Salaries amount to GAA ‘betrayal’
Call to reveal earnings of top officials
THE salary of the next director general of the GAA must be made public.
That was yesterday’s plea from Mark Conway — who campaigned against the GAA’s recognition of the GPA in 2010 — after the player’s body revealed the annual salary bill for its 12-strong, fulltime staff came to almost €1million in 2016.
Conway, founding member of the Of One Belief group, which also unsuccessfully opposed the introduction of State grants to inter-county players, claimed those at the top of the GAA should ‘hang their heads in shame,’ at where they had ‘led the association’.
And he insisted the GAA should now publish the salaries of its leading officials, insisting that transparency must be seen to be in place at the head of the association.
Tyrone native Conway, whose motion at 2010 Congress —seeking to have the salary of the GAA’s top officials made public — was rejected, warned yesterday that the GAA must move quickly in the interests of ‘good governance’ to ensure transparency.
The FAI publish the salary of their chief executive John Delaney, who pockets €360,000 per annum, but the IRFU have never detailed the remuneration package of CEO Philip Brown.
A new director general will succeed Páraic Duffy by the spring, but his remuneration package will not be disclosed, however Conway warned that the GAA could be making a rod for its own back.
‘All public sector organisations do it, all big private sector organisations do it so you can go to their annual accounts and you will find out what their CEO is paid and what their top five/ six directors are paid. It is good corporate governance.
‘We proposed for that to be put in place in the GAA and we were hit with a ton of bricks because we did so.
‘But that day has to come. The GAA, like any organisation, needs to publish what its top people are getting paid.
‘We have seen the nightmares which have emerged from a number of other voluntary groups in the last number of years which involved huge amounts of money secretly going to people.
‘Whether we are paying our people a lot of money or whether we are paying them very little, it should be in the public domain because that money is coming out of the pockets of GAA people,’ Conway insisted.
Although the GPA clarified yesterday that a significant €120,000 raise in wages over the past 12 months to ‘key management’ personnel could be explained by the employment of a financial controller, Conway labelled the amount of money spent on wages in the players’ body as ‘shameful’.
‘The GAA voted for it and the GAA is now getting what it voted for.
‘The first GPA deal was €1.7m a year; this one is for almost €7m a year so what is the next one going to be for? We are on the road to perdition.
‘Seven million euros of our money is going to the GPA annually and that would build a state-of-the-art centre of excellence like we have in Garvaghey.
‘In the GAA I was brought up in that is shameful but it is where we are at and it is where we were led.
‘That is why we opposed it so bitterly because inevitably we are going to end up where we are now and where we are now is not where we are stopping either.
‘The GAA was always about putting in and not taking out; it was about we and not me. Once you lose that dynamic, you kill the GAA. ‘You can already see the impact of that, you can see people ask why should they break their backs to be volunteers while, meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of our money is going to people to do what? It is wrong and it is a mortal blow to the GAA.
‘We fought that battle and lost. Those at the top table in the GAA should hang their heads in shame, they really should. We are where we are,’ he added.
‘It is a betrayal of what the GAA is about.’