Plenty of questions but few answers at committee
There aren’t a whole pile of drawbacks to a job that permits you attend a major sporting event and have the cheek to call it work but a few hours spent at Leinster House as the latest committee with responsibility for sport fumbles about like a Junior C footballer on a wet Sunday morning is right up there as one of them.
Circumstances this week dictated that this column couldn’t make it towards Kildare Street on Wednesday afternoon for the latest session of the joint committee on transport, tourism, and sport and the reports, tweets, and general air of dismay that the session prompted only heightened the sense it was a bullet dodged.
The brief, as the men who run the GAA, FAI, and IRFU entered the room, was simple enough: A look at the “challenges, strategies, and governance of sport in Ireland”. Instead of surgical precision what we got — as we always do — was a scattergun spread of questions, statements that amounted to mostly smoke and noise and little in the way of punch.
Thousands of words were spoken but raw numbers describe the vacuum best.
There are 11 members of the committee, drawn from various political parties, and three eminent people were there at their behest. Yet the number of individual topics broached hit somewhere around 30 in just a handful of hours and no more than a third of those were even close to anything to do with the topics down for discussion.
That old joke about a camel being a horse drawn up by committee is an obvious staging post here, although John Le Carre’s observation about how a committee is an animal with four back legs is more apposite. So, too, Milton Berle’s two cents worth. “A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours,” the 1950s TV star once said.
Damn, what a great line.
It was suggested to Jenny Pitman, the Grand National-winning trainer, one time that the Jockey Club race planning committee consisted of a table and four chairs. “And I bet they’ve got woodworm,” she added. That’s almost 30 years ago though. Sports bodies are different beasts now and a focused examination of some key issues would have been welcome this week.
Take strategies as just one simple example: The big three sporting bodies all have questions to answer about the well-being of, and any plans to improve, their playing structures, whether that is the FAI’s League of Ireland, the GAA’s club game and its subservience to the inter-county scene, or the IRFU’s subsistence-based All-Ireland League. Still, at least the thorny issue of fan embassies got an airing, eh?
There were some notable contributors among the inquisitors. There always are but the muddled format and the ease with which those called to the chambers habitually bat away any queries of note amid the morass adds up to little more than a waste of time and a spurned opportunity.
The contrast with the UK’s culture, media, and sport committee and its considerably more intensive dealings with the International Associations of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president Sebastian Coe on the nature of what he did or did not know about allegations of systematic doping in Russia before they were unveiled in a German TV documentary was stark.
Another topical counterpoint to the Oireachtas hearing was apparent in the fantastically revealing documentary The Impossible Job. Made two decades ago, it featured the late Graham Taylor as he wrestled with the role of England manager and a World Cup qualifying campaign that ended in elimination and ignominy.
Much has been made of the inside-the-ropes access afforded to the filmmakers. Among the best scenes was that of Taylor sat at the FA’s boardroom table with Manchester City’s Peter Swales and other blazers as he answered queries on the previous summer’s tour to the US, where they lost to the hosts, and the antics of Paul Gascoigne.
This was no glorious era of glasnost. The Taylor documentary was an outlier even then but it is clearly all the more so in the modern era when even the amateur officials on Wexford’s county board can deem it a good idea to effectively bar the media from the mostly humdrum roll call that makes up their monthly get-togethers.
It seems that the more live sport we get to see, the less we learn about those tasked with running it. It makes for a bland, dangerous landscape, one where little of interest or import is revealed about the engines that keep the machine moving or those who oil the cogs.
And we all know by now that sport, like all industries, needs all the accountability it can get.
