WE HAVEN’T LOST TOUCH
GAA Director General Tom Ryan has acknowledged a worrying perception that top Croke Park officials just don’t get it.
The Carlow man said he’s aware of a growing narrative that those who run the GAA are out of touch with the grassroots.
That claim was consistently made throughout the ‘Newbridge or nowhere’ and Liam Miller benefit match (left) sagas this year. And just this week the Roscommon branch of the Club Players Association hit out at the GAA for rejecting it’s ‘blank canvas’ motion for fixture scheduling.
In a statement, Roscommon CPA slated Ryan personally and said generally that ‘those who lead the organisation have lost touch with the Association’s grassroots members’.
Ryan said it’s a perception that frustrates him and something he wants to tackle head on.
He said of the detachment claim: “I don’t like that, clearly we have a job to do to break that. I honestly don’t believe that it is the fact of things. But if people feel that, if that’s the perception that people have, I think then equally we have difficulties.
“So we have a job to do to get over that. That’s partly about communicating our bona fides to people, being open to things with people, and it’s partly about moving things along and changing things in certain directions.
“But that would be the one thing that I don’t really like. Whatever about the decisions you might make, or directions you might embark upon, generally speaking you get some of them right and you get some of them wrong.
“But the sentiment behind them universally is to advance the Association. And by that, the Association, I mean the whole thing, not one specific element of it.
“But there are any number of competing interests. We talk about hurling versus football in certain counties. There are any number of competing interests, competing perspectives and it’s very, very difficult to balance all of those, all the time.
“If people have that perception, and I’m not saying they don’t, that Croke Park is kind of separate from the clubs, or that terrible term, the ‘grass roots’ of the organisation, I think that’s mistaken.
“For the most part, everyone working in here is involved in their club and doing stuff in clubs.
“So we’re the same as everyone else but we have to marry, not just one perspective, you’ve got to marry an awful lot of them.
“When you talk about challenges, I think I know the things you might have been referring to, specific little controversies, I don’t mind them. You kind of get over those, you do your best to get over them.
“That thing that you mentioned (disconnect with grassroots), that is is one thing that does prey on the mind a little bit and we have to get better at it.”
Ryan was speaking at the announcement that the game hurling has been inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.