Miller saga shows clarity needed on rules

GAA’s understanding with Government is fractured forever

GAA were sleepwalking into a land mine

WITH hindsight, Tom Ryan could argue that the biggest stick he has been beaten with in his four-month reign as director general was one crafted by his predecessor.

Páraic Duffy walked away from his role as the GAA’s top official in March, his 10-year reign was generally viewed in a positive light. However, one of Duffy’s interventions has come back to bite his successor hard.

At the 2015 annual Congress in Cavan, a motion from the Miltown Malbay club — which sought to empower Central Council to authorise the use of all county grounds for other games — was expected to get little traction.

It was driven by the veteran Clare official Noel Walsh, a longtime advocate of loosening the chains on GAA gates to other codes, but it got a lot more sup- port from the Congress floor than had been anticipated.

Indeed, it impacted to such a degree that it prompted a rare intervention from the top table as Duffy insisted the Clare motion would represent a fundamental change from the previous permissions regarding the use of Croke Park and the 2023 Rugby World Cup bid.

Naturally, his voice carried authority but, even so, the motion still garnered 38 per cent of the vote. Had Duffy stayed silent, it is conceivable that it might have attracted another 10 per cent of any floating votes out there. That would still have been shy of the two-thirds majority, but it would have gifted momentum to those seeking change.

The talk would have been of a Congress ‘split down the middle on the issue’, but instead Duffy’s intervention may have bled momentum from that drive for change.

When the same motion was resubmitted at Congress in Carlow 12 months later, it attracted just 23 per cent of the vote. That low number had a double impact. It meant, on a technicality, it could not be resubmitted for another four years but, far more importantly, it buried the issue so deep that it left the GAA sleepwalking into the Páirc Uí Chaoimh land mine.

Except it was not Duffy who was left bloodied, but the man who took his place.

Safe to say, the Liam Miller tribute match saga will determine how tightly the GAA leadership grip the gates of provincial grounds at Congress next February.

Last Saturday’s ground-breaking Central Council vote, which will allow a soccer match to take place at a GAA stadium — other than Croke Park — for the first time on September 25, is only the beginning. The GAA will have to find a way to ensure there is such clarity in the rule that, in future, it will not come down to a matter of interpretation.

‘This will form part of a further debate,’ GAA president John Horan admitted after Saturday’s vote.

It is likely that the wording of that motion will be framed with the intention of ensuring that any requests to Central Council in the future for the use of county grounds will not be done on a carte blanche basis.

That may be the objective, but the real price to be paid for the GAA leadership’s misguided belief that the rule book would provide shelter from the public and political storm, generated by their initial decision not to facilitate the request to allow the Liam Miller tribute match to proceed at Páirc Uí Chaoimh, is that it has fractured a long-running understanding with successive Irish governments.

Because of the GAA’s contribution to nationalism, there was never any desire to twist its arm on the policy of not opening its doors as landlords to competing codes with an acceptance that the multi-sport stadia model — the norm in Europe — could not be applied here.

However, if the GAA come calling again on the Government, as they did for the €30million in state funding which was central to Páirc Uí Chaoimh’s redevelopment, they might find that terms and conditions have changed.

‘I think it is most important when we launch the large infrastructure funds that those who receive it make commitments that the community will have access to something which is subsidised by State money. That’s something we’ll have to insist upon,’ said the Minister for Sport, Shane Ross last week.

And that is not the only thing that may change.

Next February, when that motion goes to the floor, Ryan may follow Duffy’s lead by intervening from the top table, but this time it is likely to be in support rather than to oppose.

That may be what’s learned from a very harsh lesson.