Tom Ryan worried by the way ‘Croke Park’ is perceived

When Tom Ryan was unveiled as the GAA’s new Director General last April, a 15-minute interview entitled ‘Getting to know Tom Ryan’ was published on the Association’s website.
We learned from it that the former Director of Finance, a Carlow man, is an accountant by trade who lives in Terenure with his wife Mairead, a big Limerick fan, and their three children. He is a long-time member and volunteer at the Faughs club in Dublin, where two of his boys play.
It’s a typical GAA family existence yet the problem for Ryan is that as soon as he pulls on his suit each morning and heads out the door to work at Croke Park, he is viewed in an entirely different manner.
The statement from the Roscommon Club Players Association earlier this week that “those who lead the organisation have lost touch with the Association’s grassroots members” is an increasingly common refrain among disaffected sections of the GAA.
The narrative gained traction throughout the ‘Newbridge or nowhere’ and Liam Miller benefit game controversies though it’s one that frustrates Ryan deeply.
“I don’t like that, clearly we have a job to do to break that,” said Ryan. “I honestly don’t believe it is the fact of things. But if people feel that, if that’s the perception that people have, I think then equally we have difficulties.
“So we have a job to do to get over that. That’s partly about communicating our bona fides to people, being open to things with people, and it’s partly about moving things along and changing things in certain directions.
“But that would be the one thing that I don’t really like. Whatever about the decisions you might make, or directions you might embark upon, generally speaking you get some of them right and you get some of them wrong.
“But the sentiment behind them universally is to advance the Association. And by that, the Association, I mean the whole thing, not one specific element of it.
“But there are any number of competing interests. We talk about hurling versus football in certain counties. There are any number of competing interests, competing perspectives and it’s very, very difficult to balance all of those, all the time.
If people have that perception, and I’m not saying they don’t, that Croke Park is kind of separate from the clubs, or that terrible term, the ‘grassroots’ of the organisation, I think that’s mistaken.
“For the most part, everyone working in here is involved in their club and doing stuff in clubs. So we’re the same as everyone else but we have to marry, not just one perspective, you’ve got to marry an awful lot of them.
“When you talk about challenges, I think I know the things you might have been referring to, specific little controversies, I don’t mind them. You kind of get over those, you do your best to get over them. That thing that you mentioned (disconnect with grassroots), that is is one thing that does prey on the mind a little bit and we have to get better at it.”
Ryan said he has no immediate answer to the problem and refused to dismiss it as a perception issue that the GAA’s authorities don’t need to be concerned about.
“It’s easy to dismiss it as that but if it’s only a perception it’s still a problem,” he said. “It’s funny, I was chatting to someone else about it in the context of your job (in the media). Somebody was talking to me about the general term of ‘the media’ and how people express views about ‘the media’. It’s kind of the same thing. ‘Croke Park’ is used as a collective word, without ascribing any identity to people. I don’t think that’s a good idea and I’d like to get away from that.”
Ryan shrugged when asked if the claim that the Croke Park hierarchy are out of touch is now the go-to response for those who simply don’t get what they want.
“I don’t know, I don’t want to come across as arrogant either and to be dismissing that as a disaffected viewpoint,” he said. “If it’s a viewpoint, it’s a viewpoint and it’s something we need to overcome.”
It’s among a raft of issues that Ryan, like Paraic Duffy before him, has to deal with in his capacity as the GAA’s most powerful official.

Others include the violent episodes at GAA games that are increasingly being highlighted on social media, the development of hurling, football’s apparent identity crisis, various infrastructure projects and the growing perception that Dublin’s footballers enjoy privileges that all their rivals don’t.
At the top of Ryan’s to-do list is finding a way to solve — or at least improve — the fixtures impasse, the very reason that the Roscommon CPA were so irate earlier this week.
“Fixtures, that is a question all the time, how you get that balance between the local fixtures and the national fixtures, and creating enough scope in the national fixtures to allow the local fixtures to be played in a predictable and effective way,” he said.
The other thing would be, and not unrelated to fixtures, the whole club versus county and the balance of that, and the amount of resources and time and profile and so on that goes to the inter-county game.
“It’s a great thing (the inter-county game) and you need that because that’s what attracts people in the first place and that’s what gets people’s attention. You also need to make sure that that’s not getting too much resources, time and profile, relative to the club game. Because to a certain extent, the inter-county will look after itself a little bit more than the club side of things.
“The club side needs to be nurtured, so it’s just looking at that balance and testing that balance all the time, and the fixtures. I would see those as the two big things.”