'The GAA has always been too interesting for stories only to be told by those who thrilled the tens of thousands.' Eimear Ryan's The Grass Ceiling brings something new to the table.
Declan Bogue I DON’T CARE who you are, there’s only so much superstar GAA figure autobiographies anyone can wade through before they become jaded with the format.
The latest offering, The Grass Ceiling by Eimear Ryan, takes its place among the very best books on the topic. A camogie player from Moneygall, Co Tipperary, she sees herself perhaps more keenly as a ‘hurler’, and that’s a great way into this book. “It’s really great to see that perspective being given more space. One of my favourite sports books is Christy O’Connor’s ‘The Club’ and that came out in 2010 or thereabouts. And that was a long way ahead of the curve. It captured that local club experience in a way that hadn’t been done before and it was a great inspiration for me.”
“There was no pressure put on me, but in any family, you get a sense of what we value and what is important and from day one it was hurling and the GAA. “But back in 2016, Kevin and Olivia at Winter Papers, they were looking for an essay on winning in the GAA. They felt that it was something they read too much about or seen too much about.”That became the essay, The Fear of Winning, later to be developed into a short film called The Grass Ceiling also.
The most nerve-wracking feeling she had was when she isolated various passages and emailed them on to different people who were part of her story. Some of them might not have been painted in an entirely flattering manner, but to their credit, “They were all amazing about it. They were all generous and kind and just said, ‘yes, really appreciate the honesty, fine by me.’”
“The days that you lost, the days you made mistakes, they stand out in your head a lot more than the days that you win. The days that you win are a happy blur in your memory, but the days you lost seem crystal clear and play back in my head in high-definition.”And yet, she is a writer. Like any writer, there is a hunger to get out there into the world, away from the very thing that keeps you rooted into a tight-knit community of team, club, members.
There are also fascinating diversions into how she might see the most gauche teenagers on the Tipperary hurling panel would attract the attention of her peers in discos, but to be a camogie player felt like something to be almost hid from boys. She got over that. “There is that feeling of being in the gym of somehow being on display in some way. Because it is such a big, open space. Sometimes there is mirrors so you definitely feel you are exposed in the gym,” she explains.
“One of the things I loved about camogie is that you have a helmet on. You are obscured. Your looks don’t matter at all but the way you express your body is important.In stepping in and out of the two worlds of literature and GAA, she agrees that there is a trend nowadays to include GAA as a focal point of many people’s lives in new literature. While James Joyce may have left a few cryptic clues in Ulysses about ‘The Citizen’ character being Michael Cusack, GAA references are bare enough.
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