GAA’s become so centralised. It’s corporate elitism now
Tommie Kenoy has devoted his life to pushing for positive change and he’ll keep fighting the good fight
TOMMIE KENOY should be an unremarkable man. The GAA is reliant on people like him for its success, the diligent volunteers who give time, energy and love to an organisation that could not function without them. But there are many driven in that way, thousands of them all across the island.
Kenoy is a distinguished administrator, serving Roscommon GAA in many capacities, including a long spell as chairman, and sitting as a member on Central Council. Again, the tireless administrator is common within Gaelic games.
Were a lifetime’s devotion the sum of Tommie Kenoy’s investment in the GAA, then he would figure alongside many, many others in that way; honourable but unremarkable.
Kenoy stands out because he has asked questions; on some of the most important issues in the 136-year history of the GAA, he has taken stances that, initially, attracted little in the way of popularity or support.
He is what sounds an oxymoron: the radical GAA man, the county board fixture with the gumption to identify problems and demand that they be addressed.
Kenoy was, famously, an early advocate for the amendment of Rule 42, thereby facilitating the playing of rugby and soccer in Croke Park during the renovation of
Lansdowne Road. In his youth, he was part of a movement within his native Roscommon against Rule 27, the ban on GAA members attending or playing ‘foreign’ games.
Now, he is part of the Club Players Association’s determined efforts to tackle the fixtures crisis that is, he says flatly, ‘tearing the heart out of teams’ all over Ireland.
Sports administration is presumed, with some reason, to be a dry and unquestioning world.
Tommie Kenoy has consistently put himself outside the mainstream, daring to stand up for what he believes is fairness and common sense.
On a midweek day in February, snow fills the air in north Roscommon, and this remarkable man is waiting at the door of his home in Kilmore.
The Leitrim border is a little way off to the east, the boundary with Longford further to the south.
This was the village a five-yearold Tommie returned to in 1957 with his father and mother, Tom and Molly. They had spent nine years in New York, leaving in 1948 in the spare, tough years after the end of World War Two.
‘They went to New York with the objective of earning enough money to come back and buy land,’ he says.
‘My father took two jobs. He was working in Macy’s on the floor, and he was a porter in a hospital. My mother worked as a cleaner in Wall Street. It only took them nine years to get enough to buy the land.’
A young child’s memories are flimsy, but over 60 years on, there are a couple that Kenoy can still vividly summon.
‘Strangely enough, a policeman on a white horse is one,’ he smiles. ‘And when we went back in the 1980s, didn’t I see a policeman on a white horse in Brooklyn?
‘Eating hot-dogs on the sidewalk is another memory. My father used to buy hot-dogs for us. We lived on East 12th Street in Brooklyn. We went back in the mid-80s and it had completely changed. It was a Chinese neighbourhood then, no longer Irish.
‘We went to the house where I was born and reared, and I stood on the doorstep and got my picture taken.’
US citizenship could have been a valuable asset for a youngster intent on travelling, but Kenoy joined the guards and built a life with his wife, Teresa.
The couple have known each other since childhood, but Tommie’s marriage proposal came with a caveat: the wedding could only take place outside of the championship season.
His American citizenship jolted
Kenoy in the 1970s when he was drafted to join the US Army in its dreadful misadventure in Vietnam.
‘The letter came, telling me to be in Brooklyn at such a date and such a time,’ he remembers. ‘I didn’t go and I was classified as a draft dodger, but Jimmy Carter later pardoned everyone.’
Carter’s pardon caused consternation when he granted it in 1977 but, by then thousands of miles away, Kenoy was deep into his GAA life.
He was seven years of age when football first beguiled him. ‘Our landlord in Brooklyn was a guy called Kearney, from Kerry, and in September 1959 he came to visit.
‘He landed to our house and he said to my father, “You wouldn’t happen to have a radio, Tom?” Up on the wall, we had a wet battery radio sitting on a little shelf. ‘“Jaysus,” he said, “Would you be able to get the All-Ireland?”
‘My father went twiddling with it and the next thing Micheál Ó Hehir arrived. That was my introduction to the GAA. When it was over, they shared a bottle of whiskey to celebrate Kerry’s success.
‘The game has been a central feature of my life since.’
The Kilmore club was revived in 1973 after lapsing in 1947 owing to depopulation.
‘The meeting to reform the club took place in the hall up there, on September 11, 1972. Eleven years later, on the same date, September 11, 1983, we won the senior championship.
