‘These are life matters. It puts sport in perspective, no matter how much we love it’
PERSPECTIVE comes easily these days for Stephen Lucey. Hours before this interview, he was informed that Covid had taken the life of one of his patients – someone he tended at his Roxboro clinic base in Limerick City. ‘A lovely person,’ he laments, ‘and it makes it very real and it really brings it home. Last Thursday week we were informed of nine positive cases in one afternoon, so this is just so much worse than the first and second waves.’
In the coming week, the expectation is that Croke Park will present an amended fixture calendar at Friday night’s management meeting. A delayed start of the intercounty season is likely to be confirmed. Right now, that is the best hope for its stakeholders.
The worst? With the coffers of most counties empty and no revenue streams open, talk has turned to the value – and viability – of even proceeding with the Allianz Leagues.
Lucey is in a position to see both sides.
He is a GP on the ground in a county enduring a high incidence rate of the virus and is also a GAA obsessive who was a dual player for Limerick over 17 seasons. He still togs out for Croom and continues to serve the county as team doctor for the footballers.
Except the gravity of this crisis is such that there is no room for a shared outlook.
‘These are life matters. It puts sport in perspective, no matter how much we love it,’ insists Lucey.
In the early stages of the first wave, he was one of many who made an impassioned plea – emphasised in an interview for this paper – for people to stick to guidelines in order to save the lives of others.
In the main, that was a message heeded by the Irish public but this time he fears that too many people have turned a deaf ear.
‘I don’t know how many people that is getting through to. You can look at any number of figures but take one look at the traffic on the road this time and you would have to ask the question, how many people are really sticking to the 5km rule? How many people are really leaving their homes only for essential trips?
‘Pandemic fatigue has been there for a long time and this is very tough on young people, from young children right up to people in their 20s. They want to socialise, they want to see their friends, they want to hang out so it is very tough on them.
‘Because of that, a lot of them might not stick rigidly to the restrictions but you can say the same about a lot of older people who have not been doing so.
‘There is always a cohort of people, no matter what rules and regulations are out there, who just don’t give a s**t and do their own thing, while the vast majority do (abide by guidelines) and I believe that is a big factor in contributing to lockdown fatigue.
‘Whatever the reason, I just don’t think that the numbers are going to come down fast enough to give us the best chance.
‘I am hanging for sport. I miss it terribly and I want to get back in that dressing-room environment. I want to see our games back but we still have a way to go for that to happen,’ warns Lucey.
The GAA took the decision at the start of the New Year to delay the return to collective inter-county training – it had been set to resume on January 15 – to February 1 even
though its status as an elite sport ensured it was exempt from Level 5 restrictions.
In reality, though, it was the only decision that could be taken. The risks of amateur players congregating, without being able to confine them to the bubbles that can protect professional sports, while the virus is rampant in the community hardly need to be stated.
Had Croke Park not taken that decision, then it is almost certain it would have risked having its ‘elite’ status exemption being revised. However, during this health crisis the GAA leadership has been ahead of the curve in taking pre-emptive action.
That is unlikely to change this week when it is anticipated the suspension on collective training will be extended for another month. That, in turn, will push back the start of the Allianz Leagues, set to begin on February 27, to the end of March. The expected knock-on impact is that the inter-county season will not conclude until mid- August, scuppering plans to play the All-Ireland football final in the third week of July.
The Government’s extension of Level 5 restrictions, which will be confirmed this week, will frame the
GAA’s decision in terms of not relaxing their self-imposed curtailments on inter-county activity.
It is fair to assume that the GAA will not move on lifting the ban on collective training until such time as the green light is given for schools to reopen, by a distance the most contentious political and social issue on the Government’s agenda.
‘There is an awful lot of uncertainty over the opening of schools and we are just hoping that decision can be made sooner rather than later,’ insists Louth chairman and independent TD Peter Fitzpatrick.
‘Last year there was no Leaving Cert and this year those doing it don’t know what the situation is, so it is important we get clarity on that as quickly as possible, because the bottom line is that these kids need to know what is happening.
‘Don’t get me wrong, sport is very, very important but the health and wellbeing of people is the most important thing and that has to be the priority for now,’ adds Fitzpatrick.
But it is not so much the continued suspension of the inter-county season which is concerning the majority of county boards, but what happens when action resumes.
If managers and players are straining at the leash to get back, the conflict, in both high levels of infection rates and low cash reserves, is of genuine concern for those running the game within county boards.
