GAA did not deserve the barrage of cheap shots
Posturing politicos should be mindful of history and careful when taking aim
THERE have been a number of mortifying junctions on the GAA’s tortuous journey to common sense. Even the most hidebound traditionalist will have conceded that the association was in a low place, though, when the most beleaguered member of our unconvincing, opportunistic Government felt able to talk down to them.
‘I think these kind of rules need to change, though,’ said Eoghan Murphy, Minister for Housing, on the opening of Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
‘I think they belong to a past that we no longer recognise here in this country.’
This was only hours after the hapless Minister was upbraided by one of his own colleagues. Yet Murphy was emboldened enough to crawl out of his freshest housing controversy to lecture the GAA.
He wasn’t alone. The Taoiseach raised the €30 million the State contributed to the redevelopment of the Cork venue (a third of the final cost), a reminder that no politician is too senior to use sport as leverage for easy publicity.
Shane Ross, the Minister whose humiliation in Rio followed one of the last flexes of Pat Hickey’s power, scolded the GAA. The relationship between politics and sport has been a sorry one since the foundation of the State, and that won’t change under this administration.
The Taoiseach and his ministers were able to wring handy news out of the Páirc Uí Chaoimh controversy largely because of how the GAA has mishandled it.
But that does not mean GAA members are not entitled to take umbrage at lectures about doing the right thing from politicians.
The comments of Varadkar, Murphy and Ross were all variations on the same demand that the GAA do the right thing. The truth is that for generations, the GAA has done more for communities throughout this island, and for the health and well-being of millions of people, than all the governments ever managed.
This should not protect them from criticism, but it should be acknowledged. They are not another malfunctioning arm of the State. GAA clubs have served the country, and in particular rural Ireland, as the lights went out in post offices and Garda stations, when the lack of other services threatened to leave parishes isolated and abandoned. The lectures from the offices of State arrived in the week that the Government launched its latest National Sports Policy, to run from this year for a decade up to 2027.
Its ‘high-level goals’ target increased participation, more excellence and improved capacity. The headline ambition is to double the amount of money invested in sport, from €112 million this year to €220 million by 2027.
Increased investment is badly needed in high performance but also to support the clubs in all sports that depend on the thousands of hours volunteered by coaches and mentors every evening of the week.
Importantly, the document recognises the vital connection between funding and success in high-performance sport, and suggests that ‘investment of the order of €20m per annum on a sustained basis will be required in the early years of this policy, with a clear commitment by Government to deliver multi-annual funding for each quadrennial from 2019 onwards’.
The last point is particularly important, given that athletes prepare in cycles, most commonly four-year blocks as dictated by the Olympics.
When funding is delivered on an annual basis, this makes the planning of athletes and sports more challenging, for example in attracting high-quality coaches.
However, the very next point reads: ‘Opportunities will be explored so that business or individual donors will also be attracted to invest in a more meaningful way’. This rather undercuts the grandness of the plan, but Ross was effusive in promoting it and its importance to Irish sport.
‘This is what’s so important, it lifts communities,’ said the Minister. ‘It lifts small communities in themselves, which have been neglected so much.’
Sport certainly does that, but not as an instrument of State policy. No, sport energises communities because of the dedication of hundreds of thousands, not just in the GAA but in athletics, soccer and rugby clubs, and in boxing gyms and in the many minority sports that rarely get attention but that are central to the lives of many.
This has been a wretched week for the GAA, but the input of politicians was not required, and it reeked of the cheapest kind of populism.
There are more practical ways they can assist Irish sport – but that doesn’t guarantee headlines.