EVERY NOW AND then, some outside audience learns something about Ireland and we get to enjoy what we look like through the eyes of others.

Some person or other will discover that we have a gnomelike poet president who has two dogs that are larger than he is. Occasionally, they’ll be amused that we have a filling station dedicated to Barack Obama for some reason. This past Sunday, a whole new audience was introduced to hurling. 

BBC Two broadcast Sunday’s All-Ireland Senior Hurling Final between Cork and Clare to a peak audience of half a million. Granted, many of those will be diaspora well aware of the game, but many more of whom were entirely uninitiated to the battle unfolding before their eyes on terrestrial TV. 

As is to be expected, social media was quickly inundated with enthusiastic British people whose eyes had been opened. “I’ve been watching Hurling for about 30 mins and this might just be the greatest sport ever,” wrote Danish, from Manchester.

Another description read: “Hurling appears to be a mix of UFC, rugby, hockey, football, baseball, the egg and spoon race all whilst hitting a snooker ball as hard as you can as high into the sky as possible towards goal with what looks like the bones of a tomahawk steak.” These people might not understand hurling, but they understand hurling, if you get me.

In response to a video of Robert Downey’s goal for Cork, which saw him travel about thirty yards with the ball balanced on the end of his hurl like a goddamn circus performer, one Twitter user asked how the goalkeeper was supposed to save it. It’s a fair question — playing in goals in hurling is probably the closest thing to being the guy in the Secret Service whose job it is to take a literal bullet for the president.

Hurling, after all, is a spectacle like little else in mainstream athletics – bearing slightly more resemblance to some kind ancient druid combat than it does to any non-contact sport (or most full-contact ones). British viewers tuning in for the first time on Sunday were even treated to the unique joy of seeing the referee go down with a blood injury.

The assemblage of pace, precision and physicality in hurling is something that is not quite replicated in many other popular sports. The skillset required to rise to the pinnacle of hurling is so strange and specific, requiring as it does the willingness to be struck with a dense projectile travelling at somewhere between 150 and 180km/h while also maintaining the poise of a ballerina wielding a machete. There is constant jeopardy, with players capable of scoring from any angle and virtually any distance. It is a tit-for-tat war of attrition played at such speed that you need to manually recalibrate your brain if you sit down to watch soccer afterwards. 

When Tony Kelly plays hurling like this, there’s nobody better to watch. Magician.

pic.twitter.com/RKBYsSM14r

— Daniel Hussey (@DanielHussey2) July 21, 2024

It is a game without parallel. Lacrosse? No. It’s very hard to respect anything with those tiny little goals. Ice hockey? Do it in shorts and then we’ll talk. Hurling is like nothing else on offer. Naturally, arising as it did in a country whose indigenous language and cultural practices were actually under threat for 800 years by the very neighbours who now tune in with amazement to watch it played. 

It is therefore especially lamentable that Ireland is now home to a burgeoning movement which tries to convince us that our culture and “way of life” – so self-evidently vibrant on Sunday in the colours of red and blue and gold rippling through the stands of Croke Park – is under threat again. No, we’re not under British rule again. No, we’re not hiding in hedges trying to keep our language alive under pain of death. No, the Catholics haven’t been banned from universities or owning land. There’s just been an increase in immigration and some people really despise immigrants. That’s about the long and short of it. 

But those watching from afar can see plainly that Ireland is consistently producing greatness in virtually every arena.

We are going into this summer’s Olympics with some of our brightest athletic prospects in history, including  and a very real chance to best our previous medal haul record. We have all-star boxers and golfers and jockeys. 

In music there is Hozier, CMAT, Fontaines DC, Dermot Kennedy, Kneecap and Lankum. There is Sally Rooney, a woman who has essentially hauled an entire genre of writing into being. There is Paul Lynch, the most recent winner of the Booker Prize. 

Cillian Murphy just won the Oscar for best actor, the year after Banshees of Inisherin produced four Irish acting nominations (while Paul Mescal picked up another for Aftersun). These are just the headline acts, but there is evidence everywhere you look that Irish culture and Irishness itself is flourishing. 

Even as cultural spaces are depleted due to a lack of funding, poets and writers and actors and musicians and sportspeople continue to fight and find a way to put Ireland on the map in a way that far outsizes our total area.

The only way you could possibly believe that Irish culture on the wane is if you are wilfully refusing to engage with it, and that is the truth. The people who will tell you that Irish culture is under threat have nothing but disdain for Irish culture. How often do they get caught on camera unable to respond to a point made to them as Gaeilge? Consorting in Telegram chatrooms with English nationalists like Tommy Robinson? These people have one idea of what it means to be Irish and it boils down to having white skin.

Ahead of yesterday’s final, GAA president Jarlath Burns gave a speech to a thronged Croke Park in which he said: “For those people who are our diaspora, who had left this country because of war and famine, and for ancestors who had to leave it, we are thinking of you as you watch it.

“You are in Croke Park today, if not in body than in spirit, and we thank the countries who took you in and allowed you to make a new name for yourselves with our native games.”

That Burns would give an address like that at a time like this is not a coincidence. It is a reminder that Irishness cannot be extricated from emigration and immigration. For all the on-field factors that make hurling so compelling, the true value of the GAA is the same as any other team sport — inclusion, acceptance, and something to do together.