When Dessie Farrell, chief executive of the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), said at the Croke Park launch of its new agreement with the GAA that it was a "win-win for everybody", he was surely only referring to the people in the room at the time.
Unless, of course, there is a new definition for “everybody” in the GAA that is sufficiently narrow to exclude 98 per cent of all those who play Gaelic games at adult level, not to mention the wider membership whose voluntary endeavours are the very reason the GAA enjoys such social pre-eminence in Irish life.
The deal announced last month has been rightly recognised as a negotiating triumph for the GPA (which represents only inter-county players) and it has the virtue for the GAA hierarchy of smoothing over a potentially knotty relationship in the coming years.
But at what cost and to whose detriment? Nobody disputes that inter-county players should be properly looked after and nobody could wish for anything other than cordial relations between GAA officialdom and players at any level.
Yet the effect of the latest GAA-GPA compact has consequences that are far-reaching and that will adversely affect levels of the GAA that don’t even merit a mention in the text of this framework agreement.
The commitment of a 15 per cent share of commercial revenues to inter-county players, a ground-breaking development and standout feature of the deal, will necessarily draw resources away from where they are most needed.
For example, there will be less money to address the huge demographic and games development challenges across a country where, in places, serious interventions are required to ensure the association’s community role is either shored up or established in the first place.
And let's be clear: in post-bailout Ireland, most GAA clubs remain at the mercy of fragile local economies and survive on meagre resources as members dig deep into their pockets.
The GAA is seldom shy about trumpeting the extent to which central revenues are recycled throughout the organisation, but a clear consequence of this deal is that there will be less trickle-down. More and more of those revenues will be cordoned off for inter-county players and to sustain an inter-county system which is already financially ruinous to many county boards.
Fundamental problem
That’s not even the worst part of it, however. A more fundamental problem with the deal is that it copperfastens the divide that has been allowed to develop between club and county players, ensuring that the interests of the latter are preferred – financially and now through prioritised input into policy decisions – over the former.
It would, of course, be difficult to point to any time in the past half-century when club and county games co-existed comfortably and to the absolute satisfaction of all; there is ample evidence over the decades to show that the lot of the club player has long been dismal.
What is new now, however, is just how far the legitimate and widely publicised grievances of club players – the unstructured seasons, the lack of meaningful games, the disruption to personal lives – appear to have fallen in the hierarchy of GAA priorities.
There are multiple reasons for this – and the failures of local GAA county boards are obvious here – but it is no accident that the stock of the club player has fallen in tandem with the growth in the organisation, influence and financial muscle of the GPA.
Indeed, the rise of the GPA is one of the more extraordinary stories in Irish sport in the last decade. Alongside a flair for self-promotion, this organisation has proven itself remarkably effective in securing significant revenues from disparate sources: from Croke Park, corporate Irish America and, notwithstanding revelations of its dismal lobbying efforts of late, from the Government in the form of player grants.
What the GPA has done with this cash includes an attempt to develop a suite of “services” that address “welfare issues” which, for all their admitted seriousness and complexity, are rarely particular to the inter-county player.
What is particular to inter-county footballers and hurlers is the growing demands being placed on them by many county managers and here, on the biggest welfare issue of all, the GPA has made no impression. This fact is implicitly acknowledged in a new deal that commits to establishing “a working party to explore and address the demands placed on county players”.
Little should be expected of this working party. The GPA’s modus operandi has been to address symptoms rather than causes, their energies and money channelled into the accommodation of players to whatever demands are made of them, however intrusive, costly or unsustainable those might be.
So wedded is the GPA to the idea of “elitism”, to making a case for the exceptionalism of the county player, that it cannot countenance anything else.
But surely, in the course of the recent negotiations, it was incumbent upon the GAA to offer a different analysis, to propose a different way forward for the county game? A way that might at once curb its excesses and correct the imbalance in a club-county dynamic that last Thursday’s proposals for revamping the All-Ireland football championship do the service of acknowledging without seriously addressing?
Better schedules
This is no easy job and there are no perfect solutions. However, a move in this direction – where the starting objective is the creation of better club schedules rather than the expansion or rejuvenation of inter-county formats – would at least have the merit of being consistent with a rhetoric which extols amateurism and the place of the club as key to the GAA’s community mission.
Instead, the deal that has been cut is one that elevates the contribution of one class of GAA member above all others, irrespective of how much of their lives they invest in the service of the association.
Equally, this is a deal that, in giving the GPA serious skin in the GAA’s commercial game and affording them a special hearing on such vital issues as competitions and the playing calendar, is prioritising and pushing an agenda that will only deepen the disadvantage of the ordinary club player.
There are so many ways in which the contemporary GAA is an improvement on anything that has gone before. The entrenchment of inter-county privilege and the accompanying contempt for clubs is not one of them. And that’s what the GAA-GPA deal delivers. Whatever else may be said about it, a “win-win for everybody” it isn’t.
Mark Duncan is a historian and GAA member