68 children who played football for their club last year are not able to this year
FOR all the highminded talk of integration of the genders in the GAA, it is an act of segregation that is occupying a Galway club these days.
The petition seeking the reintroduction of underage football in Craughwell GAA club has climbed over the 400 mark this week but is still being met with a stony silence.
Craughwell’s is a local issue but one that has undoubted significance on a national scale.
Back in February an email from the club executive informed members that the football teams from Under 13s up to U16s were being disbanded for the year, leaving just the U12s as the solitary age group playing football.
It came as unwelcome bolt from the blue to members and parents as the wiping out of four underage teams was not deemed worthy of sufficient importance to make the club’s AGM back in January.
There was no discussion with club members, but an explanation was proffered by the club executive citing an exhausting fixture schedule as the rationale behind its decision.
‘The competition calendar for the 2022 season means that at certain grades players, partaking in both codes, would be asked to play four games in a given sevenday period and would have to train, in both codes, on top of this,’ it explained.
Those seeking the return of the club’s football teams argue that the crammed fixture schedule is down to the club’s willingness to play their best young talent above their age groups and that the issue would not arise if players played exclusively to their age — in the process also ensuring more opportunity for less talented individuals to participate — allowing hurling and football to be played on alternate weeks.
An effort to elicit a response from the club this week by Sportsmail was met with a dropped phone call, while pleas for a special AGM to rescind the decision have thus far gone unheeded.
It has led to an official request this week for the Galway board to intervene on the issue.
Craughwell is primarily a hurling club — five times winners of the Galway championship, although the last of those successes came in 1931 — a tradition that provides some context to the acceptance that there is no space in the club for an adult football team.
As ever, the motivation behind the decision depends entirely on what lens you look through; the club’s argument that it has had to effectively discontinue football for player welfare reasons is countered by the view on the other side that football — which achieved success last year in a number of age groups — was seen as ‘getting in the way’ of hurling.
Who knows, but the bottom line is that 68 children who were able to play football for Craughwell last year, will not be able to do so in 2022.
It is a local dispute, but at grassroots level in the GAA, it is a national tension.
And it raises a very important question not just for Craughwell but for the GAA, whose mantra is now plastered all over every club wall, proclaiming it to be an association ‘where we all belong’. Is that really true? After all, it is a message that will sound pretty hollow to those kids who will have to travel through their village and past the gates of their GAA pitch on the way to whatever club will take them in and let them play football, whether that be Oranmore, Loughrea or Gael na Gaillimhe — the latter a city-based club without even a pitch to its name.
It will have consequences for everyone and there will only be losers on all sides at the end of it.
The number of kids playing football will inevitably dwindle, given the inconvenience and discomfort of uprooting from their community and peer group, relationships in the community will be damaged as a result of this stand-off, while the club will lose prospective members as some parents, who believe their children should have the option to play both codes, will eventually sign up to one where genuine duality exists.
Everyone takes a hit. Arguably, Craughwell’s most prominent player, Cillian McDaid, a member of the Galway team who beat Mayo last weekend and who was a Féile football winner with the club, plays senior football now with Monivea Abbey.
McDaid is not just a footballer, he was also an All-Ireland-winning minor hurler with Galway, but that talent has now been lost to his home club.
This is a conflict that simmers throughout the country where the political power and tradition of one code (and it happens in reverse in football-dominated clubs) sometimes finds its expression
“It was seen as ‘getting in the way’ of hurling”
THE ISSUE OF SEGREGATION IS AT GRASSROOTS LEVEL CREATING TENSION NATIONWIDE “A happy player is the most productive”
— sometimes, sadly, a perverse satisfaction — in choking the weaker one.
It is the reason why, with all the best will and resources in the world, the prospect of developing hurling as a country-wide sport will never happen because those tending the fields where it can be nurtured best, have no desire to see it grow.
On the flip side in hurling, there is a mindset among some — perhaps modelled on Kilkenny’s lapsed football identity — that the quickest way to success is by exterminating football as if it was some kind of virus that will infect all around it.
Thankfully, there are others blessed with a greater vision and marriage between the codes.
When Clare club Cratloe — a dual club that would traditionally have leaned towards hurling — emerged as a force in both codes when completing a county senior double in 2014, their senior football manager Colm Collins explained the secret of not just their success but of the harmony that co-existed between the codes.
‘There seems to be an obsession in the county about us playing both, especially among clubs where there’s absolute acrimony and the football and the hurling can’t get on with each other.
‘But in Cratloe that is not an issue.
‘When you put the players first then egos go out the window, you think about what’s best for the players. And the players we have love playing.
‘A happy player is the most productive player you can have,’ said Collins back in 2014.
And a happy club tends to be an inclusive one, in a way that goes well beyond what the poster on the wall proclaims.