Motions Committee back in spotlight

Rule 42 debate: There will be no official statement from tonight's meeting of the GAA's Motions Committee until tomorrow at the earliest. The meeting is scheduled to finalise motions for this April's annual Congress, and there is significant interest in the fate of the motions concerning Rule 42 and the use of Croke Park for soccer and rugby.

"The counties who have submitted the motions will have to be informed in writing," according to GAA PRO Danny Lynch. "Those letters won't go out until Wednesday."

Amid speculation that the committee intends to rule out of order all motions on Rule 42 for a second successive year, GAA president Seán Kelly faces a major challenge to his authority given his stated desire to see the topic debated and the reforms he initiated and which were accepted by the Special Congress last autumn.

The Motions Committee consist of the president, the past presidents and the director general, but it is rare that there is a full turnout. Nonetheless, tonight's meeting is expected to attract a far fuller attendance than usual, and it will be interesting to see if that has an affect - not that any permutation of the committee is better disposed towards the issue in question, but because there may be divergent views on how far it's desirable to push matters.

Statements from former president Jack Boothman suggest that the committee are sticking to a complicated view of motions on Rule 42. Central to this complexity is the opinion of the committee that a wide range of rules are affected by any change to or deletion of Rule 42. Among them are Rules 3, 4 and 5, the provisions of which have been detailed here before and which concern basic aims of the GAA and underline the current view that any change to Rule 42 involves a restatement of basic principle.

One official from a county which has submitted a motion has said he believes the committee "are setting the bar too high" in the demands being placed on those counties framing the motion.

Another told this newspaper that to be on the safe side his county had submitted the amendments in six motions rather than the original one, which was ruled out of order and sent back for redrafting.

Even if motions are accepted for listing on the clár for Congress, crucial to the outcome of any debate on Rule 42 will be the specific motions. As one Croke Park source put it yesterday, "It's not just a matter of getting them through, but getting the right ones through".

This is a reference to the two motions proposing that Croke Park be made available to the national rugby and soccer teams pending the redevelopment of Lansdowne Road.

It had been thought that the GAA might look favourably on such an accommodation, but recent indications are that this may not be the case. Certainly from the perspective of the Motions Committee, it's unlikely they will allow something they consider a major re-routing of the GAA's aims to be debated in the context of a temporary change.

There is an additional, practical reason for this.

Should motions on the temporary availability of Croke Park pass on to the Congress agenda, there will be a question mark over whether acceptance should be on the basis of a two-thirds majority or a simple majority. The convention is that experimental rule changes require only a simple majority. More crucially, it will be Kelly's call on the day of the debate.

Should the debate go against Kelly tonight it will cast a long shadow on his presidency. A year ago he dusted himself down and went away to try to ensure that issues couldn't, in future, be kept off the Congress clár simply because of red tape. The current mass striking down of motions runs contrary to what delegates at last autumn's Special Congress thought they were approving.

In an interview with the Sunday Times at the weekend, Kelly spoke about the need for "a major intervention" if the motions are struck down tonight.

Although any motion removing the influence of the Motions Committee would require their approval, their influence would be circumvented by the appointment of a sub-committee to recommend significant changes to the process.