MICHEAL CLIFFORD
The GAA must not ignore the plight of Ireland’s rural clubs as they battle to stay alive while player numbers dwindle
‘KIDS ARE FACED WITH THE THREAT OF BOREDOM, NOT BURNOUT’
LAST month, while the rest of us were counting handpasses, they were conducting a far more testing audit on Valentia Island. An emergency meeting of the GAA club was convened to see if they could muster the bodies to keep the ball kicked out for another year.
They stopped counting at 11, knowing that if they didn’t find any more then the thing that has bound their community together for more than 114 years would be vaporised into folklore.
To the outside world, Valentia Young Islanders is recognised as the club of Mick O’Connell. Down in South Kerry it is seen as a traditional stronghold which has racked up 20 divisional championships. Within the island itself, it is quite simply their everything.
‘If we didn’t have the club there would be tumbleweed blowing through this place. Everything revolves around it – the school, work, the pub counter,’ explained Deirdre Lyne, the Valentia chairperson this week.
Last year, they defied their size and numbers to win promotion to Division 4 of the county league and, capping it all, won a South Kerry Championship match against Waterville.
Where once they celebrated winning championships, winning games is enough now and they only got over that line because Richard Quigley, their 52-year-old goalkeeper, injured himself in the process of making a match-defining late save.
Since then, they have lost a dozen players through the kind of black hole all small rural clubs spend their time trying to plug.
In the main, it is down to players moving away in search of work or education, along with a few long-term injuries and long overdue retirements.
And yet next week when they reconvene in the Ring Lyne pub for another head count they might just scrape another year out of what they have. This will no doubt be predicated on a number of retirements having been rescinded in the interim.
No country for old men? You got to be kidding. In vast swathes of rural Ireland there would be no clubs but for old men.
You know that tired joke about how you don’t retire you just die, the punch-line here is closer to the truth than a belly laugh.
And Valentia is no island in that sense. This is a nationwide issue and one screaming out to be heard.
Rural depopulation is the blight that is choking communities like South Kerry and plenty others around this country.
A few years back, six clubs met in the final of the South Kerry Minor Championship.
This is no riddle, just a sad indictment of rural neglect.
Caherciveen and Renard amalgamated on one side, Valentia, Portmagee, Derrynane and Sneem on the other.
From Mick O’Connell’s Valentia to John Egan’s Sneem is comfortably more than an hour’s drive. That is how far they had to travel to get 15 footballers under the age of 18 out on a field.
That is the price the GAA is paying for a depopulation crisis that has multiple contributory factors – smaller family sizes, unfriendly rural planning regulations, and above all else, the lack of a government development and investment strategy.
This week, John Horan became the first GAA president to address the Senate and over the course of the afternoon was also asked how the GAA could address the issue of rural decline.
In responding, the GAA president pretty much hit the nail on the head by pointing out it was not the association that was responsible for closing post offices or for rolling out a rural broadband infrastructure which is the equivalent of pigeon carriers on steroids. ‘The GAA are helping with rural decline, we’re not causing it,’ he insisted. But that is not strictly true, either.
The good news, though, is that at this month’s Annual Congress in Wexford the GAA will get the opportunity to do something to help small struggling rural clubs in a meaningful way. A motion, drafted by Valentia and passed at Kerry’s county convention, will make its way to Congress floor. ‘A county may have a bye-law whereby a player who shall have celebrated his 16th birthday prior to January 1st of the championship year may play non-championship games with his club where such club is graded as Junior Championship status with one adult team’ reads the motion.
With the very best of intentions for player welfare, Congress a few years back put in place the rule that no player under 17 could play in an adult competition for their club.
Of course it makes perfect sense, ensuring that developing youngster are protected and are not fasttracked by adult team mentors blinded by ambition rather than a duty of care.
But one rule does not fit all and unlike Shane Ross’s skewed view that his drink-driving legislation has no greater impact on the residents of Ballinskelligs as those in Ballsbridge, the GAA has to have the courage and the nerve to legislate for the minority.
The Valentia motion is ring-fenced in that it is limited to junior clubs with single teams and excludes those under-17 from playing Championship.
These are kids not faced with the threat of burnout but often with boredom because of a lack of games given that their minor league season extends to no more than three or four games.
It is a motion that does not pretend to be a silver bullet, just a possible life raft for a community drowning in isolation.
It is also one that will test the GAA’s boast as the ultimate facilitator of democracy.
And it if turns its back on this cry for help, the GAA will reveal itself to be no better than a state which stopped listening to rural Ireland a long time ago.