IT’S A TURN-OFF
GAA counting cost of falling attendances
THE revamped All-Ireland football Championship proved a turn-off for supporters as attendance figures slumped by 18 per cent last year, even though the inception of the Super 8s saw an extra six games played.
The dwindling interest in a football Championship that saw Dublin ease to their fourth All-Ireland in a row was the main reason behind a 14 per cent fall in gate receipts, to €29.6million from the previous record high of €34.4m in 2017.
In the annual accounts released yesterday, the GAA attributed the drastic drop in gate receipts to the fact that there were two money-spinning replays in 2017 — Mayo versus Roscommon and Kerry — and just one last year, when Clare and Galway replayed the hurling semi-final, while Mayo made an early exit from last summer’s Championship.
There was a slight fall in the gate receipts for the hurling Championship, €10.2m down from €10.7m in 2017, but it will be the football figures that cause the greatest concern within Croke Park.
The average attendance at the 39 football games in last year’s All-Ireland series was 13,225, compared to an average of 19,049 for the 2017 Championship, when 33 matches were played.
DECEMBER is a fallow month for Gaelic games, with little in the way of matches to distract. So, the release of John Costello’s annual report is awaited with bated breath as the Dublin County Board chief executive tends to generate a headline or two.
A couple of years back, spurred on by ‘the extravagant hyperbole’ that has greeted the success of Jim Gavin’s team, Costello trained his crosshairs on equalisation of funding.
‘All this talk of Dublin domination could strengthen the argument (a nebulous one, I believe) that something radical must be done to stop them,’ he wrote.
‘There is much talk of funding equalisation in the GAA, how the finances at our disposal must be curbed. But this presupposes that Dublin GAA is awash with cash or that you could slash our funding from central coffers without any negative effect. At the most basic level, this is about jobs.’
Yesterday’s annual accounts revealed that Dublin received €1.3million for games development in 2018, almost 14 per cent of the allocated funds. The figure dwarfed Meath’s €367,400, the county with the next highest amount.
It’s more than five years since former president Liam O’Neill first uttered the phrase ‘equalisation of funds’, and over four years since former director general Páraic Duffy told an Oireachtas committee that ‘the GAA and Dublin are aware of the need to rebalance funding… and that there will be a reduction of funding going to Dublin.’
And yet, there they still sit, casting a sky-blue shadow over Gaelic football and still getting the most significant slice of the pie.
‘There’s an employment issue here in that ultimately we are employers of 60-70 coaches in the Dublin area,’ GAA finance director Ger Mulryan said yesterday, echoing Costello’s sentiments of 2016.
‘If we were to stop that funding, then in theory, they could lose their jobs and ultimately we wouldn’t get the benefit we currently get out of the whole process.’ Mulryan (left) did point out that the funding model for games development coaches in Dublin is split 50-50 between the association and the clubs, a model that is now being replicated under the East Leinster project in five counties — Meath, Kildare, Louth, Wicklow and Wexford. More than €600,000 was allocated to those counties under that project. However, on a morning when the dwindling public interest in Gaelic football caused by Dublin’s dominance was reflected on the balance sheet, the distribution of funds was not a good look for the association.
Alongside the startling drop in gate receipts — little more than 50,000 came to Croke Park for Dublin’s All-Ireland semi-final against Galway — the most telling statement yesterday was made by Peter McKenna when he talked about the fall in Allianz League revenue for the stadium.
Revenue for League matches fell by 20 per cent in Croker in 2018. ‘And this was particularly disappointing because Dublin had four home games, as opposed to three in 2017,’ McKenna said.
That trend has continued into 2019, if last weekend is any guide. While last Saturday evening was frosty in the city, and there was the attraction of the Six Nations opener in Aviva Stadium, less than 15,000 rocked up to Jones Road for a triple-header of matches.
Dublin’s dominance has become tedious. People are turning away. Switching off. And figures like those released yesterday suggest that dominance isn’t about to end any time soon. Five years on from O’Neill saying that the playing field had to be levelled, it is still skewed towards the sky-blue monster the association themselves created.
Sinn Féin’s Rose Conway-Walsh was the only impressive speaker when GAA president John Horan spoke at the Seanad, as she was the only one to take Horan to task for the sheer unfairness of the funding directed towards Dublin.
‘There is, of course, a worry that the GAA is focusing too many resources towards the eastern seaboard, and Dublin specifically. Between 2010 and 2014, in central games development funding, per registered player Tyrone got €21, Mayo got €22, Kerry got €19 while Dublin got €274.40,’ Conway-Walsh pointed out.
The unfairness still exists. If there’s a group of five or six counties who hold ambitions of breaking the sky-blue stranglehold on the game, they are not getting much help from Croke Park.
Mayo only received €134,219 in games development funding last year, Kerry did a tad better with
€197,600. Galway, a strong dual county, received just €184,462 while the funds diverted to Ulster looked paltry. Donegal got €130,200, Monaghan €124,000 and Tyrone, last year’s beaten finalist, received just €119,000 for games development.
The association were keen to emphasise that they had just invested €1.2m into Belfast, through the GaelFast project which they hope will penetrate the schools in the city.
But Croke Park don’t help themselves when the issue of Dublin’s funding is raised. Yesterday, it was disingenuously pointed out that both Cork and Longford received more funding last year, but that was for redeveloping Páirc Uí Chaoimh and Pearse Park.
‘The coaches ultimately assigned this grant money spend over 50 per cent of their time in schools across the city,’ Mulryan stated yesterday.
‘They are promoting GAA. They are delivering the message and skills of our games. They are effectively recruiters, recruiting the underage into our games, which is really, really positive.’
But why is this recruitment drive only going on in the capital city? Does the rest of the country not deserve similar sort of attention? Something for those in Croke Park, and even John Costello, to contemplate if the crowds continue to fall in this year’s football Championship.