RYAN VOWS TO PLACE OTHERS ON A PAR WITH DUBS’ FUNDING
IF there is ever a fly-on-thewall record of Tom Ryan’s first nine months in charge, it will not be titled ‘Fire and Fury’. In an age of inflamed leadership rhetoric, the new director general of the Gaelic Athletic Association is like the anti-Trump. There will be no late-night tweets causing uproar over policy while tucking into a cheeseburger in front of a television screen in the bunker of Croke Park.
Instead, Páraic Duffy’s successor offered a proper presidential approach to his seven-year term, based around old style values of ‘genuine decency and integrity’, stating in his inaugural address in the Management Committee room on Level Five of the Hogan Stand in Croke Park: ‘If you can be fair and be reasonable and be honest and be decent about how you go about your work and work hard you won’t go too far wrong.’ Very much like the man before him. The choice of the 48-year-old former long-time director of finance makes him an inside man. Judging by yesterday’s opening press briefing, he has no plans to tear down the walls from within, to chart a radical new course.
As various hot topics surfaced — the Sky media rights deal, the fixtures chaos, the revamped hurling and football championships — he responded in calm and measured fashion, urging for patience rather than a revolution.
‘A good year will be a year that the two championships have captured the imagination of the public, that have reached the heights or perhaps surpassed the playing standards of the previous couple of years.
‘A good year will be one where we’ve made advances on some of the things that we’ve talked about in terms of club structures and club fixtures and people being able to avail of the opportunity afforded for April time.
‘A good year will be one where participation numbers are advancing and are moving in the right direction relevant to 2016 and 2017.
‘A good year will be one where we perhaps see one or two teams emerging and competing at levels that they haven’t done in recent years.’
His predecessor, Duffy, suggested the Super 8s will likely be a bridge to a two-tier football championship, a view echoed by new GAA president John Horan who was also in the room. Ryan didn’t rule out that prospect.
‘I think the shape that the championships eventually take, it might not be where we are now. I’d see it very much as an evolution. We are about to embark on three years of trial, experimentation, whatever you’d like to call it. At the end of that, we’ll probably know where we need to go next in terms of an evolution. I don’t think it’s a finished article. I think it’s well worth having the debate.
‘At the same time, if you look at the League that we have just gone through — leaving aside the weather — it has been really, really good. The attraction with a competition like the League is that every team is going out with more or less a 50-50 chance of beating every other team which is a structure we haven’t always had with the football championship. I think it’s worth considering, worth looking at.’
From the get-go, he emphatically quelled any notion that the existing media rights deal will be revisited before it is due to be renewed in 2021, irrespective of any opposition out there to the pay-per-view element, particularly the 14 championship matches exclusive to Sky Sports.
‘We’re going to stick with the existing structure of things. We go into the market, for want of a word, with a view to trying to generate a fair and reasonable income with which to fund things which we are obliged to prove.
‘If we were to curtail things, and maybe we will curtail things, I don’t know. Then, by definition you’ve got to curtail what you are doing in terms of expansion and ambition and all of those things as well.
‘We try very, very hard to make sure that the vast, vast majority of what we bring in is distributed out. If we were to calibrate things it would have an impact locally. Things like this year you are going to see hopefully Pearse Park in Longford is going to be redeveloped. Those are the kind of things that would actually take longer to do, or be done on a smaller scale, or not be done at all.’
As finance director, he was part of the rebalancing process in terms of the amount of games development money going to Dublin compared to the rest, even if it still dwarfs anyone else. He points to the recent pledge of over €1 million euro investment for Belfast as part of that rebalancing process.
‘The first thing I’ve always said to people about Dublin is that the money is going into clubs in that county, not into the county set-up. Now clearly there’s a correlation and clearly the fact that county teams are doing well is a function of what the clubs are doing.
‘What we always set out to do was to try to augment the funding elsewhere – there was also a bit of rebalancing and we did adjust Dublin a little bit but the job was always to augment funding elsewhere. So Belfast is a case in point. There are similar ventures going into Meath, Kildare and a number of counties.’
What he doesn’t envisage is any amalgamation of smaller counties as he pointed up the challenges faced by increased urbanisation. ‘No. I can’t. Can you? Counties are one of the cornerstones of the association and personally, I don’t see the attraction for somebody from a small county looking at a team that they’re only a small constituent part of – your own county is your own county. If we ever got to that stage we’d have a very different GAA and it wouldn’t have the same appeal to anyone around the table or to me.’