GAA is failing to hit the beat when it comes to their musical choices

Over the years there must have been other times in Croke Park when the stadium music stirred the blood but the 2018 All-Ireland hurling semi-final felt like a new departure. Limerick had just beaten Cork after extra-time in an epic match, and as the Limerick players and management gathered arm-in-arm in the middle of the pitch Linger by the Cranberries boomed over the public address and caught the euphoria.

It was a glorious meeting of mood and moment. Up on Hill 16 and in the stands thousands of Limerick supporters stood and sang at the top of their voices. Limerick had just reached their first All-Ireland final in 11 years, and everybody who had stayed behind wanted to be part of a noise. Making a great communal sound is one of the thrills of being in a crowd. At the final whistle nobody in green wanted the house lights to go up and the dance to end.

Limerick's Sean Finn and Pat Ryan celebrate after a hurling All-Ireland senior championship semi-final at Croke Park in July 2018. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho

For a long time the GAA missed that trick. If music was played after a match it would have been one of the old staples from the winning county, the kind of stuff that was trotted out on Trom Agus Éadrom back in the day or Up for the Match on the night before an All-Ireland.

Little enough of it was upbeat, or even catchy. Those songs had a home in pub sing songs, or in an Irish bar overseas, where their stock was propped up by sentimentality. It was for a particular audience. Not necessarily young people.

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Uniquely among sporting organisations anywhere in the world, though, the GAA had a spiritual contract with music. In Part One of the GAA’s Official Guide, under the heading of Additional Aims, it states that: “The Association shall actively support the Irish language, traditional Irish dancing, music, song, and other aspects of Irish culture.”

Through the generations that has meant different things. In the early years of the GAA advertisements for tournaments would always include the names of the bands that were attending because it was intrinsic to the attraction.

Marching bands have been part of the pageant of the GAA at all levels since the beginning. For decades club teams were routinely marched through the locality before tournament games. In The GAA – A People’s History, Cronin, Duncan and Rouse excavated a stunning picture of two teams being paraded through Drogheda before an under-14 street league final in 1954, preceded by a brass and reed band and flanked by supporters. Traffic was brought to a standstill.

But there came a time when the GAA’s choice of music felt anachronistic and out of step. Traditional music or ballads were the standard fare at GAA matches. But just because it was traditional and Irish didn’t necessarily mean it was any good. Nobody kicked up even when it felt like it was being shoved down people’s throats. Though the games were changing in a million different ways in front of our eyes, the music was not.

The Artane Band in Croke Park at the 2019 All-Ireland football final. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho

Music is a matter of taste, of course. In some parts of the country the passion for traditional Irish music has a religious fervour. Clare is one of those places. Thirty years ago, when they won the Munster title for the first time in 63 years, I followed the cup on its Monday night tour around the county. The only way to keep track of the team’s movements was on Clare FM, and that evening all they played was traditional music and song.

But when Clare beat Cork by a point in the championship in Cusack Park two years ago the ground rocked to the sound of Freed From Desire by Gala, a staple of clubland. At major GAA venues – though not everywhere – the GAA realised that it was in the entertainment business. Its competitors for the entertainment buck had been dabbling in razzmatazz for years.

In professional sport it goes back a long way. In the 1980s the Chicago Bulls basketball team famously started playing Sirius as their walk-on song for home games. The venue would descend into darkness and the synth instrumental from Alan Parson’s 1982 album Eye In the Sky would fill the arena.

That piece of music has been on the playlist for big rugby games at the Aviva Stadium for years now. When the Heineken Cup took off in Ireland it dawned on all the provinces eventually that rugby couldn’t be the top and tail of the spectacle and they couldn’t always depend on the crowd to generate an atmosphere from a cold start. The mood needed to be stimulated sometimes.

The GAA is still searching for a balance. It can’t abandon traditional music entirely, or the old ballads, and even when it plays a modern tune it looks for a link between the artist and the county. So for the Dubs it’s Thin Lizzy, for Limerick it’s the Cranberries, for Cork it’s the Frank and Walters, for Galway it’s the Saw Doctors.

When a modern tune is not played at the final whistle of a big game now it feels like a bum note. When Offaly’s under-20 hurlers won the All-Ireland on a balmy evening in Nowlan Park last summer they rolled out an old Offaly standard at the final whistle. About 20,000 Offaly supporters had travelled that night, but the majority of them were young people. As they swarmed on to the pitch at the final whistle they wanted to hear a banging tune; instead they got something their parents might have danced to in the village hall.

When the Offaly under-20 footballers won the All-Ireland in 2021, a local band, JigJam, appropriated the tune from Fisherman’s Blues by the Waterboys and came up with a rattling song to honour Offaly’s triumph. Their young audience loved it.

Last week the Cork County Board received some emails complaining that the music had been too loud at the hurling league final in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. It’s the kind of thing you’d hear after a wedding. On the playlist in the Páirc were AC/DC, Depeche Mode, Chappell Roan, and the Frank and Walters among others. The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee was given an airing too but it was well down the playlist.

If there were 20,000 people on the pitch after the match, at least 18,000 of them were young people. They didn’t want to hear De Banks. There is no going back.