Player deal further evidence of new dawn

THE ceasefire may have been announced last year but tangible evidence that the stand-off between the GAA and GPA is finally over arrived in Croke Park yesterday with news of the two bodies’ first joint venture.

The announcement of the GPA’s player development programme was “nothing mind-boggling”, as GAA president Christy Cooney admitted, but it was nonetheless a historic day.

GPA chief executive Dessie Farrell, sitting alongside Cooney at the time, chimed in by saying that “this sends out a strong signal that our players and administrators are no longer at each other’s throats”.

Farrell added that this programme will give life to the interim agreement agreed between the bodies late last year but it fell to Cooney to elaborate on the significance of it all.

“I always felt that, with the goodwill there between both parties, we could achieve it when we had developed a certain amount of trust. There was positive goodwill between us. If we didn’t achieve it, it was our own fault, on both sides.

“We were always positive. We had a great facilitator through the early stages of the process but, over the last couple of months, we have worked well to announce what we have today.”

Official recognition for the GPA will be voted on by the GAA’s annual congress in Newcastle, Co Down next month and Cooney is confident that a permanent agreement will be in place come October. The programme launched yesterday is the first of three such initiatives due to come on stream in this calendar year and it will include a career service, an educational advice, personal counselling and a benevolent fund. A total of €1.1m has been set aside under the interim agreement for such projects in 2010 although that may not be spent in its entirety this year given the fact that the rapprochement is still in its infancy.

Yesterday’s announcement, while welcome, came less than a week after it was revealed that the GAA will no longer compensate players at club and county level for pre-operation physiotherapy bills. The move was criticised by the Irish Society of Chartered Physiotherapists who claimed it would have a detrimental effect on player health and welfare but Cooney defended the move yesterday.

“We made a decision on the whole insurance scheme. We had to invest €1m in it this year because it lost that amount last year and there is a serious review of it involving our medical and our insurance committee to ensure that the scheme would be viable.

“Today was a start to the welfare projects and I am sure that the injury scheme will be looked at over time. We will put in place a group to have a look at it for us.

“The player insurance scheme is a very good scheme but there are areas which we need to tackle and to give it an overhaul. At the end of the day, we have to ensure that the scheme is financially viable and not have a situation where the GAA has to put one million or more into it every year to have it sustainable.”

Dessie Farrell added that it was a difficult issue and that there were some ‘complexities’. Like Cooney, he pointed to the costs involved and the current economic realities.

“I’m a club player myself now and for a lot of club players that was the front line of the injury scheme. But, when you look at the figures, the vast majority of funding in the scheme went on loss of earnings.”