‘And the last time we played senior football pre-1981, when we got promoted to senior, was in March 1918.’
In the early 1970s, Kenoy was a talented footballer, playing with a neighbouring club in the absence of one in Kilmore, and representing Roscommon at Under-21 level.
He played soccer in the Longford and district league through the winter to stay fit.
After a match one day, he was warned by a man in the crowd that he risked banishment from the GAA if his soccer dalliance was discovered. Even now, almost 50 years on, he sounds astonished in relating the tale.
Rule 27 was the notorious restriction on ‘foreign’ games, but it was for his tireless work towards the amendment of Rule 42 that Kenoy came to national prominence.
Change was finally won at Congress in 2005, four years after a proposal from Kilmore had stunned the same meeting in coming close to being passed. It lost by one vote.
It would take half a decade before change finally came.
‘It was a classic case of the GAA establishment against the grassroots,’ he says, and that frames his involvement now with the CPA.
With Congress looming once again, the GAA establishment will gather and the status quo will largely be affirmed. The inter-county game continues to generate millions, and laudable as it is to hear of the great majority of revenue being redistributed through the association, the discontent in clubs, arising from the fixtures’ log-jam, grows.
‘The CPA was a cry for help,’ says Kenoy. ‘This talk about the GAA being a truly democratic organisation, that is not the case. Going to Congress, how much of the stuff is brought to county boards to mandate delegates going to Congress?
‘A lot of it isn’t,’ he says – and this
‘IT WAS CLASSIC CASE OF GAA ESTABLISHMENT AGAINST THE GRASS ROOTS’ ‘THE CLUBS HAVE GOT TO HAVE A VOICE IN WHAT IS GOING ON’
is a man that reckons he has attended Congress at least 20 times.
‘Presidential elections: how many times are counties asked to mandate their delegates as to who they should vote for? Rarely does it happen.
‘The delegates make their own decision. That’s not democracy. We have to go back to bottom-up democracy. The clubs have to have a voice and a say in what’s going on. That’s not happening.’
The counter to this, though, is that in too many clubs there is not enough interest or energy in trying to influence what happens at county board level.
Kenoy acknowledges the point, but is alarmed by the disillusionment he detects in clubs throughout the country.
Has his campaigning lessened his love for the GAA?
‘What it has done is, it’s made me very worried about where the GAA is going now, getting away from its core values,’ he says.
‘It’s becoming so centralised. It’s all about corporate elitism: big matches, big gates, big games, the Super 8s, the round-robins in the hurling Championship.
‘For the first time ever, I think, you’re hearing complaints from places like Kilkenny about club fixtures (Brian Cody talked at the end of last year about club players getting a ‘hard time’ under present conditions).
‘There was no problem before with a clear path (through the provinces to the All-Ireland series), but now, with a round robin, there is a squeeze on club fixtures.
‘To me it’s tearing the hearts out of the grassroots of the GAA. You can’t but fight against that. You can’t sit back and say, “Let it happen”. You have to fight it.’
‘He’d live and die for the GAA,’ says Teresa, and it continues to consume him, even if it is problems and the search for solutions to them that are monopolising his time.
He recalls the feeling of representing his county, his village, and his family, when he wore the Roscommon colours in the early 1970s. It bestowed status not only on a player, but on his family and on his community.
The success was not the player’s alone, but that of his place.
And it saddens him that one of the invidious effects of the beleaguered status of the club now, is an ambivalence about producing a county player.
Where once it honoured a club, now it deprives them of their best player for months at a time.
‘There is a tension there,’ he insists. ‘It’s to the advantage of clubs now not to have an intercounty footballer or hurler. We have no inter-county player here in Kilmore at the moment, so we know we have a panel for the whole year.
‘We don’t have to worry about someone going off training here, there and everywhere.
‘We have the full panel for the full year. We’re not going to have matches when we should have matches, but at least we have a panel we can work with, and they’re not waiting for the county men to come back.
‘You’ll hear club people saying it: “We’re lucky we have no one on the county panel”. Once it was a huge badge of honour. I was a bloody hero around here, at 19 years of age, playing senior league for Roscommon and county Under 21.
‘That’s not so much the case now.’ The seven-year-old beguiled by the voice of Micheál Ó Hehir toppled into a love for the GAA on a September Sunday at the end of the 1950s.
Sixty years on, the love remains, but it is not blind.
Tommie Kenoy has served the GAA as a player and an administrator most of his life.
His greatest service has come through questioning, though. He continues the search for answers.