Here’s the best way to get around GAA rules...
W HEN I was a boy, there was no soccer pitch within eight miles of us and Fr McManus Park was our Stamford Bridge, our Highbury, our Old Trafford and Anfield. It was even our Elland Road, but all of those famous, bewitching grounds would disappear in a quick puff of smoke when Paddy Cromwell walked through the gates.
Y’see, when I was boy life was simple and orderly. You made sure you never got caught playing soccer in Fr McManus Park and you made sure Paddy Cromwell, more than anyone else, never caught you.
Paddy was christened Patrick Pearse Cromwell, which was a neat piece of footwork by his parents — cancelling out any possible lineage to a certain English tyrant.
Paddy, to us boys, was the lord and master of Fr McManus Park. The rear windows of his house overlooked the field. Some of us thought he owned the field (he didn’t!). We would all take turns keeping an eye out for him.
We didn’t know what would happen if he ever caught us (he didn’t either!). All we knew for sure was that we
could never get caught.
When I was a boy there was one big rule that hovered over our lives. Gigantic in size, though none of us ever saw it written down. None of us could ever remember hearing anybody shouting out the rule. It was just there. And Paddy Cromwell was there. And life was simple and perfectly understood. Nobody can ever… ever, EVER… EVER… even think about playing… YOU KNOW WHAT!! Got it? When I was a young man I got to know Paddy Cromwell very well. We travelled all over Meath together to GAA grounds. Paddy laughed at the notion he was ever a bogeyman. He loved all sports. He watched lots of soccer. He even watched us, from his rear window, playing soccer in Fr McManus Park. And, now and again, he’d take a little walk… just to gently remind us that rules were rules in a GAA club. Otherwise?
Well, who knew what might happen if games of soccer and rugby were played in Fr McManus Park! Or a game of cricket… for Chrissakes!
THE GAA needs a face. For too long – for over 130 years – it has been caricatured as a monstrous oaf, and that is an unfortunate and foolish state of affairs to have to put up with all of this time, is it not?
Never more so that this last
week or so, when the GAA just sat there, plonked on its extremely wide backside, its mouth hung open, its eyes sort of glazed over, waiting, waiting and thinking, and not doing anything fast enough, and failing hopelessly to defend itself from its own members who were in a bit of a rage and from big mouths like former Ireland soccer legend, Damien Duff and others outside of the GAA who embarked on foul-mouthed, ill-informed rants.
Thankfully, the testimonial match for Liam Miller (left) — and the unseemly stand-off that sullied the very notion of a charity soccer match being played in a spanking new Páirc Uí Chaoimh — might have, finally, brought the organization to the realisation that it needs a makeover.
The GAA needs to make sure it never again embarrasses itself and shames its own people. It needs to see to it in future that a decent level of humanity can never be upended by a hard-nosed rule book being thrown around the place. It needs a face and one strong voice… and it needs one other thing.
It needs that person to be given executive powers, which is not such a giant and scary leap at all when we think about it. The new director general of the GAA, Tom Ryan, is paid a handsome (big and very smiley!) salary to lead the organisation.
RYAN is in the top job for the next seven years and, unlike GAA presidents who arrive and are gone again, and immediately forgotten, the director general actually runs the whole shebang. It’s his responsibility.
This week, the GAA could not do the easy and decent thing because of a rule book. And because of the same book, there was no point in Tom Ryan coming out of his office and saying anything.
As early as possible, all of that must change. The rule book can stay. Rules, just like when I was a boy, are important and GAA property is just that… GAA PROPERTY.
It is the property of an organisation, which is not a brainless oaf but an organisation built by good people over generations to make the GAA what it is today — a magnificent and prized organization.
But now we need one man, or a woman preferably in the future, who can do right by the GAA, and occasionally see to it that wrongs are neatly side-stepped in a business-like manner.