Payments are a cancer

DIDN’T the GAA realise what a sweet gig they had going on?

Sure there are wholesale illegal payments to managers at club and intercounty level, sure everybody knows about it and sure everybody sniggers when a former successful manager travels halfway across the country to take over a struggling outfit because he believes in “the project”... but by attempting to tackle the issue like they are, the GAA are looking a gift horse in the mouth.

The status quo is murky and distasteful. However, by turning a blind eye to the problem for the last twenty years (at least) they’ve enjoyed that most Irish of things: an Irish solution to an Irish problem, or a GAA solution to a GAA problem, if you will.

But Christy Cooney had to go and ruin it all now didn’t he? What with all his talk about a cancer running through the core of the organisation... the thing is though, as fun and all as it is to be cynical, the Cork man is actually on the money here.

Not so much at intercounty level, most county boards can afford to hand out an extra few bob here and there, but for clubs the burden of funding an outside manager is oftentimes crippling. That’s the ball game here. It’s a little farcical that club managers are getting paid at all, let alone the amounts you regularly hear rumoured.

The thought of club managers taking (low) five figure sums out of struggling GAA clubs in a given year at a time when most GAA clubs are struggling is ludicrous and yet it’s happening all the time. Cooney is right: it is the single biggest cancer in the game right now.

It’s not even so much the amount of money involved (substantial and all as it can be), it’s how the money is raised and by whom and for what. When people pay their few bob at the annual church gate collection, or they hand over a few euro a week to the club lotto, you can be sure they’re not doing so with the intention of funding the club’s new fangled outside manager.

In practice, of course, they are. The GAA’S new discussion paper acknowledges that they (and their inter-county colleagues) are getting paid. Not all of them, of course. Most managers do it on a purely voluntary basis and I’m sure that includes some outside managers at club and inter-county level, but when the conservative, ‘say nathin to no wan’, GAA is openly acknowledging it, like it did in its discussion paper this week, you can be damn sure it’s a widespread phenomenon.

The report, written by Director General Páraic Duffy and released on Tuesday, acknowledges in detail the problem and suggests three courses of action: Option 1, do nothing; Option 2 enforce the present rules in a more stringent manner; or Option 3 make such payments legal in the eyes of the GAA.

Option 1 would seem to be out of the question given all the brouhaha both Duffy and Cooney and the media have been making about it recently, but this is Ireland and this is the GAA and stranger things have happened. Afterall come league and championship the media will have less time on its hands to concentrate on administrative issues – the focus will return to this game, that player, the likilhood of back to back All Irelands for Dublin... etc.

Option 2, meanwhile, seems desperately naive. If County Boards, supporters clubs and clubs

have been making under the counter payments up to now, do the GAA really think that an online database of legitimate expenses as well as solemn declarations are going to make the difference? It’s cloud cookoo land stuff.

As, indeed, is Option 3. It’s not going to happen. Even if county board A is paying their manager they’re not going to vote for any diminution of the amateur ethos of the GAA – it’s the third rail of GAA politics, touch it and you die.

So what can be done? Not a whole pile. The biggest thing they could do is ban outside managers – to manage a county you have to be resident in that county and be a member of a club in that county. For clubs the same would apply, you have to be resident in the parish and be a member of the club.

Clubs and county boards would be a hell of a lot less likely to pay managers if they were from the county or club they were managing.

The only other way that could see the practice curbed is if, as was indicated last week and suggested again in the discussion paper this week, the Revenue Commissioners started to take more of an interest in the finances of clubs and county boards leading to possible audits of managers’ financial interests and neither party would want that.

That’s the most likely outcome (and it’s not very likely either), because for all this latest burst of fine ideals and rhetoric from the GAA they remain what they always have been: deeply conservative. Páraic Duffy’s reccomendation at the end of his 29 page meditation?

“The establishment of a Working Group to oversee the formulation of an official GAA policy on the issue of unregulated payments to managers.”

So while the GAA seem to be shunning the Irish solution to the Irish problem, they’re not quite ready to give up another Irish tradition just yet – kicking to touch.