Fear of paying players is the real problem
According to a Turkish proverb, when a hatchet first entered the forest, some of the trees comforted each other: “At least the handle is one of us.” Things didn’t work out too well for those trees counting on some timber-based fellow feeling. If they’d been managers they might have survived.
When you consider the GAA’s tacit admission that the payment of managers is a problem, particularly at intercounty level, it’s extraordinary that one of those managers hasn’t come out swinging.
Alongside the criticism of the concept of the outside manager there’s a general pardon issued to certain traditionally strong counties. We are regularly told that such counties would never resort to such appointments.
We’re therefore invited to infer that those traditional counties do not pay their managers, which leads us to the unfortunate conclusion that every other county is paying theirs.
Getting tarred with that kind of sweeping brushstroke, though, doesn’t seem to bother managers of all stripes: you don’t seem to read too many interviews in which managers point out that such sweeping generalisations are directly incriminating them in under-the-counter payments.
Why not? You could ask a manager, but it’s doubtful he’d respond. Too strong on the brotherhood: for the people who wear the ‘bainisteoir’ bib solidarity isn’t something that happened in Polish shipyards.
In this corner of the newspaper we don’t have a particular problem with managers being paid. There seems to be a series of spurious arguments put out to suggest that doing so in an official, approved fashion would be tantamount to seeing four skeletal horsemen in the sky, but few of them stand up to close scrutiny.
The ‘why do they need it now when they didn’t before’ argument? On general principles you should never argue that things were like this once so they should still be the same way. As John Maynard Keynes said, ‘when the facts change then my opinion changes. And you, sir?’ We refer to the notion of the flat earth, and move on.
The ‘this is an amateur Association’ argument? It is, apart from the professional administrators, medics, physios, accountants, games development officers, counsellors, receptionists... the hard facts are that professional competence costs money. No-one in their right mind would question paying money to the likes of the people listed above because their expertise is needed to ensure the GAA runs smoothly.
I’m afraid your immediate response (“Yes, but managers are different”) does not hold water here: the point is that amateur body or not, the GAA needs professionals and pays them accordingly.
The ‘players will want it next’ argument? In our experience some of the people who have the best idea how little money there is in the country are intercounty players.
It’s doubtful that any GAA player thinks that an economy where banks are being closed is interested in paying hurlers and footballers, never mind being capable of doing so, but this appears to be the great fear. In reality there is only one option left — to declare a general amnesty for those who have transgressed in the past and to make paid managers an official part of the Association — if that’s the choice of an individual county board.
History teaches us that much. In rugby there was a similar situation stretching into the early 90s, when it was well known that several nations were putting the sham into amateur when it came to player payment.
One former Irish international once recalled wryly that French opponents, for instance, were fond of handing over business cards along with warm invitations to visit if one was ever in their part of France. But the players’ various occupations listed in official match programmes — working in municipal offices, and so on — didn’t always tally with the bistros, bars and restaurants which figured prominently on those business cards, where the player’s name was usually followed by (prop). Eventually this hypocrisy came to an end, and contrary to those given to predicting the end of rugby as everybody knew it, the game became more popular than ever when it went professional.
As for the ‘well-maybe-but-rugby-is-professional’ argument, stop. Rugby is a paid profession for about 120 players and maybe the same number of support staff.
That’s part of the problem for the GAA, but it’s also part of the solution. The demands on elite footballers and hurlers mean that it’s almost a profession, with the ‘paid’ part left to one side, while the sheer number of those intercounty players is what makes pay for play so unlikely. But it would help if everyone simply admitted that the biggest part of their problem with paying managers is the prospect of paying players. After all, you can’t deal with your problem until you recognise it.
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
