Don’t call him controversial - Joe Brolly Interview
In Tralee last Friday, the Derry man sat down with the Irish Examiner to discuss the association’s key issues.
Conciliatory? In your dreams: Brolly unleashed a volley of condemnation at the organisation’s hierarchy on a variety of issues — and warned he’s only warming up.
Okay, you got him. “Indentured slaves”, those words that had most of us tracing the recesses of our history class memories or scurrying to Google?
Joe Brolly was being slightly mischievous. Mischievous but with a moral.
“Nobody disagrees with the content. Some people say ‘well, indentured slaves was a bit too strong’. That was a visceral phrase designed to make people sit up and pay attention. The raw data is there. There’s no sport in the world that has the training-to-game ratio that we have. The issue is always money.”
If you want a sound bite, Brolly will provide them, especially when he’s sincere about the topic of conversation. Behind his occasionally comical spats with Spillane and O’Rourke, behind the mega-watt smile, the state of player welfare in the GAA genuinely scares him.
“An arms race,” he says regularly. “A demolition derby.” The barrister in him knows how to structure and distil an argument; the pundit and columnist he’s been for the best part of 15 years understands what makes news. No other person in Gaelic games has seized the Zeitgeist like him.
Sitting beside an open hearth fire in Tralee’s Ballygarry House Hotel with a brandy in front of him, all he’s missing is the cigar. The scene is ill-fitting for someone Lutheran-like nailing of a thesis against the GAA’S front door but it’s just as misleading.
He’s here free of charge to surprise Kieran Donaghy as part of an Austin Stacks fundraiser. He’s never asked for money for any GAA appearance. The cognac is partly medicinal. His flight on a two-seater plane from Belfast to Farranfore was decidedly choppy.
Alcohol is a rarity for Brolly these days. If truth be told, it was only a luxury before he donated his kidney to his St Brigid’s club-mate Shane Finnegan three years ago. He says his circulation isn’t great. “Cold feet all the time, cold hands. It’s not a picnic.”
Cycling has given him an avenue of pleasure and release but he had five crashes last year. “I felt a bit self-destructive after the transplant. I’m not exactly sure why, it’s deep s***. It’s not straightforward.”
He was insulted when GAA president Liam O’Neill last month qualified his criticism of Brolly’s remarks by stating he had been so generous in providing Finnegan with a kidney. Almost as much by director general Páraic Duffy’s indirect dig at him in his annual report when Duffy wrote: “Some of these commentators seem to consider themselves better, purer GAA members than the rest of us, but it’s easy to act the purist when one has only to talk, as opposed to taking decisions in the real world”.
Brolly isn’t having that. “This sort of patronising attitude about greener than green Gaels that think they’ve a monopoly in the GAA. This sort of ‘ah, we know Joe is very generous — he gave a kidney’. That f***ing s*** drives me insane. It’s so dishonest and we all know it’s dishonest.
“Now I don’t want to turn my guns on those boys properly but the time is approaching. There can be no doubt that (commercial and stadium director) Peter McKenna runs the GAA now. There can be no doubt there’s a fear with him because he’s a pretty intimidating guy. He’s a tough, forceful guy and very good at what he does.
“The problem with our investments and we’ve got to have healthy commerce and we always did have but the whole idea of Croke Park envisaged and driven by Peter Quinn was that it would pay for our idealism. There is nothing wrong with having the commerce, it’s great. We have to make money, we put it back in. We invest everything and everything should be done through the prism of our ethics. What are our ethics? Who knows?”
Brolly would swear blind Duffy added his section on player welfare to his report in reaction to the “massive disquiet” over the last couple of months. He describes the report as “Páraic Duffy’s annual whitewash”.
“You’ve people like Ginger McLoughlin, Trevor Ringland, Hugo MacNeill saying ‘look what happened to rugby, you’ve got to stay away from this because it’s a false goal’. We become consumers and an audience. This is obvious stuff yet the answer from Páraic and these guys is that we have to be sensitive to commercial realities.
“What is he talking about? Obviously, we live in the real world. I’m not going out wearing sackcloth and ashes. But I’ll tell you this: Páraic Duffy would last about two days in my world. You’ve to make real decisions, you’ve to stand on your own two feet. He would last two days in there.
