Only Horan could go to China

ODDLY enough, when a Dubliner was elected President of the GAA, we had a certain amount of hope that something might be done about the Dublin elephant in the room. Naturally we didn’t expect anything too radical, this is the GAA we’re talking about here.

Still, even as much as a fulsome acknowledgment that there was an issue would have been pretty seismic, to be honest. The formation of some sort of a review to mirror the one which helped kick-start the decade of the Dubs would, we believe, have been a fairly modest step to take, and nobody was better placed to take those steps than John Horan for the simple reason of who he was and where he came from.

Horan was in a uniquely powerful position to get the ball rolling on what is the single greatest challenge facing the GAA in the medium to long term. Alas, he didn’t do nearly enough to grab hold of it, to help shape the debate in such a way as it to ensure it didn’t become overly contentious. A Dublin president of the Association taking the lead would have done much to take the sting out of the debate. It could have been the Na Fianna man’s Nixon to China moment.

It was only because of Richard Nixon’s credentials as an anti-communist crusader dating back to the McCarthy era of the 1950s that the Republican president could make an opening to Red China without howls of outrage from back home. If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a dyed in the wool Dub frankly addressing the issue could have spiked any accusations of sour grapes.

Maybe the in-coming president, Larry McCarthy, will be seen as enough of an outsider coming from the United States – albeit that he’s a native Cork man – that he’ll be able to grasp the nettle. Hopefully so, but we are left with the feeling that a real opportunity has been missed.