JP gift could teach GAA a little about fairness

THE manner in which JP McManus distributed his charitable largesse this week should really provide the GAA with some food for thought.

In handing out a million euro to every county board in the land, exclusively to be used by clubs, he was not treating all the same but inadvertently ensuring that smaller counties – by virtue of having fewer clubs – would benefit more than the bigger ones.

With one well-intentioned scribble of a cheque, he applied a principle of fairness that had been beyond the grasp of the GAA, whose funding strategy for well over a decade was to apportion the largest slice of its development funding to its biggest and best resourced county at the expense of its smaller units. But that principle of looking after the smallest and weakest first extends beyond finance and also goes to the very heart of fairness on the pitch.

The curtain on the new football year will be raised by a rematch of last year’s All-Ireland club final between Kilmacud Crokes and Glen. While inevitably most of the noise in the build-up will focus on the boardroom sequel to last year’s game, when an officiating error put the result in doubt and led to Glen having an objection upheld, it was the presence of Galway’s Shane Walsh on the Kilmacud team that was the biggest talking point 12 months ago.

No more than the officiating error at the end of the final, Kilmacud were not at fault for signing up Walsh, who transferred from his home club Kilkerrin-Clonberne to one in the city where he is now based. Neither was any fault attributable to Walsh, but the optics of one of the biggest, wealthiest and strongest clubs signing him up did not look good then, and it looks no better now.

Given that there is no parish rule in Dublin, there is an obvious solution to ensuring how this could be prevented from happening again. Any player who seeks a transfer to a club in Dublin should state the preferred level at which he wants to play, and he can then be assigned a club in that grade by the county board, based on a ranking system which would ensure the weakest clubs and not the strongest would be first in line.

For example, if such a system was in place for next season, Clontarf and Fingallians (the two clubs promoted to the Dublin senior championship) would have first pick from the panel of players intending to transfer, followed by Lucan Sarsfields and St Sylvester’s.

There is nothing unprecedented in such a system; it is one employed by the NFL in America to ensure that the weakest performers get the earliest picks in their draft.

And when one of Ireland’s best accumulators of wealth and the biggest sports organisation at the epicenter of the capitalist world have a better grasp on what is fair and equal than an association guided by Corinthian principles, perhaps it is time to think again.