Time to regulate payments to coaches

GAA has to bring it into the open and grow up

HERE’S a confession to kick things off. There have been times where I’ve trained Gaelic football teams in the past and was handed a brown envelope full of cash after the session.

This should be akin to saying that water is wet or dogs sometimes bite.

It is as commonplace as rain in Ireland, but everyone pretends it doesn’t happen.

I got a few quid for training a team. So do hundreds of others week after week after week.

Jarlath Burns may well be the next GAA president and I enjoyed his interview with Thomas Niblock on the BBC’s brilliant ‘GAA Social’ podcast this week.

“If we are paying managers, do it in a structured way that’s not hypocritical,”he said. Burns is dead right.

This is a huge issue for the GAA. Plenty of coaches and managers — even at club level‚ are effectively getting a second full-time wage.

Some of the figures being thrown about are crazy. There’s a motion before GAA Congress about debarring anyone involved in any financial irregularity from holding elective office in the GAA.

Surely paying coaches and managers under the table is a financial irregularity — but a blind eye is turned to it.

Why is this charade still going on? Look at the fuss over Shane Walsh’s transfer to Kilmacud Crokes last August.

Acres

The controversy raged for weeks. It consumed acres of newsprint and dominated the airwaves.

I’d love if Walsh had come out and made the very valid point that there are hundreds of coaches and managers around the country working in clubs that aren’t their own, and often in different counties.

When is there a big fuss made about that? Everyone knows that, in many cases, they go to different jobs because of the money on offer.

The late Seán McCague, during his time as GAA president 30 years ago, made it a priority to look into payments to managers.

He famously ended up saying about the under the table payments that they couldn’t even find the table.

That this was seen as something that needed to be addressed decades ago says a lot.

Surely a solution should have been found by now? Why this hypocrisy that the GAA is a strictly amateur organisation?

I really don’t think it would be that big a deal to approve these payments and standardise them.

Have proper contracts. It already goes on in the shadows, just bring it into the open and grow up.

We could also regulate the system to weed out the hordes of spoofers.

Bring in a proper coaching badge system, as is there in other sports, and let the cream rise to the top.

If you’re taking a fee to coach a team, then you have to justify the fee.

I know of really genuine people who don’t have the confidence to go for jobs in their own club because the spoofers have complicated things so much.

It has irritated me for years. You would not believe the chancers that are out there.

Love

There are plenty of good coaches who are in it because of a real love for coaching and football too, we shouldn’t forget that.

But I know of chancers who are ‘coaching’ three club teams in the same season. Sometimes in different counties.

This is a true story, 100 per cent. There was one spoofer who charged €150 per training session — it seems to be the going rate.

He’d arrive at meetings late, throw out a few cones and bluff away. He also slagged off teams that he worked with in the past.

No surprise that the team in