RULE 42 AND ALL THAT

The long and often bitter battle to relax Rule 42 was won 15 years ago by a grassroots revolution that altered the course of GAA history

Frank Roche takes a look back on the saga which divided the GAA but, ultimately, saw them take a giant leap forward

THE DEBATE had been raging, back and forth, when Noel Walsh rose to have his say. The Clare official and his fellow Congress delegates were here to settle a row that had polarised the GAA, like few issues before, as it embraced a new century. This was a battle of minds not for turning, an Association of competing visions and bitter divisions. What to do about Rule 42? Walsh had been one of several who had spent years pressing to amend a rule that road-blocked the playing of what some pejoratively termed ‘foreign games’ in Croke Park.

As he spoke, in that very stadium, on April 16, 2005, he quoted a line from Franklin D Roosevelt: “We have nothing to fear except fear itself.”

And when the votes were counted, the grassroots revolution had prevailed – against the odds and implacable opposition of the old order.

“Democracy is a wonderful thing,” said a beaming Walsh afterwards.

The result was announced by Seán Kelly, the Kerryman seeking to mask his own “euphoria and relief” as he read out the vote – 227 for, 97 against.

“It was an unforgettable moment; the defining mark of my presidency,” Kelly wrote in his memoir. Called, aptly enough, Rule 42 And All That.

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NOEL WALSH passed to his eternal reward last week. In a long and varied career of GAA service, the Miltown-Malbay native had been a Clare football manager, long-time selector, county board chairman, Munster Council chairman and a member of multiple other national committees.

Entering the noughties, his recurring battle against the strictures of Rule 42 – and the insular image it portrayed – became his mission.

He wasn’t alone. Anthony Delaney from Shanahoe in Laois and Tommie Kenoy from Kilmore in Roscommon were leading advocates in the quest to utilise the money-spinning potential of the new Croke Park by offering tenancy to Irish soccer and rugby.

The impetus came from Shanahoe’s motion to the Laois convention in late 1999, seeking to give Central Council the power to set aside aspects of Rule 42 “in certain circumstances”.

That motion made it onto the 2000 Congress clár in Galway, but was referred back to Central Council and that was the last we heard of it.

Until that famous 2001 Congress in the Burlington Hotel.

By then, Delaney had been joined by other agitators with an interest in penning motions. “I wrote it myself in the kitchen, in October 2000,” Tommie Kenoy told the Irish Independent this week. “I had suffered a bad accident over in England and I was at home here recovering, on sick leave at the time, and I started to fiddle around with the GAA rulebook.”

A dangerous, labyrinthine pursuit. But as he reasons now: “Croke Park had been upgraded and my thinking was, ‘We have a state-of-the-art stadium in north Dublin, and it sits idle from the All-Ireland until the club finals in March, and it makes no commercial sense ... all you have in it are seagulls. So it was a case of exploiting the commercial potential of Croke Park during the down-time.

“We had no notion it would make the sort of money it eventually made. We were talking four or five million; it ended up netting 36 million (euros).”

That windfall, though, was still a long way off.

Momentum

Kenoy’s motion, giving Central Council the power to authorise the use of Croke Park, was one of three that made it to Congress in 2001.

The Laois motion was withdrawn and Longford’s ruled out of order, but momentum was growing behind Roscommon’s proposal. “We did a serious canvass in the build-up, and also around the Burlington the night before, and we believed we had a fairly strong chance,” Kenoy recalls.

But other obstacles were conspiring against them. The foot-and-mouth outbreak had robbed them of a “strong ‘pro’ vote from across the Irish Sea”.

Then came Bertie Ahern’s gambit: on the Friday night of Congress, GAA president Seán McCague announced a Government grant of £60m towards the redevelopment of Croke Park. This was high-stakes political football with the Taoiseach’s national stadium pet project, his beloved ‘Bertie Bowl’, the elephant in the room.

The underdogs still romped the popular vote – 176 to 89 – but this left them one tantalising vote shy of the required two-thirds majority.

The vote had been counted via a show of hands – a “very unscientific method”, Kenoy maintains, to decide national GAA policy. “When I glanced around, I said, ‘This is f***king tight, lads, what will we do?’ They were humming and hawing. And I said, ‘Look, if we lose by less than five we’ll

ask for a recount.’ And we lost by one, so I got up and said, ‘Uachtarán, this is such a tight vote, I think we deserve a recount.’ And, of course, he said no.”

