Ger Aherne: 'One of the saviours of GAA and amateurism might be the Revenue Commissioners'

Recently, GAA director general Tom Ryan floated the idea of club teams being managed only by their own members. Aherne wholly endorses that concept.

Sat, 22 Feb, 2025 - 07:19

John Fogarty

On Friday afternoon, a few hours before the 2025 Annual Congress commenced in Donegal, the GAA’s Central Council were briefed by director general Tom Ryan on forthcoming developments from the amateur status review committee.

Protecting the voluntary ethos of the organisation has been a cornerstone subject for GAA president Jarlath Burns since he announced the creation of the body upon coming into office 12 months ago. “It has to start for next year,” he said.

Burns has publicly spitballed ideas such as issuing licenses to county teams to ensure they abide by possible financial ceilings and closed seasons. It is slightly ironic that news of the David Hassan-led committee’s imminent actions came in a county whose intense level of pre-season training has been the talk of the country.

On Friday, counties were told they will be contacted by the amateur status body for information on their backroom teams and other arrangements in the next two weeks.

Burns has also spoken about managers being contracted by the GAA but the recommendations will come from Hassan, who was chairman of the standing playing rules committee during John Horan and Larry McCarthy’s terms. He was also part of the group that formulated the GAA’s five-year strategic plan up to 2026.

Before that, the Derry academic was a member of Aogán Farrell’s “Towards 2034” committee. Aside from Burns’ suggestions, if there are any pointers for what proposals are forthcoming, it is their report which may provide some of what Hassan and his colleagues are thinking.

That 2034 document, produced in January 2018, was never released. Concluding that the provincial championships should be scrapped and turning provincial councils into regional ones was deemed too spicy.

Then again, it did recommend counties appoint operations managers and the GAA take more control of its media rights via its own broadcast streams, both of which have become realities.

However, it was the 2034 body’s proposals around amateurism that raised most eyebrows. Inter-county players and managers, they believed, should receive allowances incorporating a no-longer-fit-for-purpose mileage system.

Former Defence Forces Brigadier General Ger Aherne was a member of the 2034 committee. Originally St Finbarrs, Aherne captained Cork’s minor footballers to an All-Ireland title in 1972 and has been active in St Brigid’s in Roscommon since he joined in 1990.

Just as Aherne saw merit in the development of an allowances system in the report seven years ago, he sees it now.

“The truth is the one of the saviours of the GAA and amateurism might be the Revenue Commissioners. You have to understand that a lot of these illegal payments are off balance sheets. If some of these travelling mercenary managers at club and county level were subject to Revenue audits, it would be interesting.

“The recommendation was to bring legitimate allowances for managers and players into the foreground and not the background. I’m not so sure the allowances in the foreground now cover the totality of the payments being made and that’s where the Revenue Commissioners might come in.

“We’re either interested in saving the organisation or we’re not. I’m increasingly hearing from the generation after me about how sick and tired they are and how lukewarm they are about the organisation because of the GAA saying one thing and not doing what is required to bring that about.

“You see a lot of clubs having a competition for who their manager is going to be. Rather than going down the multi-annual process of preparing their own people for management and coaching, they want to go for the quick hit. ‘Let’s pay €20,000 or €30,000 to Johnny Go Backwards who is a, b and c’.

"That’s where club committees are contributing to all of this.”

Recently, GAA director general Tom Ryan floated the idea of club teams being managed only by their own members. Aherne wholly endorses that concept.

“If the recommendation that only club members can manage their clubs was accepted, people would say, ‘Anyone can be a member of a club’ but that’s not true. This is all about the willingness or lack of willingness to actually police ourselves.”

Aherne is in no doubt that club and county accounts record only some of what managers receive.

“If you go through the books of county boards and clubs, they will say that person A was remunerated last month for x number of kilometres at the public service rate and reimbursed for expenses, but is that the totality of the remuneration for people managing and coaching in the GAA?

“We adequately covered these issues in our report, that the professional services that are used by counties and clubs such as physiotherapists and accountants have to be remunerated. It is the coaching, managing and playing that is the issue for the GAA’s amateur status.”

Aherne considers Hassan “an honest and honorable man. He’s a man of absolute integrity. David Hassan is a man of great vision too.”

He awaits to see what the amateur status review committee proposes but maintains the ethos of the association can only be enshrined, the massive expenditure of teams controlled and inter-county training breaches prevented by “strong leadership” at all levels.

“The travelling troubadours of mercenary managers, they’re really not interested in the welfare of players. They want to generate as many training sessions as possible because that increases the remuneration for them.

“That (training breaches) is down to the unwillingness or inability of the county committees to stand strong and tell those managers they will not do that. Let’s not become apologists for the lack of strong stances of our office holders.”