Article paru dans le Sunday Times - Dimanche 11 Janvier 2009
Wednesday evening at 8pm in Brittany in the north-west of France and although the temperatures have dropped to -8C, 24 Gaelic footballers – 17 men and seven women - have still gathered on a frozen pitch at the Harp rugby club in Beauregard in Rennes City. The field was so dangerously hard and the air so bitingly raw that the coach Yves le Prioul, structured the 90 minute session with stamina-skills drills, avoiding the routine match. The weather was freezing all week but this group have never sought an amnesty from harsh training conditions and it’s never been a deterrent to numbers in the past.
The full title of the Rennes Gaelic football club is aptly named Ar Gwazi Gouez – the Breton name for The Wild Geese. Although gaelic games have such a global appeal now that there are over 400 clubs spread throughout the world, this is its most unique outpost. Rennes are one of six gaelic football clubs in this small region of France and every single male playing member are French. It would be a mistake to think that they’re rabble outfits, just playing a different sport for variety or a means for keeping fit; in 2007, Brittany won the Shield competition at the European Gaelic Games Championships.
Although they struggled at the top level in last year’s European Games, the standard in the region is improving all the time and so is the level of competition. Liffre were only founded two years ago and they won last year’s Brittany championship. That domestic championship kicks off again on February 7th, when the first tournament of the season will be held in Vannes. Five tournaments will take place between February and the end of May, where a points system decides who is crowned champions. “The competition is very intense and it is a huge honour to win it,” says Guillaume Kerrien, a founding member of the Nantes football club.
Although there are gaelic football clubs now in every department of the region, they hope to expand the base even more. Lannion and Vannes were only founded last year and they expect a club to be up and running in Lorient before the end of this season. Two other towns have also expressed interest in forming clubs and plans have already been drawn up to form a Breton league.
The GAA was always prominent in their traditional territories of the United States, the UK and Australia but its global dimension has exploded in the last ten years, where over 300 clubs have mushroomed outside Ireland in that timespan. Many now are also being built from the bottom up. At last year’s Continental Youth Championships – effectively the North American Feile na Gael – staged in Philadelphia, 138 teams from the US and Canada participated, which numbered over 2000 kids.
The vast majority of clubs are driven by Irish exiles or people with a historical connection to this country but cultural barriers have steadily been broken down. Of the 600 players from the 16 clubs which participated at last year’s Asian Games, the panels were made up of 18 different nationalities – roughly 40% of the playing base. In the Milwaukee GAA club in the US, only a tiny handful of its 500 members have a connection with Ireland. In the Barcelona Gaels club, around 90% of its playing members are Catalans.
Although the growth of gaelic football in Brittany in such a short time has blown away all convention, the region always had the potential to be a fertile soil for its promotion. Historically, Brittany is a very Celtic region and its people have always been acutely attuned to their Celtic identity. As well as the cultural links through the vast number of twinning relationships enjoyed between towns in Ireland and Brittany, there is also a huge student-exchange culture.
The first GAA club in Brittany was founded in Brest in 1998 by Yann Guenneguez, a Frenchman who had spent some years in Westport. The club in Rennes was set up a year later by Dan McGuigan along with Benoit Jeannin, who is still the club president. Rugby and soccer have a strong presence in the region but Gaelic football has become so popular there now that it was passed last year as a subject choice of the Bach, which is the equivalent of the Irish Leaving Certificate.
Having such a presence within the schools is a massive promotional tool. A network of PE teachers, who play gaelic football, have introduced the game to many of the schools but the crusade was effectively launched by Anne-Marie O’Rourke. From Coolkenno in Wicklow and a member of the Wicklow ladies side which won the 1990 All-Ireland Junior title, O’Rourke is the only Irish member of the Rennes club and is pretty much a one-woman GAA promotional machine.
