Brennan stands firm on pay-for-play views

NEW GAA President Nickey Brennan yesterday reiterated comments made at last weekend’s Congress where he claimed that pay-for-play remained the ultimate ambition of the GPA.

Dessie Farrell has strongly refuted those remarks, claiming the GAA was ‘hung up’ on the issue, but Brennan’s viewpoint remained unchanged when queried on the latest war of words between two bodies who will meet next Tuesday.

“I understand they have denied that,” said Brennan at a media briefing in Croke Park. “I hold the view that I held. I’m not going to change it here.

“Anybody who would look at the address I gave last week would see that, while I made a strong stand on the issue of pay-for-play, any rational reading of my address would also have seen that we had a long list of issues that we are quite prepared to bring in to help player welfare with immediate effect.”

One of those will be the appointment of a Player Welfare Officer, applications for which are expected to be published late next week.

Brennan denied that the GAA’s objective was to rob the GPA of the oxygen that feeds it by embarking on its own proactive player welfare campaign.

The GPA, he believes, will be around for the “foreseeable future”.

However, there is liable to be further disagreements between the parties at next week’s meeting. While the GPA will be pushing Brennan to declare support for their grant scheme for inter-county players, the president wants to address some other issues.

“We want to understand what they’re about, their own long-term aims and ambitions. Some of that was put into the list of demands that they sent to us, but the first meeting will be about getting to know one another.

“I see that as the main purpose of the meeting. We’ll probably get to some of the substance of what they’re about but, quite honestly, it will take a number of meetings before we get to the bottom of that.”

Last month, the GPA claimed Central Council had already given its general backing to the idea of the grant scheme they are trying to impress on the Minister of Sport, but Brennan confirmed yesterday that the GAA had yet to endorse it or even decide where it stood on the matter.

“We will discuss that issue with the GPA. Whether we get it fully discussed next week, I don’t know. We’re not going to come in and say we’re going to solve everything next Tuesday. That’s not realistic. We have a number of issues we want to address specifically about that.”