President elect O'Neill seriously progressive

GAELIC GAMES:LIAM O'NEILL is aware of the irony of his situation. He acknowledges he works better in small groups and is more comfortable with one-to-one contact than commanding the big stage.

Yet, over the weekend, he became the first person in modern times – at least – to become president-elect of the GAA without a contest.

The formal withdrawal of Leinster chair Sheamus Howlin followed a similar move by Ulster chair Tom Daly a few days ago and GAA management committee member Con Hogan, from Tipperary, last month.

A serious-minded and progressive individual who has never feigned the extrovert tendencies of most candidates for office, he has even felt it necessary to defend himself from charges that he lacks a sense of humour.

In keeping with modern tradition, the new president-elect lost the previous election in 2008, but attracted 112 votes in the process. In the meantime, he has been busy as chair of the Coaching and Games Development Committee.

He was also the driver of two contentious reform projects, the disciplinary proposals that were backed at the 2009 congress, but not by the required, weighted majority and the Go Games initiative for developing juvenile participation in games, which was approved last year.

A school teacher from Trumera in Laois, O’Neill will, in 12 months, become the second Leinster president in three terms, after Nickey Brennan who served in 2006-09, and will be just the second Laois person to hold the office. Bob O’Keeffe, after whom the Leinster hurling trophy is named, was the first in 1935.

“The challenges are definitely financial,” he told The Irish Times yesterday, “but I think we can meet them as well as take initiatives to cut costs. For instance, we’re not making good decisions on bulk purchase.

“Too many of our units go off in their own direction when, if we pooled our resources, we’d save an awful lot of money.

“I’m not a financial expert, but most people can understand when you reduce it to income and expenditure and at club and county level, you can’t spend what you’re not taking in.”

The boom has left a few casualties within the GAA, between property deals with developers that went wrong and over-ambitious development projects but the word from Croke Park is the serious damage isn’t as widespread as feared.

O’Neill concurs.

“We’re lucky that the property bubble didn’t leave us with a bigger headache than it did. A lot of clubs got caught, but I believe that the capacity to repay loans is still there in the vast majority of cases. Our core business doesn’t require a huge amount of finance.

“There is a problem with paying managers but it will only stop when units decide, ‘this is costing us too much and if we get a coach from within the club, results won’t be much different but our expenditure will be reduced dramatically’. If counties were brave enough to do the same, there’d be big savings.”

He blames short-term priorities for the willingness to plough money into outside managers despite the cost and there being no certainty of success.

Nonetheless he still supports the time limits on county officers even though he acknowledges the “legacy” pressures on a county chair to produce something tangible during their tenure.

One of the dysfunctions he identifies within the GAA is the growing feeling of a rift between membership and national administration.

“There is a disconnect, or at least a perception of one. As a volunteer in Croke Park I can say that I’ve never seen people there work as hard but the membership at large often associates central administration with top-down instructions, conditions on funding and so on rather than communication from the bottom up.

“County chairs and secretaries are so inundated with the demands of keeping things afloat that each request from above is a request too many, particularly if you’re being summoned to central meetings at inconvenient times.

“There is a feeling that everything’s being imposed on clubs and counties but I think it’s just a desire to push things forward.”