Taxpayer money can’t be used for GAA excess
‘THE PROSPECT OF EXTRA FUNDING WOULD RAISE SOME ISSUES’
GRAB ALL ASSOCIATION must be the most stupid of all the slurs flung at the GAA. It has many faults, but insatiable greed isn’t one of them. Money is, though, of regular concern to the organisation, as it must be in a body of such size and reach.
It has become especially relevant in a year that has left the most important weeks and months in its sporting calendar blank.
The GAA’s share of €40 million of State support allocated between it, the FAI and the IRFU should be imminent, but it’s anticipated counties will need extra funding beyond that, to deal with the costs of inter-county preparation.
This brings up the subject of State support.
Micheál Martin, in what seemed an attempt at finding good news somewhere, anywhere, said on Monday that holding the championships was important for national morale.
If that was a reasonable observation, it invited the inevitable retort: help us pay for it, so.
It’s worth noting here that this has not been a request made publicly by the leadership of the GAA. In an interview notable for its emollience a week ago, president John Horan said the association would borrow money to help support its units.
When asked about the possibility of State support, Horan did not request it, but rather focused on the financial model of the GAA, by which it redistributes the great majority of its income within the organisation (84 per cent was reallocated in this manner in 2019).
As custodians of the most popular sports in Ireland, the GAA are as entitled to help from the Government as any other code, and they are getting it.
The prospect of additional funding from the State to get the championships played, though, would raise some important issues.
It was in February that Tom Ryan, the GAA’s director general, made a powerful intervention on the subject of inter-county funding via his annual report.
Ryan described the GAA’s ‘financial landscape’ as ‘increasingly pressurised’ – and this was a month before sport was shut down and he was left estimating a cost from a blank year at in excess of €50million.
He was also commendably candid about the rampant costs of preparing teams for the inter-county championships.
In noting that the total costs of preparation by all counties amounted to €29.74 million in 2019, he wrote, ‘This is not sustainable in the long term’ before adding a line that has taken on a greater potency since March, ‘or even in the shortterm if we experience an economic reverse’.
No administrator could have anticipated the nature, imminence, or rate of that reverse at the beginning of the spring.
While preparation costs should, theoretically, be greatly reduced given lockdown and a severely compressed championship, counties will have to bear the new costs associated with the precautions that now must be taken to minimise the risk of infection.
Only a curmudgeon could quibble with Government assisting the association with those direct expenses.
But the notion of State resources, which will very soon prove desperately scarce, being tipped into the gaping maw that is inter-county expenses, is an unnerving one.
It has been said often over the past six months that this crisis gives the GAA a chance to address its long-standing fixtures issues.
The chance of that happening appears significant, given the proposal for a split season put forward by the GPA, and the welcome it received.
Why not use these straitened times to tackle the problem of exorbitant team expenses, too?
It has been identified by the most senior official in the GAA, and addressing it would come as a blessed relief to county boards who have to find ways of sustaining costs that run, in some counties, well in excess of €1million.
Ideas like spending caps and centrally sanctioned expenditure have been mentioned in the past, and threaten to immediately flounder on the age-old problem of illicit, under-the-table payments.
It is also important that player welfare not be imperilled by cost-cutting, but counties have to find a way of living within their means.
The Pavlovian response to this invariably seeks to blame Dublin, the argument going that its rivals have to find some way of equalising the advantages the football champions enjoy.
Blaming Dublin is too convenient; counties were spending a fortune long before Dublin’s re-emergence.
The county does wield enormous power, and is the most attractive brand in the game commercially.
That, too, could be addressed, perhaps through pooled revenues.
There are solutions, but there needs first to be a discussion.
And this is the year to have it.