Don’t like Duffy’s plan? At least he showed up

IT’S a mystery to most of us what goes on at Congress or even at County Board meetings. That’s our own fault really. There’s nothing to stop us putting our name forward at club AGMs or even for positions on the County Board.

Most of us don’t, of course, and we remain where we’re comfortable, we remain hurlers on the ditch. Cribbing and criticising and doing nothing much of anything to put our great ideas into action. Decisions, we should never forget, are made by those who turn up.

Officialdom gets a bad rep quite a lot of the time. Our attitude towards the blazers can be downright dismissive, even the term itself carries a smirking, jeering connotation. A lot of the time there’s good cause for that attitude, at others it’s simply because officials have been forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.

It takes a particular type of person to stick their head above the parapet, to take it on themselves to make these decisions, knowing that whatever thanks they get for it will be cursory and fleeting and nowhere near enough to make up for the amount of flak that, inevitably, comes their way.

What’s easy to forget is that these are the men and women who make the trains run on time. These are the men and women who make the entire edifice of sport possible. Are they as important as the players and the coaches? Undoubtedly so. It may not be glamorous work, but it is essential.

None of this is to say that they get every decision right, obviously they don’t. Nor is any of this to say that they don’t sometimes become intoxicated by their own self-importance or stay too long in a role, treating it more as a personal fiefdom rather than as a means of benefiting their sport and its participants.

Still for every Sepp Blatter or Jack Warner there’s a Padraic Duffy or a Philip Browne and a great many more besides. The GAA, generally speaking, has got it right when it comes to its top officials.

The association has in its arsenal against the worst practices of officialdom the most potent weapon of all – term limits. No County Board official serves more than five years in a position up to and including that of chairman. No GAA president serves for longer than a single three year term.

That makes the GAA more responsive to its membership than many other sporting organisations. This is one of its greatest strengths as an organisation and, also, one of its greatest weaknesses.

Any organisation that needs a wide consensus for any change will by necessity move slowly and deliberately – how could it otherwise with a sixty six percent threshold for any new rule to gain approval?

It leaves these officials, these men and women who turned up, in a desperately tricky position quite a lot of the time. One man’s solution might be anathema to another. Any proposed solution to a perceived problem will come under the harshest scrutiny.

Most of the time there’s a broad consensus that something needs to be done. The problem is that not nearly enough agree as to what that something may be. Near everybody now agrees that something has to be done about the structure of the championship, that hasn’t made any individual proposals any more popular.

Duffy, the GAA Director General, by bringing his proposals to Congress in Croke Park this weekend is the living breathing embodiment of those officials toiling in obscurity throughout the country.

He has stuck his head above the parapet, responded to all those calls that something be done, knowing full well that the minute he made his proposals they would be picked apart vigorously and even viciously.

It’s a thankless game, no doubt about it and at the end of it all, the weeks and months of lobbying and proselytising, there’s no guarantee that his proposals will pass muster when they’re voted upon next Saturday afternoon.

To our mind the proposals are probably as good a set of proposals as any given the constraints placed upon them. The provincial championships remain sacrosanct – although the increasing level of public indifference to them could soon change that – so Duffy had to focus his attention elsewhere.

His Super 8 proposal would give us an extra eight highly competitive games at the peak of the summer. It would give us serious championship games at provincial venues in the month of August. It would tighten up the season, allowing greater scope for club football.

There’s real merit to it. For the stronger counties it’s a no brainer. For the striving counties it’s a no brainer. For the weaker counties it doesn’t offer much unfortunately and that could be the rock it perishes on and it perishing on a rock remains the most likely outcome, such is the exercise of GAA democracy.

Failure to get it through – and that’s not certain, it could yet pass – wouldn’t reflect badly on Duffy, it would merely remind us all just how hard it is to get anything done in the GAA. Duffy at least tried. Duffy at least turned up. By doing that alone he’s done the state some service.