“We need people of capacity. These are important jobs. This is a €60 million turnover business. This is a job that requires serious vision. We are the biggest remaining amateur sports organisation in the world. Look at the forces we have to stand against to remain that way. What do we know about inertia? If there’s a vacuum capitalism rushes it and that’s what happening. He says ‘how dare people talk about corporate GAA’. What the f*** is he talking about? Sky, The Sun, American football in the height of the Championship season. That’s commercialism and it’s a question of ethics.
“Because the GAA kept its head in the sand about player welfare it was easier to abdicate it and hand it over to the GPA. Now we have a crazy situation in an amateur game. It’s not the GPA’s fault. We have been so hijacked by professional sports practices that we’ve a trade union that is based on a professional sporting model. The PFA’s Brendan Batson helped to set up the GPA because of the huge demands on players because it’s f***ing wild west out there.”
Brolly’s been dubbed the “Salman Rushdie of County Mayo” but he was taken aback by how they were treated last August when the All-Ireland semi-final replay was moved to the Gaelic Grounds because of a colleges American football game in Croke Park.
“The thing with Gaelic folk is that we are very, very subservient. We like to think the best. People are no longer thinking the best. Take what happened with the Kerry-Mayo replay. (The GAA say) ‘ah, Mayo people were a bit upset, we can understand why but on the other hand...’ That’s completely wrong. Gaels were disgusted. It’s not how it should be and it’s not how it’s supposed to be.
“We have never had issues with money. We can get our money ethically. We do need to be radical now and what sort of an association are we? Are we communitarian? That can obviously encompass a commercial element. Should our investments be ethical? Why, for example, can an Irish company like TV3 with an Irish base who have an average audience of 289,000 for their Championship games be sidestepped?”
Brolly takes umbrage at being described as controversial. When he proposes managers should be confined to their own clubs and counties, he asks what’s so remarkable about that when players are asked to do the same.
“Why is it that people seem to think you can bring in an outside manager for senior teams when they have perfectly successful without one at under-age level or at least played in the right way and ethos? It’s a bad habit that has swept the country. The director general of the GAA is saying that we can pay managers explicitly but also says he does not advocate one solution over another. This is the guardian of the GAA’s ideals. Do we want to turn professional? Let’s have a proper, rigorous debate. Let’s have people of ability, young people, people with vision, people who are leaders of their professional spheres involved in this.
“Let’s formulate a charter for the GAA. The problem at the moment is we have a GAA that’s fit for 1975; we don’t have a GAA that’s fit for 2015. We don’t know what it is, we don’t have a clear direction, which is why, for example, the director general can say in 2013 that under no circumstances, that it would be unprincipled, for us to sell broadcasting rights to a pay-per-view provider and then within six months we do exactly that (Duffy maintains he meant making all or the majority of Championship games pay-per-view).
“We need to look at our democratic structures, we need to overhaul them, we need proper oversight. This sort of mesmerised reverence that there is, it’s no good. We need people held to account. There is far too much cronyism and we all know this to be true. It’s a source of immense frustration that members of the GAA hierarchy are so afraid of debate and so sensitive to criticism. I’m saying things that are statements of the bleeding obvious in the GAA at the moment. The answer to that is to go into their shell.”
He’s sceptical about how the GAA have addressed player welfare even though Duffy earlier this weekdismissed his claim that little or nothing came of the reports on player burnout and fixtures and paid managers: “That’s typical Joe so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to that”.
The stock reply to Brolly’s concerns is that he’s being theatrical. That galls him especially when the points he’s making about the plight of young players are supported by professional medics.
“The injuries are mounting up, the fun’s gone out of the game, kids are specialising much earlier. We know international best practice states the worst thing you can do is for kids to specialise in one sport. They should be playing multiple sports but with Gaelic games taking up so much time there’s no time for anything else. Young fellas are exhausted; they’re suffering from chronic fatigue.
“This was supposed to be about fun and by fun I don’t mean jollying about on the pitch. You compete, you give your best, you learn about satisfaction, participating with the team, about collaboration. Don’t forget 99% of teams will never win anything. But now because it’s an arms race you have lads saying ‘well if they’re training 10 times we’ll train 11’. By the time we get to the end of the year, Kerry will be All-Ireland champions anyway!”
