ON GAELIC GAMES:Unless the Government comes up with some ingenious proposal to defer payment of the scheme, the GAA will face pressures from angry players and a mostly implacable membership, writes SEÁN MORAN

IT’S NOT likely that, amidst the challenges of daily administration, the GAA’s top brass get much time to contemplate schools of jurisprudence, but the question of what a governing body, whether national political or a voluntary organisation, can get away with probably crops up frequently enough in their thoughts.

With mass membership and a large cadre of committed and involved voluntary officials, the GAA’s national administration is acutely aware that it is limited in what it can do in relation to major issues, which need the approval of the organisation’s management committee and even annual congress.

Sometimes this is a bad idea, given that the average congress floor isn’t the best place to be dealing with many serious or intricate matters and doesn’t move fast enough for modern purposes, which means, as pointed out by former director general Liam Mulvihill, that, increasingly, Central Council will be needed to address urgent business.

In terms of the GAA commonwealth, congress works best when expressing the wishes of the membership at large. Controversial votes are frequently those taken without paying due regard to the will of the membership at large, whereas landmark decisions generally involve reflecting an often unheard consensus.

There are plenty of examples, two of the most famous relating to the repeal of bans. The old prohibition on GAA members playing other games went in 1971 because of a clever proposal that a plebiscite of members be held to get the views of the membership at large.

Four years ago the decision to allow rugby and soccer to be played at Croke Park followed a similar assertion of ordinary members’ views in counties where the local administrators had been hostile to change.

There are also times when even if there is no clear requirement to alter a rule in the Official Guide, it can be deemed a good idea to secure the approval of congress as a legitimising measure.

That was the case last year when the controversial players’ grants scheme was put to delegates in Sligo for their approval. There had been a vocal campaign against the Government payments to players, which prompted Croke Park to reverse an earlier decision not to put the matter before congress.

In the end, the scheme was accepted by a comfortable majority, as the information campaign conducted by Croke Park had satisfied most reservations.

That congress is worth remembering in the light of the uncertainty that now surrounds the scheme. Whereas there was clearly an acceptance of the idea that players should receive such payments in the form of vouched expenses, this permission clearly only extended as far as the money coming out of the public purse.

To the non-GAA public this is a source of some irritation. The argument that the rules on amateurism are generally interpreted in such a way as to prioritise Croke Park’s coffers has been frequently made, but all along the GAA had reasoned that, if the Government wanted to give money to intercounty players, they could hardly stand in the way.

Ironically, having worked so hard to frame the payments in such a way to be as non-toxic as possible to the (flexible) principle of amateur status, the GAA has colluded in dismantling one of the barriers to being asked to take over the payments should public funding cease, as looks to be quite likely.

Minister for Sport Cullen has left himself in a bind. Having signalled initially last week that there would be no funds to administer the scheme, he back-tracked a day later when in Croke Park for an Irish Sports Council press conference.

The minister was correct the first time in that the only reason the scheme got the go-ahead was because former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern had green-lighted it from the top and left implementation and tidying up in the hands of one of his most capable of political sweepers, the late Séamus Brennan.

This was achieved despite hostility both in the Department of Sport and the Irish Sports Council (ISC), but it was pushed politically. The €3.5 million to fund the scheme was a cheque written separately to the usual ISC allocation.

Scribbling out that sort of money as if it were a few bob for a local fund raiser belongs to a time and set of financial circumstances that have quickly become as remote as Jupiter. The payments scheme is now without political patronage and bereft of the easy money that greased its wheels only last year.

Minister Cullen is dithering on the grants, which is a surprise with virtually no funding available and the prospect of public outcry if he continues the payments. Nonetheless, he seems reluctant to pull the plug and may even make a smaller sum available, even though the modest individual amounts concerned would make the whole exercise almost more expensive to administer than to fund.

Logically, the question arises as to whether the GAA should step into the breach. If the association effectively defused the amateur status argument itself, it has been extremely cautious about the issue of responsibility. At every step of the way it has repeatedly made clear that it would not and could not pay should public funding dry up.

The Gaelic Players Association has even accepted that position as part of the public debate that led to the proposals being accepted by last year’s congress.

But, more importantly, the idea of Croke Park funding is untouchable because the membership at large clearly won’t accept a loss of grants in order to fund the scheme.

The GAA continues to receive a couple of million in coaching and games development grants, but all infrastructural funding through the National Lottery is suspended, which leaves a €30 million hole in capital project funding – a massive shortfall given the rugby and soccer dividends are about to dry up and the recession is expected to hit gate receipts.

Unless the Government comes up with some ingenious proposal to defer full payment of the scheme, the GAA will face inevitable pressures from angry players and a mostly implacable membership.

On a final note, it will be also sobering for Croke Park to note the difficulties of one of its oldest rights holders, Setanta.

For well over 10 years the company had helped to improve vastly the value of Gaelic games’ overseas rights and provide the green shoots of a competitive domestic broadcasting environment.