As well as forming the first and only ladies football team in Brittany and being a dedicated committee member, she takes one day off a week to coach football in the schools. She was recently proposed for the post of European Development Officer because she is the only person in Europe who is coaching so extensively in the schools. O’Rourke’s personal mandate has no bounds and she has made huge inroads. One young girl she has coached for years, Odile Moutenat, was voted best player at the Paris tournament last year, ahead of Irish girls who had previously played inter-county football.
O’Rourke has a five year old daughter, Saoirse, and becoming European Development Officer would require more travel and having to take more time off work. But the increased level of funding she would have for promoting the game in Brittany is a huge appeal for her. “I could do a lot more if I had more funding,” she says. “I’ve gone to schools and made goalposts out of bamboo sticks but you need enough footballs to make the students feel that this is a real sport. I firstly have to do a presentation in schools because you can’t just go in and say, ‘Right let’s play gaelic football’. Initially they don’t have a clue but then they play it and they absolutely love it.”
Last October, she organised a huge children’s football festival and her work continues at a hectic pace. She has got the GAA to send promotional and coaching packs to schools in Brittany but the language barrier is a huge obstacle. At the moment, O’Rourke is painstakingly translating the GAA rulebook into French and she has clear objectives for 2009. She plans to visit 19 schools in the region and hopes to take two primary schools and one secondary school to play in Ireland. She is also harbouring ambitions of taking a team to the Feile Peil na nOg.
“One thing that came out of our Convention last year was that the GAA needs to look at the huge work Anne-Marie is doing in Brittany,” says Eileen Jennings, Chairperson of the European County Board (ECB). “She’s taking her own time off to create interest in GAA and its working for her because she has a huge following. She is unreal.”
The clubs in Brittany get some assistance from the ECB but their budget, which comes from GAA Central funding, has to stretch over 30 clubs across the whole of mainland Europe. In the last two years, 30 French people have taken GAA foundation level coaching courses and have been trained as GAA instructors, some of which are Bretons. In Rennes on Wednesday, there was a coaching session organised by the Youth Development Officer of the Federation Francaise de Football Gaelique, which effectively governs the game in the region.
Gaelic football is taking root at all levels. INSA, a third level institution in Rennes, have created their own team and they competed in the British Universities Championships last year. INSA also hosted their own gaelic football tournament, which included three British Universities.
Unlike most other Breton clubs, Ar Gwazi Gouez want to be associated with all forms of Irish culture and they are the strongest club in the region. Through intense fundraising and sponsorship, their self-financing potential is far greater than all other Breton clubs. “It is quite hard because we have to fund everything ourselves,” says Nantes’ Guillaume Kerrien. “It’s difficult to get financial help from the town and city councils because the sport is not nationally known or recognised by the head sporting organisations. But we have a pragmatic approach and we help each other.”
The game in Brittany will always have to survive on indigenous talent because it doesn’t have the same pulling power that attracts Irish people to other cities and regions around the world. Brittany is one of the poorest regions in France, with the minimum wage only E1000 a month. “Even on a nurses salary, and I’m a senior nurse, I would earn double my salary in Ireland,” says O’Rourke. “The reason I’m here is that I’m separated from the father of my child, who is from here, and I believe that a child needs both parents. But I’ve always been a bit of an adventurist and I like challenges.”
O’Rourke sometimes plays with the men’s team and she says that the standard is comparable to “strong junior teams in Ireland”. Sheamus Howlin, Chairman of the Overseas Work Group has attended some games in Brittany and has been “very impressed with the quality of football,” Breton championship matches are officiated by Irish referees based in Paris and every player is well aware of official rules. Even when a beach gaelic football competition was held in Pornichet last year, which featured on the TV programme The Road to Croker, the competition was still organised under the umbrella of the ECB.
The first pioneers of gaelic games in Europe date as far back as 1747, when an Irish Brigade at the Battle of Lafelt, near Maastricht, played hurling matches amongst themselves during breaks in the fighting. But the deep embedding of such a strong GAA culture in Brittany is a first because of its dominant French influence. And given how fast gaelic football is developing there, it’s unknown where it may lead to.
By Christy O’Connor