I KNEW WHAT I WAS GETTING INTO WHEN I PUT MY NAME DOWN
“The club scene could restart in late summer”
EVEN at a time when the GAA has stalled, Peter O’Reilly’s work is never done.
The wonder of how an association as large and all-embracing as the GAA functions is best explained by pointing to the door marked ‘county board secretary’ because that is where all the administrative magic happens.
It is 11 years since O’Reilly left his position as office manager in an auctioneering firm to become Longford’s first full-time secretary. Prior to that, it was a volunteer’s job, something that boggles his mind.
‘It was nigh on impossible. You would have to have had a lot of loose time on your hands. It really is amazing the amount of work a volunteer secretary did in the past,’ admits O’Reilly, who spent six years as an inter-county referee prior to taking up the Longford job.
The job of a county board secretary is never done for the simple reason the nature of the work is as broad as literally the day is long.
‘You are dealing with volunteers the whole time and it is when they come home from work that they are able to deal with their club issues, so that means the query that comes will arrive after what people might consider normal office hours,’ he adds.
‘I don’t mind that because that is just how we work and I knew that when I put my name down for the job that working set hours was not what I was getting into.
‘You are the point of contact, you are expected to know something about every query there is.
‘A lot of the job is answering questions relating to insurance, injury funds, player registration, gradings for competitions, and because I am also secretary of the CCCC (Central Competitions Control Committee), that includes notification of disciplinary issues and things like that.
‘And then you have the county teams when the leagues are on and all that goes with that. I tie myself to the senior footballers and a bit with the minors because I don’t have the time to go with the hurlers and the underage, so I delegate that,’ he explains. Even though Longford is one of the GAA’s smaller units, with 21 clubs, the scale of the job does not shrink as a result.
Plans to build a centre of excellence in the county had to be parked after a subsidence issue in Pearse Park meant that a stand only completed in 2006 had to be redone and was only finished last year at a cost of €2.75million.
It sounds worse – and it has returned their county ground to an approximate 10,000 capacity – than it is.
‘Between Leinster Council and Croke Park, we have been very fortunate with the level of funding ensuring any level of debt is sustainable,’ assures O’Reilly (right). Just as well, given that the financial cost of the pandemic will present county boards around the country with significant challenges.
‘The nature of the GAA calendar is that we would have front-loaded our expenditure in terms of preparation for the Allianz League. For example, you will spend money on gear in preparation for a championship that might never take place.
‘And while we would have got some funds from Croke Park, we were due to hold a fundraiser in April that did not happen – in normal circumstances that would have got us by and that would have led us onto our own championships.
‘Now, even if we get the go-ahead, you are looking at a 50 per cent decrease in gate receipts because they will have to be run over a shorter period of time and will have to be played on a knockout basis. ‘It is going to create some severe issues over this 12 months but I think the even bigger problem is how do we manage to start up next year because whatever resources we will have, we will have used them all up by then. ‘I think you are going to find that a lot of county boards will be cash-strapped by the end of this year, so what funds do we use to get started up next year?’ He is optimistic that both club and county will return before the end of the year. ‘The next two weeks are critical in terms of the gentle re-opening that is taking place and if that passes by without going askew, I think the club scene could restart sometime in the late summer and we might have the inter-county championship in November.’