GAA’S AT A CROSSROADS

The Association has a choice — follow rugby’s lead by making the elite its primary focus or restore the club to the centre of its world

IT is not very often that a rugby discussion leaves this listener with a warm feeling, but we broke new ground this week. Last Monday night’s Against the Head – RTE’s regular magazine rugby show – had us laughing so hard, that we were forced to reach for the incontinence pants.

And when it comes to acknowledging comedic gold, there is no higher honour we can pay other than to pad up.

It may well be the case that Daire O’Brien – Against the Head’s earnest anchor – was not playing for laughs but was in the business of teasing out some hysteria.

Anyhow, he can take comfort in a job well done on the double but, in doing so, he may also have identified a core truth.

The comedy was to be found in the assertion that rugby has become the ‘people’s game’, if you take away trifling facts such as people don’t actually play it or get off their backsides to watch it.

A Sports Monitor report in 2015 suggested that one in every 100 male adult plays the game – for pity’s sake tenpin bowling came in ahead of it in terms of participation – while a 2013 audit of live attendance records at Irish sports events indicated that it accounted for just 8 per cent of the total.

Meanwhile, one in every ten Irish adult males plays soccer while Gaelic football accounted for 34 per cent of all live sporting attendances in that 2013 study, with hurling at 24 per cent and soccer at 16 per cent.

The hysteria was prompted by the notion that this is the latest attempt to suggest that Ireland is living up to the porter-originated branding of Rugby Country.

That grates on so many levels; most obviously because it is not true. After all, if so few play it or are bothered to go watch, it is most likely closer to Sure It’s Grand Country.

But then branding, which is ultimately the art of peddling a lie as an alternative fact, is something never worth twisting your knickers over.

As journalist Dave Hannigan tweeted in response to frothing Gaels who had taken such umbrage to rugby’s puffed up sense of itself, it was no more of a slight on reality than declaring hurling as our national game.

It is the premise, though, for O’Brien’s assertion on rugby’s current status that revealed how shallow we have become when taking a measure of a sport’s true worth.

It was based on the assumption that Ireland’s latest Grand Slam campaign was the talk of the country, engaging the general populace and not just those who swill scotch from hip flasks concealed inside their sheep-skinned coats. But in a nation of event junkies, talk is cheap. After all, it is not all that long ago that the nation was divided over the results of a horse’s urine test, but last time we checked there was no mad run on the show pony market. We like winners and we like to blow about winning, but the value of a sport demands to be weighed by something other than hot air. And, in these chilly times, it should never be buck-naked beneath its fur coat.

That is where the truth kicked in as one of O’Brien’s panellists, former Ireland coach Eddie O’Sullivan diluted the giddiness by reminding everyone that the price for making rugby the favoured topic of the chattering classes was by killing the conversation for those who cared deepest.

‘The vast majority of people going to see Munster or Leinster, Ulster or Connacht would not necessarily go to any club games at all, or would have any affiliation to a club.

‘Go back over the years when you had less people watching, they had that connection with the club. It is not a bad thing; it is just a change in demographics.’

Nothing wrong in that either, because that is the route rugby has chosen and the IRFU have managed it much better than others.

But then they had less to lose in the first instance, unlike the GAA.

All the wishful talk in the world will never detract from the GAA’s absolute core strength which is that it manages to reach deep into parts of Irish society that others can’t.

But there is hardly any room for smugness. The burning issue in the GAA still needs to be addressed.

Do they want the club to remain the centre of its universe or will they be just as happy if the county – like rugby’s provinces – becomes the primary focus of identity.

34 Gaelic football accounted for 34 per cent of all live attendances at sports events according to a 2013 audit

The GAA’s primary health indicators, just like rugby’s, are all healthy.

Attendances climb season on season – and with more games in both codes this year – that gradient is set to go one way in tandem with income.

If that’s how you take your measure, along with how your sport offers the tongue-tied something to talk about, then it’s in rude health.

But if the talk at the top is all positive, the distress from the grassroots is for real.

They are still at the heart of their communities, but they wonder if they are still at the heart beat of the GAA.

The latest effort to afford them the chance to breathe is doomed before it even starts – Donegal became the latest county this week to declare that there won’t be a championship ball kicked until September, despite the opening of an exclusive club window next month.

It can be argued that the clubs are to blame for not helping themselves by putting some manners on the county game. Ultimately, however, the GAA has to make a decision as to whether to abandon the principle of a meaningful integrated club/ county fixture schedule or make it work.

It needs to show that when its opens its fine coat, there will be no need to shiver or to blush.