Only way is up now for O’Neill

Already new GAA president Liam O’Neill is in exalted company. Not only does he stride in the footsteps of luminaries such as Maurice Davin, Con Murphy and Seán Kelly. But men like Matt Barrett, Gerald Ratner and David Shepherd can also now call him one of their own.

Barrett was the Barclays Bank chief executive who told a UK treasury committee that you’d want to be a right eejit altogether to have any truck with credit cards. Gerald was the gem who nearly banjaxed Ratners jewellers when he gave away a little secret about the company’s ability to sell cut-glass decanters with six glasses for £4.95. “Because it’s total crap.”

And Shepherd was the tailor’s dummy who suggested, having summoned all his marketing know-how, that the target market for Topman was “hooligans or whatever”.

Taking his cue from these colossuses of PR, O’Neill opted for a bold opening gambit to his presidency this week when he described his chief product, which I suppose you’d have to say Gaelic football is, as “boring”.

If only his pitch had hit the streets before last Sunday’s league semi-finals, the rousing call to arms would surely have brought the crowd at HQ up to at least 12,000.

As presidential inaugurations go, it was less ‘Yes We Can’ and more ‘Should We Bother?’.