GAMES PROGRAMME

“Going under-13, 15, and 17 is a huge positive and a great step forward. I was a little alarmed, more than a little alarmed, at the margin of results, I think it was under-14 football, in some cases was huge.

“Say the top maybe six teams, I think there is 10 in the group, the margin of results from the top to the bottom was incredible.

“And because of that, and that can happen anywhere, not just here, we were in Kilkenny the other day and we met Pat Henderson and we were talking about Minor championship for next year, under-17, and I said, “How many will you have in the ‘A’ championship?

“And they said it was about trying to get people into it was the problem. So they might have six or even seven. So that’s no different.

“What’s happening right across the country is that nobody wants to play in the top divisions, so that number of teams get smaller, so, in effect, the number of games gets smaller because of fewer number of teams.

“So that’s why as a province, we brought in cross county leagues this year.

“I know St Kevin’s were up last week in Abbotstown for the finals and I know, like every other county, there is competition from other sports.

“I’m from Johnstownbridge/ Ballina in Kildare, our lads were up there last week, we’ve lads playing rugby, we’ve lads playing soccer, we moved the matches around from Friday to Monday or whatever, we played the matches.

“There has to be a commitment to that. When I looked at fixtures here in the county, this is what I looked at last year, in terms of cancellations and postponements on the Servasport system.

“If you look at under-16 football Division 2B, there was 21 walkovers. Hurling, Division 2, 12 walkovers. Junior hurling league, adult, 13 walk-overs. Postponements: Division 2 football league, 28. And so on.

“We talk about other sports and the good quality of games every week.

“Across the country we need to start providing a good product. And if that means that there might be six strong teams in Wicklow at a certain division, why not buy into cross county and get another six teams of the same standard and what you want is not more games per se but more meaningful games. And that came up in the survey a lot.

The other thing we talked about was, the national fixtures planning committee, chaired by Eamon O’Sullivan from Kerry, they’re looking at fixtures as a whole in the province, they’re going to come back with a report in relation to permissions.