ONE DAY THE GAA WILL BE NO MORE
Read Joe Brolly in The Title
NAOMH COLUMBA had just beaten Laochra Loch Lao in the quarter final of Comórtas Peile na Gaeltachta, in the Galway Gaeltacht, a week yesterday. They took the team bus to Spiddal beach to soothe their aching limbs in salt water. En route, they spotted a farmer footing turf. It was a hot day and the farmer, Tomas Lydon, is in his 60s.
The squad disembarked, rolled up their sleeves and in an hour, they had footed the stranger’s turf. ‘It would have taken me five days to do that,’ Lydon said. An American or Englishman would put it down to the eccentricities of those crazy Irish. But for us, it is the GAA way, or at least the GAA I was brought up in.
A GAA where the guiding principles are altruism, volunteerism and participation. If however, a coachload of GPA members had been passing in the company of Peter McKenna, the GAA’s commercial director, would they have stopped? Certainly... if it were a pre-arranged promotional shoot with a few high-profile players paid to be there.
They probably wouldn’t have footed the turf, though. And the bus company would have had to be an “official partner” of the GAA. It is the alternative vision of the GAA, the one we are slowly, but surely, drifting towards. A GAA that Americans or Englishmen would have absolutely no trouble understanding.
On the face of it, the GAA is in good shape. Clubs have excellent facilities and good numbers. The Association, at national level, is turning over around €55 million per annum. It has assets of more than €2 billion. The games are excellent. Administration is superb.
Beneath the surface, though, we are sleepwalking towards the end of the GAA because we have no strategic plan. As a leading GAA official put it to me during the week: ‘I have no idea what we stand for anymore. No one has a clue what sort of organisation we will be in 20 years time.’
This is not strictly true. There is someone who has a long term vision, our commercial director Peter McKenna (below). Brought in to spearhead our business, he’s done such a superb job that he has, in effect, become the leader of the GAA.
HISTORY teaches us that capitalism wins, unless it is strongly resisted. Up until the last 20 years, the GAA didn’t need to bother too much about that since, as a nation, we didn’t have much and were extremely parochial. But those days are over. We have no long-term strategic vision because this is difficult and requires leadership, ruthlessness and imagination.
Instead, at the heart of the Association we have inertia. In that vacuum, commerce is consuming us, piece by piece.
I said at a chatshow in Drumgoon, hosted by the GAA’s president elect Aogán Ó Fearghail, if we continue along this path, there will not be a GAA in 20 years. No one disagreed. The panel thought it was too late to reverse the trend. Seamus Banty McEnaney felt ‘the commercial juggernaut had left the station’. McKenna recently negotiated another deal which gives internet highlight rights to a redtop newspaper. We haven’t much left to sell. It is only a matter of time before we wake up to ACME Croke Park.
The identity crisis at the heart of the GAA was summed up in an interview on RTÉ radio with the Association’s director general Páraic Duffy recently. Pressed by Sean O’Rourke on the issue of professionailsm, Duffy suggested that only ‘a small handful, maybe four or five counties possibly could sustain it. But I don’t think on an island as small as this, with a population base that we have, that pay-for-play is viable’.
He didn’t say ‘that is not what the GAA does. Pay-for-play is, and always has been, a non-starter’. Is professionalism as a concept part of our ethos now? Or not?
The drift towards capitalism has also created civil war between clubs and counties. The lucrative county season now runs from January to September. This multi-million euro business has resulted in the clubs and club players – which make up vast majority of the GAA – being sidelined. We have to see an end to this nine-month season.
The NFL (American football) runs off its season in five months (from mid-September to the Superbowl in February). Check out any national sport and the same pattern emerges. And they are all professional.
Last year, Tyrone’s club footballers twiddled their thumbs until the county team was beaten by Mayo in an All-Ireland semi-final at the end of August. Then, they ran off their entire Championship in 28 days. This year, to try to stave off a revolt, they staged one round of Championship games in May, three days after Tyrone beat Down in a preliminary round replay.
This only made matters worse. The clubs had their county players for a few days and, by the end of May, with the League season only starting, eight Tyrone senior clubs are out of the Championship.
With the stuffing knocked out of them, players are drifting off to America and London, disenchanted and resentful.
Of the Ulster counties, only Tyrone and Monaghan have even played a round of Championship games. This is seriously damaging participation. Last year, Dublin ran off their Championship like a blitz, getting it done and dusted in under a month. The priority for county boards is to get the club Championship disposed of as quickly as possible.
Described by the hierarchy as ‘the lifeblood of the Association’, clubs are, it seems, a tiresome inconvenience. There’s no money to be made from them.
THREE years ago, it was decided that drawn first round SFC inter-county games would be decided by extra time. The idea was to give clubs some respect. A year later, it was revoked at Congress. So when Cork drew with Waterford a fortnight ago the county’s club hurling Championship matches were promptly adjourned until further notice.
This problem is symptomatic of the wider malaise in the GAA. There is a simple solution to this fixtures problem, but it will mean less money: Absolish the subsidiary county competitions (McKenna, O’Byrne, FBD cups etc).
Start the League in January and finish it in March. Start the Championship in April and play the All-Ireland finals in July. Start club Championships in August and play the All-Ireland club final in November.
This will require leadership, vision and strategic thinking. It will have to be done as part of a holisitic long term strategic plan for the GAA. So that we know where we stand and what the GAA actually stands for. I believe it is not too late.
I believe the values espoused by the men of Naomh Columba must be preserved at all costs. Even if that means turning down a great deal for ACME Croke Park.