Rubicon has been crossed

SO thorough and so well thought out is, Árd Stiúrthóir, Páraic Duffy’s discussion paper on GAA amateur status and payment to managers, finally released this week, that it seems all that is left for today’s gathering in Croke Park to do is firstly to decide upon which of the three proposed intervention options is least likely to leave the Association open to charges of double standards and secondly to assign figures to any putative payments to inter-county managers.

Almost everybody agrees that the ambiguity couldn’t continue. On page 10 of the 29 page document, Duffy says that the GAA “now finds itself in a situation in which a mix of incomplete information, half truths and rumour have created an unhealthy atmosphere, one that has generated cynicism, created envy, undermined the Association’s volunteer spirit, and dishonoured its core value”.

This would appear to obviate the need to employ option one — to continue doing nothing. Furthermore, option one does not meet with Duffy’s approval so its further consideration is futile.

Which brings us to option 2- to implement fully the GAA’s existing policy, rules and guidelines on its amateur status. This would be the option most favoured by the traditional element within the Association — perhaps best exemplified by former Munster Council chairman Seán Fogarty’s impassioned defence of Rule 11 earlier this week and by ‘Of One Belief’ founder, Mark Conway’s comments on these pages on Wednesday.

One of the key considerations in the implementation of any intervention is the statement of a goal that is realistic, attainable and attuned to the way the GAA operates right now.

For many of the delegates heading into Croke Park to discuss Duffy’s paper this morning, returning to the spirit of the days before jersey sponsorships, player endorsements, fully paid up games development administrators, and official recognition with attendant funding for the GPA is pointless and indeed, no longer possible.

The Rubicon has been crossed a long time ago. It’s rather like when a move is made in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you’ve made.

There’s a sense of unease because you don’t know yet what you’ve left yourself open to but you must still deal with the irrevocable commitment to the move. Returning to the status quo is not an option now. Current Uachtarán, Christy Cooney appeared to acknowledge as much late last year when conceding that there wasn’t “much point putting something in place if it can’t be delivered and won’t be delivered”.

And so to option 3 — introducing a system of regulated payments to senior inter-county managers. Páraic Duffy appears in his preamble to this option, to be taking the first tentative steps towards normalising the prospect of some form of payments for inter-county managers. While acknowledging that “the third and final option is one that will create the greatest apprehension among many members of the Association and that it will surely be met with outright hostility and resistance by some” this option also appears to be the one given most thought.

Despite the plausibility of the five explicit objections or difficulties that would arise from any scheme to formalise some form of regulated payment to managers, the eight responses presented to these are based on a logic that is impeccable and quite feasible.

Duffy’s paper will be debated by county board officials today, a further process of debate will be initiated amongst members of the GAA, a working group will be established, submissions will be invited and evaluated and a firm set of proposals will be formulated. Afterwards it seems the only thing left to decide will be which model of payment to adopt. Irrespective of whether that model is a welfare, expenses, invoice or contract based one — all are complex and fraught with danger. The inevitability of it all is stifling but it needn’t be thus.

The challenge over the next few months will be to create an overarching paradigm for what the GAA on one hand is trying to (and needs to) achieve by regulating what can’t be controlled and the individual efforts of volunteers and clubs on the other. The GAA community have been caught in a self-defeating and a depressing cycle of passive acceptance of payments to managers for too long but we can use Duffy’s discussion paper for a different set of purposes; to affirm the important aspects of who we are and more importantly, perhaps, to discover again who we were and might be. It is an exciting time for the GAA and the debate has many possibilities; it can cast an eye back as well as forward, nourishing and enriching itself as it goes.

Those who brought the GAA this far understood Einstein’s maxim that “what counts can’t always be counted and what can be counted doesn’t always count” and the hope is that a further erosion of the volunteer spirit doesn’t occur. We see in our schools how the idea of games development administrators emerged to tackle the problem of a dearth of voluntary coaches. The effect on pupil participation and on skills development was negligible but it’s hard to avoid the thought that maybe something was lost too.

In the stampede of ambition that requests, nay demands, that we replace the local coach with the sort of expertise required to manage teams ‘professionally’, we risk losing a possibly irreplaceable lore. Naked ambition and ruthlessness are traits we admire in sport and expect of our top GAA players. The inter-county manager is the one most closely associated with the fostering of such traits. That is why the distinction made between club and county in the paper being debated today is so important. While many of us may recoil at the notion of a hierarchical structure within our games, the reality is such a structure already exists. The inter-county player and manager are, by definition, elite and while club and county football are not mutually exclusive entities, the GAA knows that having surrendered some of the mechanisms by which they might have exercised control over the destiny of the inter-county game, they subjected themselves to the whimsical demands of what we call ‘the modern game’.

By presenting the paper for debate this week, Páraic Duffy has done us all a favour but in bringing it out of the dark corners he may well find that not all dark places need light.

The horse has probably bolted at inter-county level and I don’t know if it’s too late to row back at club level. I hope not, because if history has taught us anything it is that in the case of absolute concepts such as the GAA’s amateur status, once gone, the door is shut firmly behind them.