‘We must make sure hurling gets the attention and profile and resources it needs’

Tom Ryan on...

Hurling’s Unesco international recognition

“It’s presumptuous to say that everything today is about overseas, there is a lot of work to be done in Ireland to make sure the game of hurling prospers. What today does in some ways is that it puts more onus and responsibility on us to do that because you realise this is something very special and all of us that are charged with minding it and preserving it, we have a responsibility to make sure it gets the attention and profile and resources it needs. So it is an opportunity but it’s also a challenge to make sure all of us here GAA-wise step up to the mark as well.”

Responding to violence on GAA pitches

“The idea is that we would have something specific come Congress in February that would allow us a bit more intervention in those (disciplinary cases). When you look at them, you wouldn’t be pleased seeing any of those things. But in an odd way, the fact they are visible and being highlighted, kind of forces the issue to move on too. The fact that everyone has a phone at a match...the wrong thing would be to blame the media for example, that would be the wrong thing to do.

“You are not comfortable seeing those things when you wake up on a Monday morning. Seeing it is really, really uncomfortable. But in some ways if it moves the thing on and improves the thing and give us an impetus to address it, then it’s good.

“There are two elements to it really, the acts that are perpetrated on the field is one thing and the way you deal with it is the other thing. And it is important that things are dealt with properly. When something happens on the field, you are judged not just by what happened but how it is dealt with. And if we are not consistent across the country with that, it is a weakness.”

The Casement Park project

“Belfast is the second city on the island, it needs to have a stadium appropriate to that status. We committed to a series of different projects of different guises regarding stadia in the six counties in the recent, and not so recent, past and this is the latest of a sequence of them. We’re absolutely committed to making sure that Casement Park materialises. We’ve committed a significant amount of funds to it as a project. It has encountered plenty of difficulties but it has to happen.

“It (the lack of a Northern Ireland Executive) is one of the complicating factors, but there’s any number of things. With any big infrastructure project there’s going to be any number of ways that you can meet hurdles along the way but that is one little object. It’s still going through the planning process. I think the current iteration of the stadium is certainly lower and it’s smaller in terms of capacity than the first version of it.”

The perception Dublin gets too much funding

“I think the thing that people might miss a little bit on the funding side of things is that those funds don’t go to preparing county teams — they were not going to Pat Gilroy’s and Jim Gavin’s panels, they are not going to augment or bolster the backroom teams of Dublin.

“Those funds go to employing coaches that go into primary schools and coach kids from the ages of six to 12 how to pick up a football or how to pick up a sliotar.

“Those funds don’t even go specifically to football and hurling, little girls benefit from that funding as well. When someone goes into a primary school, they don’t just pick out the boys and leave the girls aside.

“I don’t even know the number or proportion but an awful lot of those children who are getting that coaching and that PE, for want of a better word, they are not even members of the GAA and they might never turn out to be members of the GAA.

“The way you rebalance that is to try and do the same thing in other counties. We have reduced, a little bit, the funding going to Dublin for that but I don’t really want to....I think it is a good thing to be honest with you and something to be proud of.

“It would be nice for it to be happening in another urban centre, or a few more counties around the country. And that is happening now.”

Potentially dropping some of the experimental football rules before the National League begins

“I think they will have every chance (of being retained) but clearly if there’s something unforeseen that has arisen in the course of how the (pre-season) games have been played, if there’s something we haven’t factored in, we’re not going to push through stuff that doesn’t make sense. That’s our job, to review them at that stage. That was always the plan.”