O’Neill dismisses Brolly claims

GAA president Liam O’Neill has hit back at Joe Brolly’s claims that inter-county players are treated like "indentured slaves", writes John Fogarty.

O’Neill believes the 1993 Derry All-Ireland winner went overboard in his recent commentary on the demands faced by GAA stars, while he was also claimed the association weren’t invited onto recent radio programmes to counter Brolly’s arguments. Speaking at yesterday’s Allianz League launch, he complimented Brolly and acknowledged some of his concerns about player welfare are genuine. However, he questioned his lack of tangible solutions.

“I’ve said before that most of us like Joe Brolly. He’s a very engaging character, I think the man’s worth was proven by his generosity in organ donation.

“He’s a special sort of a character. He’s articulate — I’d love to be able to articulate the message he’s sending, he’s just a brilliant articulator.

“Of course, if you speak as much as Joe speaks, you’re bound to make a mistake. Dare I say it, I’ve done it myself.

“The more you speak, the more chance you’re going to get in bother, that’s for sure, and Joe probably has gotten into bother.

“I don’t want to get into an argument but, yes, he was over the top with what he said.

“There’s no doubt about that. Generally, the reaction has been to acknowledge that.

“Somewhere in every controversy like that, we have to look at it and say there’s no smoke without fire.

“There are things that need to be tweaked but you can’t do them all immediately. Saying it is one thing but doing it is another.

“I’ve always said that there are three stages in problem solving: problem identification, anyone can identify a problem; it takes a good person to identify a solution; it takes a great person to implement a solution.

“And Joe is stuck at stage one. We think we have addressed a lot of the concerns raised in the three reports (Hurling 2020, minor review, calendar year).”

O’Neill expressed disappointment the GAA weren’t afforded the opportunity to put their views across on Newstalk and RTÉ where Brolly had aired his sentiments earlier this month.

“The interesting thing is that in the radio programmes where the criticism has been levelled at us at no stage have been invited to give the response that I have just given to you today.

“Because we have done a significant amount of work and it does take time. The Hurling 2020 report took a lot of time, the minor review took a full 12 months and there was a consultation process halfway through and there were initial recommendations that centred on changing minor to U17 and the organisation just wasn’t ready for it. A decision was made to modify those proposals. That’s the way you deal with it.

“Change is implemented sometimes and sometimes you can only be an agent for change. People like me who are in a job for three years have to accept that you won’t deal with everything in a three-year period.

“I think we’ve addressed a fair amount of it and if something that we have recommended in any three of those reports needs to be modified or strengthened. That’s what the next three years under Aogán (Ó Fearghail, GAA president-elect) is for. I think he’d be more than happy to do that.”

Meanwhile, O’Neill confirmed Congress will be asked by Central Council to vote against the introduction of the clock/hooter to Championship football and hurling games due to technical issues.

A Football Review Committee recommendation, the measure, twice backed by Congress, was trialled in last year’s Sigerson and Fitzgibbon Cup weekends but postponed because of a number of issues that arose such as whether substitutes should be considered stoppages, which would have required a rule change at Congress next month.

However, more problems have since been encountered and O’Neill said it would be “irresponsible” of the GAA to allow it to go ahead when they could foresee difficulties such as time-wasting. “Central Council took a decision not to run with it. Unfortunately, that means a motion to Congress and needs two-thirds to overthrow it. The evidence was such that it couldn’t be done at this time. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done in the future but we have to get it 100% right. Of course, it is frustrating but the difficulty is our game is technical — people want things 100% and we have no option. It’s too important to the players not to get things right and if it takes a bit longer that’s it but the presentation was strong enough to overwhelmingly take this decision.”

On the matter of the forthcoming calendar year proposals, O’Neill revealed some All-Ireland semi-finals will be played over the same weekend while Sunday, November 20 will be the date set for the end of the provincial club championships in 2016.