Pay the players - but at what price to the GAA?
Any proposed change of GAA policy should surely pass two basic tests.
1. Will it help or hinder the long-term survival of our indigenous games?
2. Will it help or hinder the survival of the GAA as a community-based organisation?
Arguments for monetary compensation - an entirely separate issue from real player welfare - fail both tests.
Firstly, to survive in the face of the 24/7 media-driven and sponsor-driven saturation promotion of international sports, Gaelic games, at club and community ‘seedbed’ level, need every euro that the GAA can afford for coaching, promotion and development.
That’s just an unarguable starting point that has to be recognised.
GAA revenues really do get redistributed to the coal-face and no fat-cats get in the way.
Secondly and more fundamentally, money for inter-county players will subvert the values and the drivers that are at the heart of what makes the GAA work so uniquely at community level.
Community and club allegiances are the very heartbeat of the GAA.
They would be the first casualties of any new monetary compensation regime. Why? Because human nature in any quasi-business situation will be so predictable. Over time, more and more players will change allegiances to follow the best paying options (probably driven by the deepest sponsor pockets).
Money will need contracts; contracts bring disputes (eg, can a manager easily drop a player when this has an income effect on the individual?).
Disputes bring lawyers; then a transfer market (which will always favour the stronger/wealthier).
As players begin to change their clubs and counties, the irreplaceable community heartbeat of the GAA will weaken progressively and resuscitation will not be an option.
Start on this slippery compensation slope and who can predict how far the slide will go.
This is not just a GAA issue - it should concern anyone who thinks about what kind of Ireland we want to pass on to future generations.
Imagine an Ireland without hurling, for instance - other than in pockets of rural Kilkenny, Antrim and parts of Munster.
The Arts Council and every cultural, artistic and political lobby group should rightly berate the GAA if it does not prioritise - and direct maximum resources to - such a unique indigenous art form.
A nostalgic look back by the Yeats Summer School of 2050 on the one-time importance of hurling in Irish life would be a poor outcome.
So what then about the players and ‘excessive demands on them?’ The number of games for top players is not the problem - it’s the new-era training regimes.
If the Gaelic Players’ Association and Croke Park make common cause, they can find a way to curtail and regulate the vicious circle of over-the-top inter-county training regimes. Bring back a better balance between club and county activity.
Real player welfare can be ensured by restructuring and regulation, but monetary compensation is never a valid alternative, even from a thinking player’s perspective.
Former Derry star Joe Brolly has forcefully made the often-overlooked point that it is the county players who get most out of the games - the status, the excitement, the glory, the spin-offs.
The big games and the top players do of course serve an important ‘shop-window’ purpose for the games, but the requirements of a shop-window should always be secondary to the long-term objectives of any organisation (and should never dictate, or subvert, core policy and values).
The compensation lobby should be faced down with the simple argument about where lies the greater long-term good - for the games, for the players of the future and for Irish community life.
Joe Tuohy
Hillsborough
Model Farm Road
Cork
