That ‘controversy’ didn’t get its spikes out of the starting blocks
Hands up if you think the biggest issue in the GAA’s inbox this week was where the Irish rugby team trained on Thursday?
There’s no shortage of competition. The festering bitterness between Cork and Kerry continues after the two sides met the weekend before last and three saw red; a less well-known enmity is simmering away nicely between Mayo and Tyrone and came to a brief boil recently as well. We won’t get into Mickey Harte’s threat to ban cameras from covering one of the most successful football teams of the last decade.
Want more? Darragh O Sé, one of the marquee Gaelic footballers of the last decade and a half, retired a few days ago. The GAA had one of the football championship’s sponsors withdraw two Fridays ago, though they were replaced almost immediately. What isn’t being resolved immediately is the stand-off between Justin McCarthy and the Limerick players; that controversy shows no signs of subsiding any time soon, with Croke Park ruling out any involvement.
However, we learned on Friday that the GAA could seek clarification from Nemo Rangers of Cork as to why Ireland’s rugby team trained in their complex on Thursday.
To sum up: one of the few hurling counties around is free to tear itself to pieces in a long, drawn-out agony but GAA headquarters won’t be helping out. So help me, though, if those ruggerheads set foot on a GAA facility...
As a non-event masquerading as controversy, this one doesn’t get its spikes out of the starting blocks. If you want to get technical on the use of premises and so on, a separate company runs Nemo’s leisure facilities, which don’t involve the GAA grounds.
However, the suggestion that there might be some kind of case to answer here in the first place is one that might cause a few frowns in GAA clubs all around the country this morning.
Declan Kidney said on Thursday morning that GAA clubs had invested well in their facilities in the boom years, which is true. But no matter how well those clubs have invested, the majority of those facilities need to keep ticking over commercially.
If this nit-picking were to be applied, say, to five-a-side soccer games being run on GAA all-weather facilities, then clubs the length and breadth of Ireland would feel a little warm under the collar this morning. Your columnist, for instance, occupied floor space, and little more, in one such game held every Thursday evening at the premises of a prominent Cork GAA club.
The club was providing amenities for its locality and making a modest amount of money in the process, and nobody sought clarification about its allowing non-GAA sports to be played on its premises. Not even when it was transparently clear that one of the five-a-side games was a local soccer club’s soccer training session.
The possibility, however remote, that Nemo Rangers might even have to clarify the situation is a disgrace. The Cork city outfit is one of the most successful clubs in the history of the Association, with a string of senior county and All-Ireland club titles to its credit.
They are unlikely to cower in Trabeg because the GAA hierarchy might be pursing its lips. Nemo have always been independently minded: when the Cork clubs forum was looking for somewhere to hold its meetings last year as they drafted a document seeking administrative reform, they found a home in the south city club.
If the GAA’s mission is to spread the gospel of its games, then Nemo’s record puts those of many other clubs to shame: its players and coaches are a credit to Gaelic football and they play an attractive brand of football in the right spirit (this from someone whose last sporting encounter with the men in green and black ended in what long-standing convention describes as a ‘frank exchange of views’ at the dressing-room end of the Glen Field, and for the record, that ball was never over the line).
They don’t neglect hurling either.
Off the field, Nemo draw on the expertise of what is, in reality, an extraordinarily small membership to drive the club forward, with its magnificent new complex vivid testimony to that expertise and drive.
More to the point, they’re more than willing to offer guidance to officers of other clubs seeking advice on developing their own facilities; on one occasion your columnist saw Antrim GAA people being given a guided tour of the Nemo complex, followed by a sit-down chat with club officers on how they might do something similar in their own area. Just throwing that in so you’d know. For clarification purposes.
