Cooney: hurling needs long-term stability

GAA president Christy Cooney has stated his determination to end the cycle of structural changes to the various hurling championship tiers and find a long-term solution in the coming months.

A motion for next October’s Special Congress will, as expected, seek to include Carlow in the Liam MacCarthy Cup next year but all four tiers have become entangled in the confusion arising from promotion and relegation issues this summer.

“The most important thing is that we have a structure for next year’s championships and we can make our draws,” Cooney insisted at the launch of the Kilmacud Crokes Hurling Sevens competition in Croke Park.

“In fairness to Carlow they deserve the opportunity because they have won two Christy Ring cups and the other four counties (Clare, Offaly, Wexford and Antrim) ... clearly nobody wants to see them relegated.

“That’s the biggest challenge. Are we going to relegate? Are we going to broaden it from 12 teams? How do we judge the criteria on how people can compete? We have to consult and make sure it works.”

That consultative process will begin in the coming weeks and, while the Special Congress will begin the job of tidying up the mess, it will fall to next year’s Annual Congress to try and resolve the matter.

“I’ll speak to everyone,” said the president. “It will be a broad consultation process that will be in the interests of developing hurling and making it stronger and making sure every county gets a fair crack of the whip.

“I’m equally conscious of the tiers outside of the MacCarthy Cup. If we are going to make a competition meaningful and want counties to advance, promotion and relegation is an agreed part of that criteria. We’ll see where we go from there.”

One of the proposals likely to come before delegates next April will seek the suspension of promotions, but not relegations, for one season so that the numbers of teams in each grade – altered in response to the current difficulties – return to their current levels.

“We really need to get it right and I don’t want just a short-term solution either,” said Cooney. “If we put something to Congress next year that wasn’t thought out we’d be back to where we are with counties going to the DRA and we don’t need that.

“We need a clear road map.”

Confusion has reigned all summer. When Carlow won the Christy Ring Cup they believed they were assured a place in the Liam MacCarthy next season thanks to a successful Westmeath Annual Congress motion that had abolished promotion/relegation play-offs between the tiers.

However, the problem stemmed from Antrim’s argument that they had been guaranteed a three-year stint in Leinster and it snowballed when the DRA subsequently ruled the Westmeath motion out of order.

Cue chaos and Monday’s belated announcement detailing Carlow’s accommodation in the top tier in 2010 as well as the various other tweaks filtering down the line which will be voted on at Special Congress.

Meanwhile, Cooney has not ruled out the possible introduction of match specific bans, as opposed to suspensions based on periods of time, which are currently used by the GAA for their disciplinary procedures.

This is a bugbear that arises every year without fail and it has done so again this week after the Central Competitions Control Committee proposed four-week suspensions for Dublin’s Ciaran Whelan and Denis Bastick for incidents in the All-Ireland quarter-final against Kerry.

With Dublin’s next fixture not due until early January, neither player will miss a single game as the punishments do not cross over to the club fixtures.

While Cooney’s predecessor, Nickey Brennan, has said match bans would be unworkable in the GAA, the current president has refused to state his opinion but is open to discussion.

“People have different views on the current suspensions that are there. Some people feel we should just have a games ban, depending on the seriousness of the infringement. We will look at it. There are no hard and fast rules. By and large, what is there has served us well. If we are going to change something it must be for the right reasons and be better. If it is not better we don’t change. I don’t believe in changing for the sake of change.

“Whatever we do at inter-county level we must make sure it is fit as well at club level. We can’t have one rule for one and another for another. Whatever we do with playing rules or discipline rules, whatever we change, it must be workable at all levels.”

Cooney also expressed his satisfaction with how the overall disciplinary process has evolved this year with less players taking their cases to the DRA and relatively few controversial incidents occurring on the field of play.