Cutting teams from league to save a few quid doesn’t add up

#justsayin...

IT’S not widely known that Donegal played an All-Ireland hurling semi-final long before they ever reached the football equivalent. As Ulster champions in 1923, they qualified to meet Munster kingpins Limerick in a match that, with everything happening in the country at the time, wasn’t played until April 1924.

The game was part of a Croke Park double-bill with the KerryCavan football semi-final. The matches were notable as the first in the GAA to use numbers on the back of jerseys, although a heavy downpour meant the numbers became unreadable to the large crowd.

The Donegal team was comprised largely of ‘non-natives’ – custom officers, gardaí and Free State army officers from Munster who had been transferred to the county – and lost 7-4 to 0-1.

I was reminded of this interesting slice of GAA trivia this week when news broke that some within Croke Park felt the best way to develop hurling in the weaker counties was dumping five of them out of the league.

The All-Ireland hurling championship is now the preserve of less than a third of the 32 counties. And it has been that way for a long time. When I was growing up, I didn’t even know that our national game existed in my own county – even though there were evangelists keeping it alive in my own club and others – a lonely job. But my experiences of hurling were restricted to cheering Galway on every August or September – or Antrim for that rare year in 1989.

And that’s the way hurling has been in a lot of the country. We have cheered from a distance, admiring this game we are told is part of us even if we are not part of it. We are proud when we are told that it has been granted special cultural heritage status by the UN and has ‘intangible cultural heritage to humanity’ but it’s still a sport played by somebody else.

But rather than try to make sure more people are playing it, someone in Central Council felt that getting rid of Cavan, Fermanagh, Leitrim, Louth and Longford from the hurling league would be good for the game.

The logic is that more than €800,000 was spent in preparation of those county teams last year and the money saved by not playing in the league would be better used in game development and promotion.

But there is never any guaranThe tee that football-orientated county boards would use that extra money to provide a few hurling coaches.

The idea is not new. Before Paudie Butler left his role as national hurling development director over a decade ago, he had proposed something similar. But there was a bit more thought behind Paudie’s proposal.

He suggested that seven counties around the border region – Sligo and Leitrim in Connacht, Monaghan, Fermanagh and Cavan in Ulster, Louth and Longford in Leinster – could come together and form a new province in hurling terms. They could have club competitions and play against each other in a way to develop the game before eventually returning to the league. Even as he suggested it, Butler admitted some county boards may support it to save cash, rather than any determination to save hurling.

plan was shot down anyway. When Martin Fogarty took the role, he initiated Táin Óg league, which has seen clubs from weaker counties compete against each other at underage level. It has been a success, because it is a progressive plan, with a goal in sight. Developing hurlers at a young age. It is hard to know what the goal of this Central Council proposal is – other than saving a few bob for county boards.

The growth of hurling in Dublin remains the success story of the past 20 years. It only happened because clubs and county boards bought in.

My own son plays Gaelic football one week and hurling the next with our local club, Na Fianna. And it will be that way up until under-12. Trying to make that practice widespread in football counties would surely be a better way of de-mystifying hurling – and even growing it.

Twenty years ago, then-Meath manager John Hunt, who thought long and hard about ways to spread hurling from its powerbase, suggested every GAA member pay a small levy to fund a string of full-time hurling coaches for underage level in the weaker counties. It fell on deaf ears.

However, that is the sort of thinking which is needed. Like former Antrim hurler Mickey McCullogh, when he worked with the Ulster Council, who set up the combined schools side from the North that were competitive in All-Ireland colleges. The experiment didn’t last long as officials elsewhere objected.

That is what is needed to keep the game alive and take it off the endangered list. That Donegal once contested an All-Ireland semi-final proves the game shouldn’t be the preserve of eight or nine counties. And it is up to the GAA to ensure that is the case, rather than thinking up ways of maintaining the status quo – because it’ll save a few bob.

‘GROWING UP, I DIDN’T KNOW HURLING EVEN EXISTED IN MY COUNTY’