After penning columns about Armagh’s training regime this season, Brolly received a lengthy phone-call from Kieran McGeeney who contested his claims about double training sessions.
In the media last week, McGeeney countered “lies” were being written. Brolly heard him out but remains unconvinced.
“C’mon, the eight players who left the panel, Andriu Mac Lochlainn’s contribution on Newstalk about training twice a day with Kildare, that he simply had to leave in the end because he had a job and had to work. The 16 operations in Kildare after Kieran McGeeney left. I’m not just pointing the finger at Kieran but when managers like that have autonomy and the boards are willing accomplices the whole thing can get out of control.”
Keeping in mind his wide-eyed cognisance of player welfare difficulties, will we see a softer Joe Brolly on The Sunday Game this summer?
He was particularly hard on Galway both during and after last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final defeat to Kerry. He said at the time: “The problem with Galway is there’s no competitive zeal, they’re not a serious team, they’re not seriously organised, they didn’t come here with real ambition.”
Might he be turning a corner?
“I just think that Galway weren’t serious mentally. I’m sure they did all the training that everybody else did but I was talking about Galway’s application to the game. They were on the fringes of it and yet Kerry were going through the motions and very vulnerable themselves. Galway could have won that game.
“You’ve to understand something: in the course of a live Sunday Game broadcast you might have three minutes. I mean three minutes to make a contribution — that’s about the height of it. So all you’re doing is throwing in the ball. It’s a totally different thing to what I’m saying (about player welfare).
“One of my problems with television is that you can’t get into these sort of discussions when I write a column and go on the radio for 45 minutes discussing it through because the world isn’t black and white. But to the extent of live football coverage, it’s tabloidy because all you can do is set the ball rolling on a debate but you haven’t got time to follow it up.
“Michael Lyster might say to me beforehand ‘you’ve got 30 seconds’ and the cameraman will be winding his finger. You’re thinking ‘condense it, make your point’. If you don’t make your point in that time, you don’t. There’s no forum for debate or discussion.”
Might he now give Kerry credit for their adaptability last September when he has used such awestruck terms as “machine” and “system” in reference to Donegal?
“I wasn’t always writing in glowing terms about Donegal. Let me make it clear: I’ve always decried the style of football. There’s no contradiction between saying ‘this is fascinating, this is remarkably efficient, this is an outstanding achievement by Jim McGuinness’ and saying ‘it has the capability of being extremely destructive to the game that we know’.
“Teams are already playing 12 men behind the ball everywhere. Look at the teams who were successful in Ulster last year. Monaghan, Armagh, Donegal — all heavy blanket defences. Armagh almost beat Donegal in a horrible game in Croke Park.
“Donegal’s style of play will look good when it’s up against a team that plays man-to-man football. It’s an ambush and that’s exciting but as it takes hold... look at how it was for Kerry and Cork to get to the Munster final last year. They were nearly ambushed by blanket defences.
“My other issue is you can’t watch a club game in Donegal anymore. They are all aping McGuinness’ style because it’s successful. There was a score-line of 1-4 to 1-2 in a championship game (Glenswilly v St Michael’s).”
Brolly will tell you about other problems he’s identified with our games. The secrecy around training sessions. The omerta in county squads. The bullying of players. He could and would go on but he must return to his Kerry hosts. Bomber Liston has a pint called for him.
“Don’t go away without letting me show you off in town!” he warns Brolly as he is whisked off for this interview.
“Obviously, I’m a driven person,” surmises Brolly. “I’ve got issues from my childhood and I don’t sleep. I’ve plenty of time.”
Good news for some, maybe not so good for others.
Related Article:
In response to yesterday’s Irish Examiner piece in which Joe Brolly revealed he’s been approached about running for the GAA presidency, a leading bookmakers have offered odds on him taking the office before 2020.
Paddy Power yesterday offered a price of 7/2 on the RTÉ Gaelic football pundit becoming president within the next five years. Effectively these are odds of him succeeding Aogán Ó Fearghail, who takes over from Liam O’Neill on February 28 as the next two appointment years are 2018 and 2021.
“Brolly may be the very definition of human marmite with GAA fans but as a successful barrister, campaigner and grassroots worker within the organisation there’s no doubting his pedigree for the role,” said a spokesman.
