David McWilliams in the Irish Independent on the success of the local hurling team in Dalkey, County Dublin, ostensibly displacing rugby and soccer --
To understand this, we have to understand that the last two or three decades have been a time of enormous social upheaval in middle class Dublin. The main force has been the emergence of a rural professional class that has come to dominate Dublin’s professions. These upwardly socially mobile punters from the country are the major winners in the Irish professional meritocracies of medicine, the higher levels of the civil service, the law, accountancy and banking ... The main economic factor behind rise in hurling in coastal south Dublin can be traced to the 1960s and free education. The class that benefitted most from free education in the 1960s and 1970s was not, as you might imagine, the industrial working class, but the small farming class ... They turned into the teacher aristocracy, bringing with them to Dublin a love of the GAA, squeezeboxes and Farah slacks. Their success in education also catapulted them into the public service in great numbers. Now they are retiring as the best-paid public servants in Europe. Their kids have gone up a notch on the social hierarchy to become doctors and lawyers. Some of them have adopted rugby, the sport of the old hierarchy, but they have also kept their allegiance to the GAA. So as they bought houses in the coastal parts of south Dublin, they joined GAA clubs, not rugby or soccer clubs, leading to an explosion of GAA in this part of the world.
David McWilliams discusses his Irish adaptation of the Bobo, the HiCo (Hibernian Cosmopolitan) in The Pope's Children (2005) --
When did names like Oisin and Aoife rocket up the top 10 list of children's names? When did the trendiest clubs in Dublin change their names from the Las Vegas sounding Pink Elephant to Connemara inflected Rí Rá? ... Why did the GAA and particularly hurling -- long associated with the antithesis of progress and sophistication - become hip? ... In the past, the major driver of the jettisoning of Irish or indeed any minority culture was economic .. Today, the very same process is making it accessible again. When the economy is booming, people can indulge in exploring their own culture. The corollary is that when unemployment is close to 20 percent and emigration is high, there are more important fish to fry than culture .. from the mid-1990s, demand for Gaelscoileanna, GAA, and traditional music increased dramatically with national income.
The two interpretations aren't necessarily contradictory but something has happened between the mid-2000s era portrayal of what is essentially a form of conspicuously differentiated consumption with the current view which is a bit more class tinged and a little hint of metropolitan unease about upward mobility and legacy provincial cultures.
The uncomfortable truth may be that elements of both are right: that it's precisely because Ireland's professional class, the bourgeoisie de robe, was insulated from the 2008 crash, the economic preference of the incumbents and the arrivistes for a certain type of authenticity (and one not easily appropriated by the wrong type of person) is alive and well.
To understand this, we have to understand that the last two or three decades have been a time of enormous social upheaval in middle class Dublin. The main force has been the emergence of a rural professional class that has come to dominate Dublin’s professions. These upwardly socially mobile punters from the country are the major winners in the Irish professional meritocracies of medicine, the higher levels of the civil service, the law, accountancy and banking ... The main economic factor behind rise in hurling in coastal south Dublin can be traced to the 1960s and free education. The class that benefitted most from free education in the 1960s and 1970s was not, as you might imagine, the industrial working class, but the small farming class ... They turned into the teacher aristocracy, bringing with them to Dublin a love of the GAA, squeezeboxes and Farah slacks. Their success in education also catapulted them into the public service in great numbers. Now they are retiring as the best-paid public servants in Europe. Their kids have gone up a notch on the social hierarchy to become doctors and lawyers. Some of them have adopted rugby, the sport of the old hierarchy, but they have also kept their allegiance to the GAA. So as they bought houses in the coastal parts of south Dublin, they joined GAA clubs, not rugby or soccer clubs, leading to an explosion of GAA in this part of the world.
David McWilliams discusses his Irish adaptation of the Bobo, the HiCo (Hibernian Cosmopolitan) in The Pope's Children (2005) --
When did names like Oisin and Aoife rocket up the top 10 list of children's names? When did the trendiest clubs in Dublin change their names from the Las Vegas sounding Pink Elephant to Connemara inflected Rí Rá? ... Why did the GAA and particularly hurling -- long associated with the antithesis of progress and sophistication - become hip? ... In the past, the major driver of the jettisoning of Irish or indeed any minority culture was economic .. Today, the very same process is making it accessible again. When the economy is booming, people can indulge in exploring their own culture. The corollary is that when unemployment is close to 20 percent and emigration is high, there are more important fish to fry than culture .. from the mid-1990s, demand for Gaelscoileanna, GAA, and traditional music increased dramatically with national income.
The two interpretations aren't necessarily contradictory but something has happened between the mid-2000s era portrayal of what is essentially a form of conspicuously differentiated consumption with the current view which is a bit more class tinged and a little hint of metropolitan unease about upward mobility and legacy provincial cultures.
The uncomfortable truth may be that elements of both are right: that it's precisely because Ireland's professional class, the bourgeoisie de robe, was insulated from the 2008 crash, the economic preference of the incumbents and the arrivistes for a certain type of authenticity (and one not easily appropriated by the wrong type of person) is alive and well.
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