Gaelic Games

Malachy Clerkin: Whatever anyone thinks about Rory Gallagher, the GAA president should not be influencing Naas GAA’s coaching choices

Jarlath Burns has brought huge energy to the role since he took over last February, but his intervention at the Kildare club is an unprecedented overreach

Jarlath Burns wrote to Naas GAA club over the news that they were going to add coach Rory Gallagher to their backroom team. The club has since said Gallagher will not be joining their set-up. Photograph: James Lawlor/Inpho
Jarlath Burns wrote to Naas GAA club over the news that they were going to add coach Rory Gallagher to their backroom team. The club has since said Gallagher will not be joining their set-up. Photograph: James Lawlor/Inpho
Malachy Clerkin's picture
Malachy Clerkin
Tue Jan 07 2025 - 20:36

The news that the president of the GAA has written to Naas GAA club regarding the appointment of Rory Gallagher as a coach comes as a surprise. Even with the year only a few days old, the desk of the Uachtarán is full to bursting. The club All-Irelands are about to be decided, the new football rules are coming to the boil, the weather is having its way with the schedules. The nitty-gritty of who does what for a club team is not what a GAA president would usually be concerning himself with.

The news that Jarlath Burns has done so? Probably not a surprise at all.

Right from the beginning of his presidency, Burns has made it obvious that he doesn’t want his three years in the role to pass in a haze of rubber chicken dinners and ineffectual speeches. He wants to get right in among it and make changes where he can. His first year in the job will be up six weeks from now – he has shown more reforming zeal in those 10½ months than anyone since Seán Kelly two decades ago.

Most visibly, he has done it with big-ticket items such as appointing Jim Gavin to head up a committee to fix football. People had been shaking their heads about the state of the game for well over a decade and Burns made it a priority to do something. Regardless of what happens between here and the end of his term in 2027, it will probably go down as his biggest swing.

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But he has been active – and, more to the point, reactive – on the granular stuff too. He tried to get last summer’s Tailteann Cup semi-finals swapped with the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals at six days’ notice, only to have his idea rejected by Central Council.

When the GPA made their presentation to Central Council in September about getting rid of the pre-season competitions, Burns put it to a vote immediately in the room. It was passed, much to the chagrin of delegates who would usually have been given prior warning if a such a vote was likely to happen. The Longford delegate went as far as telling the Examiner the following week that the rule would be overturned if anyone was minded to bring it to the DRA.

All of this is in keeping with how Burns wants his presidency to be seen. The GAA is a huge operation and there will always be plenty of people around the place to patiently explain why something can’t be done, or at least why it can’t be done in a hurry. Burns has always been keen to project the opposite image.

Rory Gallagher pictured during his days as Derry manager. Naas GAA club this week reversed their decision to add Gallagher to the backroom staff of their senior men's team. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho
Rory Gallagher pictured during his days as Derry manager. Naas GAA club this week reversed their decision to add Gallagher to the backroom staff of their senior men's team. Photograph: Laszlo Geczo/Inpho

The issue of Naas GAA bringing Rory Gallagher in to coach their senior men’s team is a deeply knotted problem. Gallagher has never been charged with the domestic violence alleged by his former wife Nicola. In February of last year, the GAA’s own Disputes Resolution Authority ruled that the Ulster Council’s decision to debar Gallagher from any role or participation in GAA activities was invalid. Gallagher is free to coach any team, just as any team is free to engage him as a coach.

But none of this is straightforward. Just because the law of the land and the quasi-legal adjudication of the GAA say one thing, public opinion won’t necessarily follow. This is particularly true of something as intimate as allegations of violence against women at the hands of their partners. Not to mention something that has for so long been shamefully ignored.

Domestic violence continues to be a grossly overlooked fact of Irish life. The week before Christmas, gardaí released statistics showing that there had been 61,000 reports of domestic abuse made across the country in 2024. It was up 9 per cent on the previous year – that’s 167 reports a day, every day. And yet last year’s general election came and went with scarcely a mention of it. Nobody pretended it was an election issue.

[ Naas backtrack on Rory Gallagher’s inclusion in management team ]

Gallagher has become a lightning rod. Despite the lack of charges, there are clearly a lot of people who believe the worst about him and his relationship with his ex-wife. On top of which, domestic violence isn’t taken anywhere near seriously enough by our leaders, and some of the rage and frustration at that fact has landed on him. So when Naas GAA decided to bring him in as a coach last weekend, the backlash was instant.

Nobody knows why Burns chose to involve himself in the process. Most likely, it was because he could. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Burns has been roundly and deservedly lauded for the get-things-done energy he has brought to the role, and this was something he could influence. The Naas/Gallagher story was filling airtime with unhelpful coverage of the GAA, and this was a way of killing it off.

The GAA president can’t be swinging at every pitch though. Whatever anyone thinks about Gallagher, it’s an unprecedented overreach for Burns to be getting on to Naas – or any club in any county – about the make-up of their coaching staff. Particularly when the GAA themselves have decreed that Gallagher is not a banned coach.

Reforming zeal is good. Taking a stand after somebody has been accused of domestic abuse is good. There are better ways to do so than this.