Adding to the intrigue, 44 of the 309 delegates entitled to vote hadn’t done so. The rumour mill suggested that the ‘Burlo jacks’ was no place for social distancing as the votes were tallied. “At next year’s Congress, there is unlikely to be such a mass outbreak of bladder malfunction among delegates,” the late Eugene McGee wrote.

Interviewed on RTÉ, Kenoy said he’d be “very surprised” if it wasn’t passed the next year. “Of course,” he now admits, “I hadn’t anticipated the right wing of the GAA circling the wagons. And boy did they circle them!”

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IN JUST 12 months, so close became very far away. As the hierarchy mobilised, the appetite for change eroded. When Walsh declined to withdraw Clare’s motion in 2002, it lost heavily – 197 to 106. At least it scraped one-third of the votes; otherwise the campaign would have been killed for three years.

But then the Motions Committee, a conservative body comprised mostly of former presidents, deemed every Rule 42 motion out of order two years running, which meant it didn’t make it onto the Congress agenda.

Kelly had taken over as Uachtarán in ’03. Not that this gave him any extra leverage with the ex-presidents.

Balloon

The president’s views on Rule 42 were a matter of public record, which went down like a lead balloon with his increasingly vocal critics, several of whom fired broadsides his way at Cork’s convention in December ’03.

Reflecting on this period, Kenoy claims: “There’s stuff I could tell you that, under no circumstances, would I put on the public record ... it was all very dirty and a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and even people in Roscommon turned against me.”

But then momentum shifted again, and Kenoy cites three “crucial” factors.

Kelly had initiated a change of rule (passed by Special Congress in 2004) which meant motions deemed flawed by the Motions Committee were to be sent back to the county, indicating errors and inviting correction.

Then there was Roscommon’s Congress motion in ’04 seeking a referendum of clubs. Whereas this was kicked on to Central Council, the idea inspired an appeal from the ‘Yes’ camp that clubs debate Rule 42 and “mandate their delegates to county convention, who in turn would mandate people going to Congress ... as a consequence, counties who were opposed to it all through came to Congress, mandated to support.

“The third key factor was that, had we not passed it, Ireland would have had to play their home games in soccer and rugby across the Irish Sea.

“An absolute key factor.”

As the defining 2005 Congress loomed, seven proposals eventually negotiated the Motions Committee.

On the day itself, support would coalesce around Sligo’s motion giving Central Council the power to authorise the renting of Croke Park during the period that Lansdowne Road was closed for redevelopment. Its temporary nature was key to its success.

However, a vote backing Central Council’s proposal for a secret ballot prompted fears (ultimately misguided) that some delegates would vote in defiance of their mandate.

The debate itself was high on rhetoric and ideology, especially from the ‘No’ side. Former president Con Murphy of Cork set the tone. “We are supporting the creation of a new association that caters for everything and stands for nothing,” he warned.

Longford’s TJ Ward summed up the counter-argument, that “playing on fears is no way to make a rational decision.” On it went until the votes were tallied. And history was made.

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TOMMY KENOY’S original motion, in 2001, was seconded by Liam O’Neill of Laois, future president of the GAA.

O’Neill views that Rule 42 campaign as the modern GAA’s “first major manifestation of the power of democracy. It came from the clubs and it found its way to Congress and was passed – and it opened up the possibility for change.”

Whereas some might argue that “not an awful lot came” from the decision, O’Neill reckons it “changed Irish society.” The game against England, in 2007, is viewed by some Irish players as the “highlight” of their careers.

“That match changed the image of the GAA – not just in Ireland but across England, and made people aware that Croke Park was the physical evidence of what a well-organised amateur organisation can achieve. The fact we were big enough to say, yeah, you’re welcome to it for as long as you need it was a huge statement of maturity.

“People like Noel (Walsh) contributed to all that thinking. His death was noted with sadness in lots of places.”

This, O’Neill concludes, is “the awful part” of this Covid-19 pandemic – “that we couldn’t physically be present to acknowledge that to his family.”