Full time for political football?

By Michael Moynihan

Friday, July 10, 2009

WHEN the Labour Party subsumed Democratic Left into its numbers a couple of years ago, the photo opportunity of the day showed Labour boss Ruairi Quinn hugging Proinsias De Rossa in a gesture which could be interpreted as saying: welcome home, kid.

Little chance of the same happening with Christy Cooney and Dessie Farrell, maybe, but the end of the GAA-GPA staring match is in sight.

If you doubt it, you only needed to glance at the direction the GPA criticism was heading yesterday – it was directed not at Croke Park but at Kildare Street.

Politically it’s a good move for the player body – slashing across the knuckles of a minister in one of the most unpopular governments in Irish history isn’t going to alienate anybody.

Doing so in the immediate aftermath of the GAA’s indication of their willingness to engage with the GPA also presents a chilling scenario for the nation’s politicians; as they count down towards an election, the last thing they’ll want is being blackballed by the GAA. Politicians can see the tide coming in; if the GAA and GPA are sharing a hymn sheet (if not a balance sheet quite yet) then that’s a serious edifice to have looming over you.

However, while the imprimatur of politicians is one thing, there’s always a way for some grit to get into the sandwich – for both sides.

For the GAA there’s one sticky issue when it comes to waving the players away from the big pot of money in the Croke Park safe. Nobody seems to remember the Player Advisory Group set up under the chairmanship of Armagh’s Jarlath Burns around 2002, but it was a tacit admission that players needed to be involved when it comes to policy.

The establishment of that group undercut the tired mantra that everyone is equal in the eyes of the GAA and the way to effect change is through club representatives at county conventions and so on. People say the GPA is an elitist organisation that only represents the crème de la crème, and it may well be; to defend itself against those charges it need only point to the GAA doing exactly the same thing. The player association has a couple of headaches of its own. The level of dissatisfaction from club players and administrators with the GPA is hard to quantify for the simple reason that there’s no organisation representing them, though GAA management would no doubt clear their throats and point at their own chests there.

But that annoyance is real. Rank-and-file members of the GAA who already feel disconnected from corporate Croke Park don’t need to feel distanced from intercounty players too.

By the way, those Democratic Left guys weren’t long providing two of the Labour Party leaders, Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore.

Any chance of Dessie becoming Uachtaráin in the future?

* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie – Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx

This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Friday, July 10, 2009