaimed that he would win easy which was unlike the man for he was unathletic and that’s seriously understating the fact.

On the day at the Playing Fields we gathered around the Triple Jump pit as Coyle went through an elaborate stretching routine. He was serious about this thing. When it came to his turn he took off like a bat out of hell down the track, launching himself on the hop part of his routine but when he stepped he did his hamstring and collapsed in a heap of shite ending up in in a roar of agony lying in tatters in the sandpit. The rest of us had to walk away bent double as a few lads managed to hold back the laughter long enough to help him out of the pit.

The games the following year was marked most notably by my other good mate Cormac Cunningham winning the 800 metres. Having cut across the track half way around the second circuit he won the race easily. No-one in authority was paying sufficient attention to notice this outrageous assault on the Olympic ideal. I may be wrong but he may in fact have been selected to represent the school on the back of this stunning feat. Faster, quicker, shorter indeed.

There were other feats of gamesmanship, cunning, deceit and downright cheating. But no-one took the thing sufficiently seriously to notice or care. There were no parents present, no strops and no rows.

And best of all, there were no fucking beanbags.

Last night on the wireless as I drove back from Belfast there was a discussion on the economic woes facing Ireland. Cheerful and optimistic it wasn’t.

One contribution was an ultra depressing exegesis of the current state of the Irish economy and the prospects for our young people by a young Leaving Cert student from St Patrick’s in Navan.

Judging by his mood, all the exam halls of Ireland should today have erected signs over their portals declaiming ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Enter Here.’  Such was the pessimism. It seems the youth of Erin are resigned to a life in different climes.

The plain people of tomorrow won’t be the plain people of Ireland, they will be the plain people of Australia, Canada, the United States, the UK. Wherever they will go.

It harks back to other times. And it is a stark reminder to those who were maybe unreceptive to the arrival in Ireland during the naughties of Eastern European migrant workers, that we are only one economic downturn away from the curse of mass emigration once again.

The Young scribe tellingly reported that young people were sick or hearing what had caused the national woes and wanted to move on. Typically moving on meant via plane.

As if the mood wasn’t sombre enough, a follow-up item told the tale of a couple from Monaghan. The husband, out of work and unable to find employment as a civil engineer, or in fact any engineer, had headed to Australia to work, leaving his wife and children behind. She was left at home literally holding the babies, bereft and at a loss at the absence of her husband and soulmate. It was a case of living grief. Economic misery had dictated that the husband was forced to head south.

The husband is working 21 days on and seven days off on a gas pipeline in Australia near Brisbane. He, a trained civil engineer does some of that but also labours over 14 hours each day. It is back-breaking work. She described his working conditions as part-Auschwitz part-prison.

He was able to phone home via skype but the mutually agreeable time was when the children were going out to school. His wife recounted how when he first called they spent 15 minutes weeping together at their plight. In love, happily married, a couple joined in trying to keep the family together and separated by distance and the need to earn a living.

It was heartrending stuff. And in all these circumstances several thoughts cross your mind. How would I/We contend with these circumstances if we found ourselves in that position. How did the country get to the stage where a home, a family and a marriage was forced into a long distance love affair?

The answer is in education. In providing the children of today with the skills and tools to leave this place and go where the wind and the work takes them.

And where they can go voluntarily without being driven out of the country by the modern day Cromwells who came and stole their future.