Letters to the Editor: GAA must explain why agreed integration process was halted
Mary McAleese during a interview with human rights lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher at an event marking the 50th anniversary of The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) in partnership with School of Law at Trinity College, Dublin, in June. Picture: Niall Carson
Dear President Burns,
Last Saturday, 83,000 people filled Croke Park to honour Katie Taylor. Three days later, Mary McAleese resigned as chair of the Steering Group on Integration. She was brokenhearted by the GAA’s retreat from its commitment to One Association by 2027 and voiced the grave concern that some within the GAA do not want women making decisions at the highest level.
These moments present two profoundly different visions of Ireland. One is expansive, courageous, and ready for the future. The other appears fearful of sharing power.
Ms McAleese was right to speak of vision. Without vision, an organisation entrusted with carrying a nation’s culture has nothing. The great power of the GAA is unity. It holds Ireland whole, uniting all 32 counties through parish, club, county, and province — and carrying that shared belonging across the world.
Yet an association that unites the 32 counties cannot call its vision complete while it fails to unite women and men. Women have never been peripheral to the GAA. They have been peripheral only to its power.
For generations, women have played, coached, fundraised, organised, washed jerseys, transported children, and sustained players, clubs, and communities. They should not have to access Gaelic games through the back door, nor wait outside the rooms where their future is decided.
Unifying the three associations would strengthen Gaelic games, replacing fragmentation with coherence and releasing the generative power of a shared purpose, a force greater than any association could create alone.
Integration is not simply a cost. It is a strategic investment in the growth, coherence, and future of Gaelic games. As you yourself have said, a fully integrated organisation would be “unstoppable in terms of commercial capability”. Financial realities may shape the pace of equal investment, but they must not determine who belongs or who decides. Money can explain phased implementation. It cannot justify indefinite structural separation.
At a time when equality is being rolled back elsewhere, the GAA must not import another country’s culture war into our national games. Ireland’s story is one of an ever-widening understanding of who belongs. Equity cannot be invoked to postpone equality. Equity is the work; equality is the destination.
I call on the GAA to explain transparently why the agreed process was halted, to answer Ms McAleese’s concerns directly, and to restore a binding, publicly accountable, time-bound path to One Association.
Croke Park showed us the future on Saturday. The question is whether the leadership of the GAA has the vision and courage to join it. Unity is already the beating heart of the GAA. It must now be embodied in its future.
Aontas must mean all of us.
Ní neart go cur le chéile.
The east coast railway is probably the most beautiful rail line in the world, and has the potential to serve a great population of Leinster from the Wexford and Waterford areas. However, it has been neglected and almost brought out of service, by stealth, as it is only used a few times to serve the ferries. This can hardly be viable in the long term, as relatively few non-motor commuters use ferries, when travel by air is cheaper, safer, and considerably faster — 30 minutes rather than 30 hours to France.
The rail line is hazardous because of flooding, being just above sea level; rock falls at the narrow Bray Head pass; and the number of road crossings.
These could be solved by a 3km tunnel through the Head and by elevating the line, allowing a bicycle lane below and free flow of flood water. It would cost less than motorways, and save our valuable land for food production.
[It] would be sustainable, and benefit the environment and the lives of ‘buachaillí agus cailíní Loc Garmain’ as they helped to found our Republic in 1798.
AI, when masquerading as a human voice by use of large language models, shows many of the traits of a psychopath: it pretends to emote while cold-heartedly calculating its next move; it is avaricious in feeding it own needs (your attention, your money); it requires a constant supply of victims.
Sadly, we all now need to treat unsolicited digital attention with the same caution that we need to figure out if an individual we have just met is being honest. Do you trust the man or woman eyeballing you on your doorstep asking you to give them something? The power of AI now is such that a fellow human being can instruct it to hoover up all the information about you that is available online and push it back to you in the most flattering way.
It doesn’t take long to realise something is being sold to you and your money or your free time will be involved to keep the seductive flattery going. The vulnerable are most likely to be the victims.
The article by Ann Murphy on the declining rate of religious practice in Ireland, while largely excellent, is marred by one statement when she states that four in 10 parents of children who attend religious schools want the option of sending them to a multi-denominational school.
Official Department of Education sources state that 41% of those parents who were entitled to take part in the survey did so. Of this number, some 40% expressed the desire for change, which amounts to some 16.5% of those who were entitled to take part. Thus it is more accurate to say that over eight in 10 parents of children who attend religious schools did not express a desire for change.
The return of TDs after the Dáil summer recess coincides, as always, with the commencement of hare netting across the country. Thanks to the defeat of an anti-coursing bill in July, the fleet-footed captives will have to run from pairs of hyped-up dogs from the end of this month.
Though the bill was voted down by a massive 125 to 24, there’s a substantial piece of unfinished business arising from that Dáil debate. I refer to the reference by a Government minister to an independent report dating from 2022 that estimated the value of coursing to the Irish economy as approximately €70m per year.
Requests by opposition TDs and animal protection groups for a copy of the report met with stalling; and, three months after the coursing debate, the report has yet to be subjected to public scrutiny.
In the interests of openness and transparency, the report should be made available. Hare coursing depends on obfuscation and cover-up for its very survival. “Unauthorised photography” is banned at coursing fixtures and animal protection volunteers meet with hostility when they attend to observe the hare chasing.
If the elusive 2022 report that makes such extraordinary and surprising claims about this “traditional rural pastime” is not released, what remains of its credibility will take a huge hit.
Even people who never gave the subject a thought might begin to wonder if, just possibly, coursing might have something to hide…
