LET’S TALK ABOUT MONEY
Cost of preparing teams has put incredible strain on county boards and ticket prices have been hiked to bridge growing gap in their budgets
‘SIZE OF THE GAA MEANS IT HAS TO BE RUN A BIT LIKE A BUSINESS’
THE problem with bad news is that there is no communication trickster out there who can perfume it to make it smell nicer.
It is, of course, their duty to try – the oldest trick in the book is to seek to bury it by publishing it on the same day that something else is making a far greater stink.
There was an element of that in how Central Council revealed its plans for a steep rise in admission hikes last weekend as an addendum to a press release where the headline story was the dumping of the experimental handpass rule.
And even then, it was presented with the slickness of a cold-calling life insurance peddler, talking fast and sweet in a bid to ensure the small print remains a blur.
It was only a €3 increase, from €12 to €15 for pre-purchased tickets for this season’s Allianz League, but if you are of an age and disposition of not doing your shopping online – or live in swathes of rural Ireland where the only thing slower than the broadband is the Shane Ross party bus to the local which you are still waiting for – the chances are that when you present yourself at the turnstile today you will be hit with a 33 per cent hike as the cost shoots from €15 to €20.
In terms of inflation, you are not quite in the forecourt of a Zimbabwean petrol station – it is running at 300 per cent there – but you are in the next parish.
Naturally, this week’s news provided fuel for the eternally disaffected but you could make the case, as GAA president John Horan did, that a rise in admission fees was, if nothing else, timely given that the last price increases were in 2011.
That was not the precise truth. The GAA dropped their prices in 2011 as part of a review and the last comprehensive hike took place more recently in 2014. It was revealed this week that the county season ticket has been hiked in excess of 50 per cent in that time. But even allowing for that, the GAA reserves the right to put a value on its games.
And, it should not be forgotten that, in comparison to other sporting organisations, the GAA is not in the fleecing business.
A savvy family unit will get to see the best teams in the land for €30 today if they pre-purchase their two adult tickets.
You can’t say that does not represent good value, but it is less what extra people will pay and more why they are paying it that is the source of concern. The dilemma the GAA faces is that when it comes to making the argument for price increases it can’t help but talk out of both sides of its mouth. One minute it is all pin-striped suit and business, the next it is all woolly cardigan and social inclusivity. That’s the kind of split personality that will either see you invited to join a Fine Gael think-tank or committed to a long-term stay in the funny farm. ‘Anyone running a business and having a product when you go for a price increase, you’ll always have to take it on board that there’s the law of diminishing returns, that if you up the price, you may diminish your sales,’ said John Horan, the businessman this week.
‘At Congress last year I did say that we would do more for the clubs. I’d like to follow through on that and we’ve increased the club funding and development areas this year by €500,000, it’s going up by another €500,000 next year,’ said John Horan, the community man.
In one sense given its size and scale, the GAA has to be run as a business.
But its business is community, and there are times when it feels like the latter is being used to excuse hardnosed, and sometimes misguided, business decisions.
There were a couple of things which irked this week, not least the justification for the scale of that whopping 33 per cent increase.
To free turnstile operators from the inconvenience of rooting in the till for loose change, it was decided
to round the increase up to a fiver. The only mercy is that Croke Park never ventured into the motorway toll business or we would be paying through the nose for the convenience of their operators and for their allergy to dispensing coinage. But what really irked was the lack of clarity. Why does the GAA need the extra money? And let’s park the soft talk about providing clubs with an increased development fund of €500,000. That is, as our colleague Philip Lanigan observed this week, less than a sixth of the amount that JP McManus gave as gesture of goodwill to clubs last year. When a one-off charitable donation from an individual dwarfs what is being sold as a strategic investment, which in turn is being used partly to justify a nationwide price hike, then you really do have to squint through the smoke.
Of course, the real reason for the increase, as Horan conceded this week, is to address ‘the stretch’ on county board finances.
But what is stretching county boards is the ever rising cost of preparing inter-county teams, and perhaps the only way that reason will prevail is when counties apply budgetary caps to curtail the madness rather than just feeding the monster by throwing more cash at it.
Secondly, it is ironic that it will be club members who will have to dig into their pockets to pay for the upkeep of county set-ups, which in many instances are responsible for sabotaging the club game in the first instance.
That makes for a rather perverse take on Robin Hood where the poor get robbed to pay the rich.
Still it’s not personal, just business.