Of One Belief hit out at GAA and GPA

OF ONE BELIEF, the group of GAA members who oppose pay for play, have criticised GAA administrators and the GPA strongly for the deal announced over the weekend.

The GAA has stated it will recognise and fund the player organisation, a situation which has “bemused and disillusioned” those in Of One Belief.

Yesterday they compared the funding which the GAA proposes for the GPA with the process in place for county board funding: “The GAA’s National Infrastructure Committee (NISC) has recently made it very clear to GAA county boards how the GAA’s national funding regime is going to work. It’s a brilliant model, teeming with best corporate governance practice.

“Counties will apply for money for projects which meet certain criteria. They will all be equally scored against those criteria. They won’t get money for work that’s already been completed without NISC approval. They’ll have to show how they will come up with the majority of the project funding beyond the NISC grant. And they’ll all work within and be governed by the same funding parameters.

“Yet on Saturday highly-paid GAA officials drove a horse-and-cart through that model by gifting a non-GAA body a special status within the GAA and earmarking huge sums of GAA money for it in a totally different; arbitrary; and discriminatory way.

“The message seems loud and clear: if you’re a County Board wanting to invest in proper GAA work, you take your place in the queue. But if you’re the GPA, then: ‘Suits you, sir!”’

Describing as an “absolute fallacy” the assertion by the GPA and Croke Park that “inter-county players are core contributors to the commercial success of the Association in the modern era”, the group went on to suggest that: “County teams are by far the biggest financial drain on the real GAA . . . Back in July you told us the GAA “exists because of the voluntary efforts of its members: “what’s happened to your thinking in the subsequent three-and-a-half months?”

The group added that if the GAA “has a full-time paid President and a full-time paid Director General . . . why was the role of “facilitating’’ this secret process handed over to an outside barrister?”

They added that the “GPA victory does nothing for GAA players . . . the €1.6m earmarked for the “welfare” of an elite 0.5% of players could have provided six sand-carpet pitches. In one year. And another six the year after. And so on. For the ordinary GAA player, the real hero at the end of the day, this deal just means they’ll have to dig ever deeper into their pockets to subsidise their so-called betters.”

They also called for the GAA to return to “volunteer Presidents . . . (and) to start publishing openly the salaries we pay our top people. Because the growing suspicion on the ground is that we’re not getting value for them.”