Its a sign of the grim times were in when the Government can announce a ban on massed gatherings stretching out for months ahead of us and it doesnt really feel like a shock. Ordinarily, this would be jaw-dropping, world-shattering news. Instead, its probably no worse than what most sports followers suspected.
A summer of sport and gigs and festivals and everything else has been zapped before were even out of mid-April. Yet, given rising death tolls and the looming economic clouds, it feels like very small beer. Thats where we are with everything.
The swirl of news can make the days feel like being on Willy Wonkas boat, hurtling through the Tunnel of Terror with a new nightmarish image flashing by at every turn. Theres no earthly way of knowing in which direction we are going. Certainly, not a speck of light is showing. The confirmation that the simple act of going to a big sporting event is unavailable to us until September at the earliest makes it all feel darker than ever.
At a stroke, the touchstones of the Irish summer have been written off. We already knew we wouldnt be at the Euros or the Irish Open or the Dublin Horse Show. Now we know for sure that we wont be at the football or hurling championships. Therell be no day out at a refixed Champions Cup quarter-finals. We wont go to the Curragh for the Derby. Theyve even shut down the Tidy Towns for a year.
Massed gatherings are who we are. Without them, were not a we at all. We are just ourselves, ambling along in lives of small connections. And though the small ones are obviously the most important ones, we cant deny that it does the soul good to occasionally feel yourself in a maw of something bigger. Like a lot of things we never had to imagine before, losing that is surreal.
It doesnt have to be sport, of course. Indeed, so resigned have we become to losing sport from our lives for a while that it feels from this vantage point like the ban is aimed more so at the summer of festivals around the country. Therell be no Electric Picnic or Longitude or All Together Now and so on. No Fleadh. No Rose of Tralee.
These all sound like fripperies and they are. But we should acknowledge their loss all the same. Its only human to feel the sad, grim weight of the nightly numbers and to still find room for the sting of something like this. The summer will come and go but it wont be like any summer that went before it. To just shrug that off as nothing would be dishonest.
We can mourn our dead and still feel justified in grieving for the loss of the stuff of life. The events you need a massed gathering for are generally the things that sustain us. They take us out of ourselves, give us licence to colour outside our usual lines. In a crowd you can make noise, you can roar, you can curse, you can dance, sing, cry and all the other bad good stuff, safe in the knowledge that everyone else is doing it too.
Thats gone now. We dont know for how long. We dont even really know what it means, either. Technically, its still presumably possible that you could put on a Pro-14 game in, say, late July and cap the numbers through the turnstiles at 4,000. Or to start running off the League of Ireland season. Or to crank the club championships into gear. But even if you do, how can you be sure those are things that people will want to be a part of?
Right now, that feels a world away. Until theres a reliable method of telling who you are surrounded by at any one moment in time, people are surely going to be leery about going anywhere. There will be sport before the vaccine, we can presume that much at least. But whether well stand in crowds watching it depends on the level of confidence society can provide in itself.
The gateway to that can only really be testing either for the virus itself or for immunity. Unless you can test people quickly and efficiently and cordon them off appropriate to their results, it wont really matter what limits the Government decides to put on the numbers who can attend big events. People just wont go.
The beauty of a massed gathering is that it says something nobody would ever have imagined needed saying before now. It says were okay to be here together, all these people with nothing to fear from each other. Sport as we knew it wont be back until we can say that again.
Or, more accurately, until we dont need to say it.
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Massed gatherings are who we are - losing them feels surreal - The Irish Times
