Shane GAA could teach FAI a lesson on family values
FAMILY can be a deeply sinister word. The Irish football family is invoked to suggest a benevolent mass, all with the same goals and priorities, sharing the same concerns and prejudices.
It’s a variation on ‘the people’, that entity politicians love to speak about, and imply that they all have the same wants and needs.
It’s nonsense, like the concept of the Irish football family.
The current crisis besetting the FAI is a neat illustration of a body riven by competing goals – and resentments.
This can be blamed on leadership deficits, and an executive team is charged with implementing policies that align with State requirements to ensure access to public funds. This requirement is especially pronounced when the FAI was saved from disaster by a Government bail-out.
In a twist typical of the organisation, that setback was accompanied by revelations around payments to Jonathan Hill, the CEO.
It’s a far cry from the shameful revelations that brought the old FAI tumbling down, but it’s a neat refutation of the concept of ‘the football family’.
It’s pleasing to think of a community all dedicated to the one cause, but that’s not how sport, or families, work. They should be a clamour of competing voices, not sterile, voiceless, clueless cults.
This makes governance tricky, but just because there is a diversity of views does not mean people cannot unite around shared values. The sports that manage this the best are the most successful – and there were reminders with a number of stories in recent days of why the GAA remains primus inter pares.
There is no body more infuriating or liable to leave you exasperated, particularly if it is the sporting culture with which you are most familiar.
Yet it endures, and not because of cute hoorism or preferential treatment, as its critics regularly allege. Instead, it endures because it works, and it works because over nearly a century and a half, it has managed to function while accommodating a spectrum of interests and agendas.
We can predict with ease now that the most popular sport with the Irish public in 2024 will be football. This will be measurable in attendances and TV viewing figures.
This is in spite of a chorus of critics predicting crisis in the game. A succession of wretchedly poor club matches in late autumn and early winter have provided an overpowering distillation of the game’s ills.
Rule changes are required. The negativity must stop. Save our game!
The cries are easily made but simple solutions are deceptively presented. The sport has evolved thanks to better fitness and intensive coaching, and there is no sure way to a freer, more unpredictable product – whatever the populists might claim.
Club matches, even at provincial and national level, are way off the standard of the highest championship fare, and most league matches, too. Decrying the state of football is an old indulgence, not without foundation, but the levels of alarm tend to reach improbable heights this time of year.
While football is widely played, enormously popular, and hating itself, hurling remains a minority passion convinced of its glory.
While there is an ambition among
Illustration of a body riven by competing goals and resentments
the leadership of the GAA to scale back on spending by counties in the game that cannot sustain senior teams at a competitive level, those counties are resisting fiercely, supported by many.
The logic of this position doesn’t extend much beyond the need to develop the sport outside its traditional hot points, but how this is more efficiently done by spending a fortune on struggling county sides, rather than long-term investment in coaching and development, has not been explained.
Yet it sums up well the unbending belief in the glory of the sport, and it makes for a compelling contrast with the self-loathing in football.
That capacity for allowing extremes to co-exist was reflected in a couple of stories that broke towards the end of the week.
Brian Fenton was on reliably vibrant form at Dublin’s latest corporate launch. Access to an intercounty player outside of one of these sterile engagements is nearimpossible now, but Fenton has the personality and wit to elevate even these stage-managed shows.
Dublin are GAA’s sporting and commercial titans, powering along on both fronts and yet, through a figure like Fenton, managing to stay relatable.
While he spoke at a polished launch, Padraic Walsh was retiring through the old-fashioned way of answering a reporter’s call.
‘I’m not going to be putting out a statement or anything,’ he said in brilliantly Kilkenny fashion.
Their ways are not those of Dublin – another contrast that makes the GAA priceless.