O’Neill hoping Central Council can ease Munster seeding row

GAA president Liam O’Neill is hopeful that steps to resolve the threatened boycott by some counties of the Munster football championship next year might be taken at next week’s Central Council meeting.

Counties had been asked to hold special meetings before Central Council meets to discuss the second report of the Football Review Committee (FRC) which was published last December.

Four Munster counties — Waterford, Limerick, Clare and Tipperary — withdrew from the McGrath Cup in January and also refused to participate in the interprovincial series in protest at the decision by the Munster council to discontinue the open draw in the province and instead adopt a seeded system which keeps Cork and Kerry apart until the provincial final.

The four counties did not send footballers this week to the launch of Munster championships in Limerick, with Clare and Waterford not sending any member of management either.

The GAA president has been visiting schools throughout Connacht and Ulster this week as part of the launch of Féile Peile na nÓg and has not been briefed about the four counties reaffirming their threat to boycott the Munster championship in 2015.

“Whatever difficulty there is in Munster will and can be ironed out in the context of the discussion of the football review’s format for next year’s championship. When the debate on that takes place, the outcome of that might well decide how the Munster championship is going to be played next year anyway. The Munster championship is the responsibility of Munster but ideally we would prefer that there would be consensus nationally on how we run our main football competition, and I think the debate on the football proposals will give us the opportunity to do that. I hope that this difficulty can be resolved within that context, and I think it will,” he said.

One of the key proposals of the FRC, headed up by Eugene McGee, in their second report in December was a restructuring of the inter-county championship which would see eight teams in each province with the first round losers in Leinster and Ulster being entered in Connacht and Munster. The matter has been debated by each county and the adoption of the format would result in a radical change in each of the provinces.

“The initial reactions from counties will go to a Central Council meeting and Central Council will then decide what’s the next step to take and this might well be part of it. It might bring a resolution to it,” O’Neill added.