Cautious welcome for GPA deal

THERE HAS been mixed reaction to the weekend’s news of agreement between the GAA and the players’ body, the GPA.

Of One Belief, the pressure group that vigorously opposed the introduction of the Irish Sports Council grants two years ago, has issued a media statement trenchantly opposing the allocation of €1.1 million GAA funds to support GPA player welfare projects as well as the €500,000 in administration grants to cover this and next year.

Whereas opposition to the agreement is expected to be most marked in Ulster, Derry chair Seamus McCloy – who opposed the grants scheme as “grubby, cheap and wrong” at the 2008 annual congress – yesterday expressed cautious support “in principle” for Saturday’s announcement that the players and GAA were to co-operate.

“I still have strong views but the GPA is not going to go away so I support the agreement in principle. I couldn’t object to providing for player welfare but I have concerns about what constitutes player welfare and the extent to which it is open to duplicating payments to players that are already being made by other units of the association.

“I also disagree with the GPA in regarding all teams as the same: the footballers of Kilkenny and the hurlers in Tyrone for instance. I can’t get that and I’m not anti-hurling or anti-football. Also how do you police and monitor the situation? It will require strict criteria but doing nothing was not an option.”

The statement released by Of One Belief was unambiguously opposed to what it describes as “Saturday’s amazing announcement by GAA president Christy Cooney and director general Páraic Duffy that they intend to commit €1.60 million of GAA money to the GPA and simultaneously create, for the first time in the GAA’s 125-year history, two official classes of GAA membership.”

It adds: “On Saturday highly-paid GAA officials drove a horse-and-cart through that model [that operated by the GAA’s National Infrastructure Committee (NISC) in respect of capital grants] by gifting a non-GAA body a special status within the GAA and earmarking huge sums of GAA money for it in a totally different; arbitrary; and discriminatory way.

“Most GAA county boards don’t even come close to having an annual budget of their own of €1.60m . . . yet now our top highly-paid officials deem it right and proper that this amount of GAA money should be handed over to a group that isn’t even part of the GAA. And in return that group says the new dispensation won’t “gag or muffle” it in any way.”

Of One Belief goes on to take issue with the principle that intercounty players form a legitimate separate constituency because of the massive revenues that the GAA takes in through gate receipts during the National Leagues and championship.

“Intercounty players and the highly-paid people at Croke Park are amongst the few GAA people who are insulated from the reality that far from being ‘core commercial contributors,’ county teams are by far the biggest financial drain on the real GAA.

“Ireland’s 32 counties currently spend on average €0.75m per annum each on their county teams and invest at least the same amount again in terms of volunteers’ (remember them, anybody round Jones Road?) time. That’s an investment of at least €48 million per year.”

The statement refers to remarks made by GAA president Christy Cooney on the subject of amateurism and directs questions at both Cooney and the GAA’s national administration.

“Back in July you told us the GAA ‘exists because of the voluntary efforts of its members’: what’s happened to your thinking in the subsequent three-and-a-half months? Even more worryingly, what’s going to happen to it in future?

“Just what will you not concede to the GPA? Where actually would you hold the line? What actually is left to hold? So far you’ve given in to a strike threat; conceded on pay-for-play grants; created a special status for a non-GAA group (and parallel lesser status for the rest of us); introduced outside arbiters to do jobs we reasonably believe you’re paid to do; and don’t seem too worried about who actually decides whether a county GAA panel is legitimate or not.”

The statement also criticises the use of a professional facilitator, Turlough O’Donnell SC, in the talks between the GAA and the GPA and goes on to call for a halt to the recent practice of remunerating presidents in compensation for lost income during their terms of office. “It really is time the GAA went back to having volunteer presidents. We badly need volunteer leadership again. And we need to start publishing openly the salaries we pay our top people.”