If hurling is so good, why is it so small?

This is the time of the year when hurling is placed on an altar for worship. Even the agnostic are curious. It is like when Wimbledon is on telly, or The Masters, or the Six Nations, or the World Cup – any World Cup. Everyone’s eye is drawn to something shiny.

So, the Munster championship was launched to a symphony, the Leinster championship was launched to the sound of brass, and for the next while people will pay attention. The Clare-Cork game on the opening weekend attracted a peak viewership of 388,000 on RTÉ, and a staggering audience share of 42 per cent. For a bank holiday weekend, those numbers were far beyond the norm.

But it won’t last long. In the Liam MacCarthy Cup 27 matches are stuffed into eight weeks, and then there will be just seven games for the rest of the season. Two of those will be mismatches in the preliminary quarter-finals, and five of them will be played on Saturdays. Ask the Leinster Council about the attractiveness of Saturday matches.

And then what? If we have convinced ourselves that this is a Golden Age for the game, what good will come of it beyond a few blissful weeks of spectacular matches and feverish coverage? Does it make anybody want to play in places where nobody ever really wanted to play before?

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“Complacency is a disease which is more lethal in hurling than in any sport,” wrote Liam Sheedy as chairman of the Hurling 2020 committee, 10 years ago.

Wrapped up in that complacency is a streak of self-regard. As a community, hurling people have always felt superior. They like and admire other games but can’t see one that compares with hurling. They’re right, of course. But sometimes that can be a blinding condition. If hurling is so good, why is it so small?

When hurling was booming in the late 1990s what was the dividend for the game apart from the excitement that coursed through the championship? Did it break down any of the GAA’s local discrimination? No?

Offaly and Galway in action on Saturday. Photograph: Andrew Paton/Inpho

People who are immersed in the game are fiercely protective of it. Paudie Butler was appointed national director of hurling 20 years ago and excelled in the role for five years. His engagement with hurlers, or aspiring hurlers, in every corner of the island had a pastoral quality.

“I want every child to have the chance to hurl because they’re Irish,” he said to journalist Kieran Shannon in 2015. “I have this belief our game is a treasure like the Ardagh Chalice or the language. It’s ancient and something unique to ourselves.”

Nobody ever disputes the claim that hurling is a national treasure, whether it has safe harbour in your club or not. It is an easy thing to believe. Hurling never wants for flattery or lip service. In 2018 Unesco accepted hurling on to its Representative List of The Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and there is a similar list curated by the State.

In a long entry on the website, written for the uninitiated, one line has a particular resonance. “As custodians of hurling, the GAA believes that the best way to preserve the viability of hurling is to ensure that it is played as extensively as possible.”

This has been the circular, intractable problem. All gains in areas where the game had no traditional home have been small and against the tide of entrenched local preference. In those places the game has always depended on the energy and endurance of people who often feel isolated and under-resourced.

The majesty of the game that half the country has just watched on television never seems to make a difference. While social media lights up with paeans to the spectacle, these people are deadlocked at the bottom of a hill.

Martin Fogarty was the national hurling development manager from 2016 to 2021, at which time the position was discontinued. Like Butler, he pounded the roads, offering support and looking for solutions. When Jarlath Burns established a new Hurling Development Committee [HDC], Fogarty agreed to come on board.

The GAA's hew head of hurling, Willie Maher. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho

From years of hands-on engagement he had an unparalleled knowledge of the clubs in the northern half of the country, from Mayo to Louth, who were trying to nurture the game. When the HDC considered doing a roadshow Fogarty produced a list of 102 clubs, divided them into four regions, and picked a venue that was no more than an hour’s drive for everybody invited to attend.

He presented a draft itinerary for the meeting, which included “a motivational speech” by Brian Cody, and an opportunity for every club to outline their challenges to a listening ear.

That kind of outreach, though, has obvious limits, and Fogarty was conscious of that too. These clubs have been subject to scoping exercises many times before. During his time as the national hurling development manager, Fogarty was adamant about the need for greater funding. He was certain that the only route to progress was with targeted resourcing of clubs who had a sincere desire to grow the game.

By the time he resigned from the HDC last December he saw no evidence of this. In his 1,600-word resignation letter, seen by the Irish News, he accused the HDC of “going around in circles”. How long has the GAA being going around in circles on this issue? Decades.

Willie Maher started as GAA’s new head of hurling at the beginning of the month. Unlike Butler and Fogarty, his role will be less “operational” he said in an interview with John Harrington on GAA.ie, and more “strategic”.

“It’s been a listening exercise [so far] and will be for the foreseeable future as regards finding out what’s going on and then drilling down into counties. So, what operational plan do you have? Where does hurling fit into that operational plan? How do we hold county boards and county games managers to account in terms of what we’ve agreed to do from a hurling development perspective? Is it being done or not?”

Is it being done or not? The answer to that question has damned the GAA for generations. At least Maher is talking about accountability. That would be a good start.