President happy to talk about finances

Liam O’Neill says he is happy to talk about money in the wake of a proposal to reduce funding for Dublin GAA coaching that was discussed at a meeting in Croke Park last Saturday.

And the GAA president admits the fact Dublin are such a marketable entity complicates those talks.

“I’m on the record as saying I’d prefer to be in a position where we have more money on the table to argue about than being in a position where we’re short of it,” O’Neill said.

“That brings its own difficulty too and the challenge now is that because we have seen that Dublin is a huge brand compared to other counties that presents us with a difficulty, not to find solutions to Dublin but a solution to bring others up to that point.

“You can’t expect a county that gets one game in the championship and a qualifier to match Dublin for sponsorship so we have to look at some model for that.”

O’Neill also said inequality in resources and standards will always be inherently part of the competitions.

“You can’t legislate, you can’t force things to be equal but there has to be some sort of thought put into a possible realignment of finance.

“There’s no definite proposals on that. It hasn’t been discussed by management, this is just a preliminary discussion on it. It’s much more difficult to equalise than you might think.

“People from all around the country came together to discuss that and whatever comes out of it will be the agreed decision of Central Council.”