GAA director general Tom Ryan says social damage will take years to repair

The cost of coronavirus is far beyond the financial for the GAA, says Ryan

GAA director general Tom Ryan, left, and president John Horan on arrival at Dáil Éireann. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

GAA director general Tom Ryan believes the social damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic will take years to repair.

Speaking in front of the Oireachtas Covid-19 committee along with GAA president John Horan early this afternoon, Ryan gave an example of the difficulties his own family has faced as a result of social restrictions at matches.

Referring to last week when games were behind closed doors prior to small crowds again being permitted this week, Ryan said: “A lot of our focus has been on the financial picture and rightly so but to our minds, the cost is far beyond the financial. The social cost of what we have had to endure in recent months has been very significant and will take a long time to recover from.

“An example in my family when I was sent a photo of my father-in-law looking in over a ditch and a wall sadly as his two grandchildren were going in to play a county final down in Limerick last week. Those kind of things have a cost to them that we can’t measure in this room. The thing that defines our ability to do club activities isn’t just financial; it’s the capacity and appetite and ambition of volunteers as well.

“We would have a very real worry that there is a cost to be paid for just the pressure that has been on volunteers and club officers and so on over the course of the last few months. It’s been unimaginable in terms of making sure their club continues to keep their head above water and number two all the burden that we have put on people in order to get back playing games. 

“That comes at a cost to people, to people who are doing things in their own spare time, out of the goodness of their heart. We owe those people an awful lot.

“That’s why I wouldn’t want the focus to be predominantly on the financial. The financial is important because that’s why keeps us viable.”

Ryan explained that the 32 county boards would expect to return an aggregated surplus of approximately €4m in a normal year. Come to the end of the financial year next month, they will return a deficit of €12m.

“Fundings for counties comes from three sources - the central governing body, sponsorship, and gate receipts,” he explained. “Accumulative gate receipts for club championship games is in the order of €10m-€11m and that revenue is gone.

“If you extrapolate it at a very small level, in Munster we would have played 1,200-1,300 games over the course of the last few weeks since we went back to activity. At an average of 150 people at each those games which is very modest and an average admission price of €8 that’s €1.5m. 

“In the broad scheme of the national exchequer and the broad scheme of our national GAA finances, you mightn’t say that’s not hugely significant but locally that’s the lifeblood of those counties and those clubs.

“Ordinarily, it’s a precarious enough job to keep a county or a club going. What we have experienced over the last six months makes that even more difficult, and I think those people and we will have a job to rectify and set right those finances next year.”