Offaly chairman Michael Duignan, in an interview with The Irish Daily Mail earlier this month, warned that sending teams out in the hurling and football leagues would cost his board €200,000 and would mean, in the absence of any revenue, doubling his board’s debt.
If the season is to reopen, counties will either have to be bankrolled by Croke Park borrowing money or the Government providing the kind of fiscal support that allowed the Championship to proceed last winter.
‘To be honest at the moment in Louth, we have no money whatsoever,’ explains Fitzpatrick.
‘Normally, at this time of the year we would be getting a few euro from
Croke Park and we would have had a bit of money from the previous year’s club championship to carry us over. That is a lot of money to be missing. We have absolutely no revenue so we will be hoping that when it comes to the League, Croke Park will help fund it and the Government will provide some support too.
‘I think we should not forget how important the GAA is to Irish society, the huge volunteer ethos which was never more evident than during the first phase of the pandemic last year. I hope the Government remember that and there is some payback for that,’ says Fitzpatrick.
But while State assistance for last winter’s Championship – which took the shape of a €15million support package – was coughed up relatively easily, that may not be the case this time.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin predicted last winter’s Championship would be a symbol of the people’s defiance in the face of the virus but a condensed ague in spring won’t tease similar pronouncements from the Government.
It will be a far harder sell for the GAA to get State support this time and Croke Park could even be forced into the unprecedented step of borrowing money for current – rather than capital – spending, just to get it played.
That would be a huge step but – and this applies in particularly to football – there is nothing secondary about the league for the GAA’s lower-tier counties.
ANTRIM’S Declan Lynch made waves last year when he warned the GAA that failure to complete the remaining rounds of the League on resumption of inter-county action post lockdown, would lead his team to consider boycotting the Championship. For the likes of Limerick, Louth and Antrim, the League, even one that has been condensed into groups of four on the basis of region, is still very much where it is at.
‘The most important thing is making sure that people stay safe and healthy. That is paramount before anything else is looked at, so whether the League takes place or what Championship structures we may have will come second to that,’ says Lynch.
‘For Dublin, Kerry and other so-called big counties, the League is just for playing in to prepare for the Championship, but for the so-called smaller counties, the League is more of a championship than the Championship itself and I would like to see the League played before we have the Championship,’ he adds.
That view will be echoed by most Division 3 and Division 4 counties and Croke Park will be aware that taking away the League from the lower tier, in a year when some are feeling disfranchised by being placed into a second-tier championship, will magnify any discontent that is simmering.
But the Tailteann Cup is not the only thing that is new in a GAA calendar that, for the first time, is set out as an ordered split season, ensuring the club game now has the uninterrupted space its advocates have so long sought.
Moving the inter-county season back a month puts a squeeze on that, with the All-Ireland club semi-finals set to be moved to January 2022, but any delay beyond that will hardly be contemplated by Croke Park or tolerated by the grassroots.
‘We can’t get our clubs back until we are back into Level 2 and you are probably looking at April or maybe even May before we are going to be in that space,’ predicts Fitzpatrick.
‘It is important that we don’t take our eye off the game at club level because that is what involves the vast majority of our playing membership, but everything depends on the virus because it destroyed the GAA last year and we are hoping it does not do so this year. But the vaccines are providing real hope.’
With the Government having agreed a deal that will see GPs and pharmacists play a leading role when there is at last a significant increase in the supply of vaccine, Lucey will be back on the frontline.
And time is a far more precious commodity when it comes to ensuring that the vaccination programme is completed as quickly as possible.
‘The vaccine is the only pathway, it is the only way out of this,’ says Lucey, who warns that time is of the essence.
‘At the moment we don’t know how long the immunity is for and that is still an ongoing study.
‘The flu vaccine is given annually and there is no point giving a vaccine that lasts three to six months because that would mean you would have to give a vaccine twice a year to everyone in the world and that is just not practical.
‘An effective vaccine would have to work for a reasonable period of time, at least nine to 12 months.
‘And from our point of view, in terms of dispensing the vaccine we need to see the logistics.
‘With the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, you have to stay in the building for 15 minutes so that you can be observed. If that is the case how many people can you have waiting in a room or a corridor? ‘Do we move to big halls? But how safe is it having 30 people in the one space? These are the kind of logistical details that will need working out.
‘But once we get the stuff, we are ready to rock.’
Numbers won’t come down fast enough. Vaccine is the only pathway