Presidential hopeful backs Duffy proposals

Moyvane native’s second bid for President’s office

IF you’re buying a second-hand car in the next year or two best check who the previous owner is. If the log book reads ‘Sean Walsh, Moyvane’ you might be well advised to pass it up. This is to cast no aspersion whatsoever on Walsh’s treatment of his vehicle but the man drives a lot. An awful lot. These last four or five months it’s a close run thing which runs to the bigger number: the kilometres on the odometer of his car or the air miles he has clocked up.

From Aughrim to Alice Springs and Strabane to San Francisco, Walsh has drank more service station coffees and eaten more airplane meals than he’d care to remember. And all in the name of trying to become the 39th President of the GAA.

Next Friday week at the Association’s annual Congress in Croke Park Walsh will put himself before the GAA membership in his bid to become Uachtarán Chumann Lúthchleas Gael. Of the five men running to succeed Aogán Ó Fearghail, only Walsh has been down this road before, three years ago when he finished a distant third to the Cavan man who now hold office.

It’s not a case of once bitten twice shy, but Walsh feels he is better prepared second time around.

“Maybe I was a bit naive listening to everybody and talking to everybody,” he says of his candidacy three years ago. “I think this campaign is a bit different and I might have learned a bit from the last campaign. That’s not to say it’ll make it more successful or anything like that but I learned a bit from the last campaign, that’s all I’ll say.”

While he won’t say anymore on the matter, it feels like a tacit admission that the now 61-year old Moyvane native counted a few chickens before they hatched. Votes promised on the hustings but ballots not ticked on election day. He can concede now that it was probably also going to be Ó Fearghail’s day in Carlow three years ago, but garnering only 57 of the 310 votes was difficult to take. In typical Sean Walsh fashion he took it on the chin, thought long and hard about running again and then, in due course, picked up the car keys and the passport and hit the ground running.

“I have campaigned probably more extensively than the last time, that would be from the western shores of San Francisco to Alice Springs in Australia. That is the spread of the clubs, of the counties. There are counties in North America and counties in Australia that have votes so that’s where you have to make the contacts. It’s a worldwide organisation. I’ve been to some of those locations but not all, financially it would be impossible to make that kind of commitment,” he says.

Walsh mightn’t have been physically able to get to every corner of the GAA globe, but metaphorically he is reaching out to very Gael and member. A tireless volunteer and servant of the GAA since his teens Walsh has put over forty years of sweat and passion into the games and organisation he loves. From his playing days with Moyvane and Feale Rangers, through his 12-year chairmanship of his club, on then to two decades on the Kerry County Board (10 as Development Officer and 10 as Chairman) and more recently as vice-chairman and chairman of the Munster Council, Walsh has given untold hours to the GAA. As apprenticeships for the big gig go, few have been served as well as the north Kerry man.

“I believe I have the capabilities to be the GAA president and to lead the Association. I believe I have served a good apprenticeship. I believe that my stewardship of Kerry and my stewardship of Munster and my time working with the clubs of Kerry and with the counties in Munster has given me the capabilities to be president, and for that reason I want to stand again and give it another shot,” he says.

“While it would be an honour to be president I don’t see it as just an ambassadorial or an honorary role. I have never gone into any role in the GAA in that sense. I’m a roll up my sleeves man who gets work done. I was at the coalface in Kerry, I was at the coalface in Munster and if I’m involved I’m involved and that’s it. I give one hundred per cent. I wouldn’t want to be president of the GAA if it was just an ambassadorial role. There is, of course, an element of that in the position because clubs and counties expect that of you at different times. I believe there is also a job or work for the president to do but there are clearly defined guidelines between the role of the president and the role of the ArdStiúrthór (the Director-General) and I would be working to that.”

Three years ago Walsh went up against Ó Fearghail and Sheamus Howlin from Wexford. This time there are two more Leinster men in the race, Martin Skelly from Longford and John Horan from Dublin. Frank Burke from Galway is bidding to become the first Connacht president since the late Joe McDonagh reigned from 1997 to 2000. And there’s Munster competition from Clare’s Robert Frost.

Walsh, diplomatically, won’t be drawn on questions about the other candidates, specifically on whether Frost’s entry could help or harm him. He does, however, see some fertile ground further north in Ulster, where there’s no local candidate running.

“Obviously there are two candidates in Leinster (so) you’re not going to be looking for votes there. The same, maybe, with a strong candidate in Connacht, but as I say, it’s a worldwide organisation and there are votes all over the world and you have to fight for every vote and that’s what I am doing. I’ve canvassed broadly in Ulster,” he says. “I have campaigned extensively on the best way for the GAA as I see it. However the other candidates campaign or whatever arguments they put up is up to them, and how other people see them is also up to them. I’m working hard to get Sean Walsh elected and I am not one bit interested in how the other candidates have campaigned or what they’re saying or where they are looking for votes.”

On the question of whether the five-way contest over the threeman race last time out could work for or against him, Walsh is circumspect.

“It makes no difference. I believe it might make the campaign a little bit tougher. It’s a tough campaign but I assume it’s a tough campaign for everybody. It’s a lot of travelling, a lot of driving, a lot of mileage put up over the last four or five months. Look, come next Friday week it’ll be all over and the only thing I can say is I’m very, very happy that I am running. I might have been disappointed with myself if I didn’t give it the shot to go again, but I won’t have that disappointment now because I’ve gone and done it.”

ON the main issues occupying the GAA at the moment Walsh is unequivocal on what he stands for.

“I have no problem with the CPA (Club Players Association) and I don’t think anyone has a problem with the CPA,” he says. “They’re looking for a structured programme for club players. Everybody, from the current Uachtaran down, in the Association wants that. Every county at the moment has drawn up their fixtures plan for the year. Their masters fixture plans takes them up to their county finals next October. The only thing that puts that out is when counties gets a run in the Qualifiers or replays. Other than that, in most of the counties, the fixtures programme runs as is laid down. The problem is when club players on county teams have to get a run through the Qualifiers or are involved in replays with the county team. That’s when counties have to call off club matches and unless we can tighten up the inter-county scene that situation will not change.

“The answer, for me, lies within the counties. Every county controls their own fixtures. As I’ve said, there might be situations where they have no control over that, by virtue of Qualifier matches or replays involving the county team, when they cannot play a round of their county championship. But the situation where they put off club matches just to give county players a chance... I have been responsible for doing it myself, I might add wrongly. But there’s a groundswell of opinion now that club players are not ready to stand idly by while two per cent, which is inter-county players, get all the limelight and play all the time, without being involved in club games. I believe there has to be a change in attitude and the club players are now looking for that on a far bigger scale.”

He supports Paraic Duffy’s All-Ireland Football Championship restructuring proposal, saying that he believes the GAA public wants to see the best teams playing each other in the proposed round-robin quarter-final group phase. “Most importantly, most importantly, this proposal will get games into the provinces and we saw what that can do when Kerry played Mayo in Limerick (in 2014),” he adds.

“An huge issue, I believe, that nobody is talking about is the decline of the rural clubs. It’s a huge, huge, huge problem. It’s a huge problems for the country in an economic sense, with everything going toward the eastern seaboard, but it’s also happening in the GAA world. Clubs all around the country, small rural clubs the length of the western seaboard especially, are struggling for members at underage. In lots of places two and three clubs have had to amalgamate just to give games to their underage players. And we have to be in a position to be able to help them, to advice them, give them the structures to survive, and, maybe change our rules to allow those clubs to flourish. It’s a huge problem and one I would definitely want to tackle at the very early stages if I am Uachtarán.”