We couldn’t sustain a pro game, insists Ryan
NEW GAA director general Tom Ryan has emphatically ruled out any move towards a form of professionalism at the elite end of Gaelic Games during his sevenyear term. In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview in the Irish Mail on Sunday, he has also put to bed talk of splitting Dublin as a reaction to the dominance of Jim Gavin’s four-in-a-row chasing senior football team.
On the core value of amateurism being eroded, he said: ‘We don’t have the international outlet that other sports might have. All we have to generate is what we can manage amongst ourselves. That wouldn’t sustain anything like a professional or semi-professional sport. It just wouldn’t.
‘You couldn’t pay a semblance of a living wage to enough players to sustain more than a handful of teams. From a financial viewpoint it doesn’t work — the model won’t sustain it. From an ideological point of view, if it ever did end up in that scenario, I don’t know what you’d call it or what it is but it is not the GAA. It’s so far removed from the whole fundamentals of the thing, I honestly don’t believe anybody wants it. If you sat down to think about what it would mean, that doesn’t serve anybody.’
In relation to Dublin’s unprecedented level of success he was unequivocal in dismissing the idea that the county should be split. ‘I don’t see that happening. All of these things in sport are cyclical. It’s going to be very, very difficult for Dublin to maintain that level of performance. I don’t want to be negative about Dublin because the standard they are achieving is remarkable.’