Reading the uniformly positive newspaper coverage — at last Leitrim can aspire to winning Sam Maguire, etc. — you’d think this was something to crow about. Hurrah! Ireland’s children spend more time in front of the video screen than everyone else except the Japanese. Whoopee! The Irish are even more computer game-obsessed than the English. Great! Maybe this is why a far more pertinent statistic emerged recently detailing that one in three Irish kids are seriously overweight and one in 10 can be officially classified as obese. Don’t think the growing tubbiness isn’t related to the popularity of such laziness-inducing products as the infernal PlayStation.
“When I was coming home from school I used to run between the lightposts, racing the cars coming behind me,” Sonia O’Sullivan said last year in an interview. “Now it’s a bit more scary out there and people don’t like their kids walking or running to school. Most people get driven to school and picked up every day and that’s a big factor. It’s very difficult to get kids to do things now.
“It’s difficult to imagine kids going out and running around a field like I used to do in Cobh, because there’s so many other things to do. I make [daughter] Ciara walk places all the time and she’d be complaining like mad. She goes to nursery school right now and it’s only 400 meters, but we walk there every day. It’s much easier to drive them places than to walk, but you’ve got to make the effort and the time because they are so slow, they stop and look at every tree, asking questions.”
There is a reason why the best distance runners in the world now come from Kenya and other countries with far less of a prevailing car culture and much less technological gimmickry with which their children can waste away precious hours of their lives. While fully understanding the GAA’s desire to compete with other sports in an increasingly crowded marketplace, it’s unfortunate that they’ve had to resort to buying into and promulgating the PlayStation epidemic.
In America just now, the catch cry of many public health officials is a simple phrase: “Get the kids off the PlayStation and into the playground.” How ironic then that the computer games company already sponsors GAA summer camps here. A cynic (or somebody over 30 who has never been in the thrall of video games) might venture that the association wouldn’t need to run summer camps to keep the children interested in the first place if they weren’t already so obsessed with things like PlayStation.
“I am delighted to launch this historic initiative,” Sean Kelly, the president of the GAA, said last week. “The official Gaelic football PlayStation 2 game will have huge benefit for the GAA. This brings the GAA into a new technological and promotional era.”
Will it really be of any benefit? Even if the presence of a Gaelic football computer game does broaden the appeal of the sport in certain circles, will it actually get kids out of the house and down to the fields to tog out? On a Saturday morning, will those unsung heroes who run juvenile teams all over Ireland find a sudden increase in the numbers available to them? Or, as has happened in the United States, will kids be heading off to hotel conference centers to participate in huge PlayStation tournaments where the only part of their body being exercised is the fingers?
That’s the most relevant question here. In the same week the PlayStation announcement was going down so well — treated like some sort of formal acknowledgement that Gaelic football is now somehow cooler because of this link-up — a debate was raging on the superb resultsfromhome.net website about the dwindling numbers of kids involved in underage GAA in Cork city. The pernicious influence of computer games is not totally to blame for the fall-off in those playing the games or the high rate of dropping out once boys hit their teens but it’s definitely part of the problem.
Of course, there are other factors contributing to the declining popularity of hurling and football in the country’s second largest city. Some traditional GAA powerhouses have taken a long time to realize they have to work that bit harder to keep kids involved than in previous eras, parents no longer have the time (or in some cases the desire) to help out running teams, and competition with other sports and hobbies has never been fiercer. Still, there is a reason that at conferences examining the problem of childhood obesity in America, Australia, and New Zealand recently, the role of PlayStation 2 in this public health crisis has been a recurring theme.
Whatever way you spin it, this generation of Irish children exercise less, walk less and unfortunately, play less. “When was the last time you saw a child run down to the shop for a pint of milk?” asked Brian Kerr, launching a new fitness initiative recently. From somebody who grew up running around the streets of Drimnagh with a best pal by the name of Eamonn Coghlan, that was a suitably cogent contribution to what should be but isn’t already a national debate.
Something to think about while digesting the news Sony will soon be celebrating the fact that almost half a million people in Ireland own PlayStation 2s. Not a reason to be cheerful.