Colin Sheridan: Time to do what’s best for Mayo

It’s one of the most meme-worthy moments in recent cinema, when, in the movie Gone Girl, Ben Affleck’s character poses awkwardly beside a poster of his wife, who is missing and feared dead.

Uncomfortable and uncertain, he smiles a smile so smug you want to punch him, just as the cameras flash. The image becomes a totem for his apparent guilt, or rather, it renders the question of his guilt obsolete. Suddenly, nobody really cares whether he murdered his wife. They just care he smiled beside a picture of his maybe-murdered wife. In that moment he becomes much more than a suspected murderer. He becomes an unlikable bastard.

Thankfully, nobody has been disappeared during the current saga that has befallen Mayo football. But the Gone Girl parallels run regardless. In the movie, Affleck’s character Nick, falls in love with the soon-to-be-gone Amy, and everything seems picture perfect. Some difficulties arise, and where once there was just true love, now there comes love, but with conditions. Some of those conditions are met, others not, and incrementally — then very suddenly — the relationship dramatically deteriorates. Before the crash, outsiders will have assumed all was well, but after, everyone will tut tut, saying they saw it coming. The crash in this instance is Amy’s disappearance, and the subsequent propaganda war she wages — in absentia — by leaking certain clues with the sole intent of exposing Nick for the bad husband he has become. Nick’s defence is weak, even if we, the punters, are fairly certain he is guilty of only some of what’s alleged. Nick is in a tough place.

Yep, Nick is the Mayo County Board. Smiling, innocent, butter-wouldn’t-melt Amy is their wealthy benefactor, and Nick’s ill-advised ‘smile beside the poster’ moment is the ‘Shoe the Donkey’ in MacHale Park moment, and a dozen missteps since.

Back to real life. After a couple of relatively quiet weeks, Monday’s

Western People

reported that the MGISF (Mayo GAA International Supporters Foundation) had confirmed to the newspaper it had written to the Mayo County Board, this time through the boards solicitor, offering a minimum investment of €1m in Mayo football over the next five years.

The investment, the MGISF confirmed, would be subject to conditions, including an independent audit of Mayo GAA’s financial accounts for the last three years, permission for the foundation to have oversight of the bid process for all sponsorship deals, and an explanation for how a personal donation of $250,000 from Tim O’Leary was used. Ha! You see what they’ve done? The MGISF have gone ‘full Amy’.

While the Western People were reporting it, everybody in Mayo was reading the letter in question, as it had, once again, circled the county quicker than chicken pox in a school. For two months now, this has been the way of the ongoing war between board and benefactor. The MGISF have air-dropped unanswered correspondences and emails into GAA clubs like war-time propaganda. The board has responded terribly, launching counterattacks that have accounted for the entire local press corps and, more crucially, the very people it claims to represent — it’s membership — as casualties.

In the history of whistleblowing, it’s never been too important to like who is blowing the whistle. What matters is the wrongs they endeavour to expose. What also matters, however, is motive. The motives of the Foundation were undoubtedly pure in their genesis, but, so irked have they become by what they view as inaction by the county board, it threatens to derail the altruism they espouse.

The actions of the MGISF have no doubt exposed shortcomings in the operations of the county executive. This can only be for the good. But if the price Mayo GAA pays for this exposé is the imposition of conditions ‘for the good of the people’, well, Mayo people run the risk of replacing one set of demagogues with another.

The MGISF know the board will not accede to their conditions in lieu for the much-needed funds. They probably won’t even get a reply to the letter. This will further prove the Foundations point that the executive is somehow unfit for purpose. What happens then? Well, if history has taught us anything, it is interventions from foreign agencies are never without motive. Assuming county convention goes ahead this month, the foundation will mobilise its ground troops and storm the halls. If the existing board holds firm, we have more of the same. The impasse will continue. A tribunal or two, perhaps. Maybe, there will be a quid pro quo.

Maybe the board and the foundation meet in the middle and you have the absurd situation that the two parties appear arm in arm, claiming through the power of love and forgiveness, they are willing to do whatever to make the union work. Just like Nick and Amy (anyone who saw the movie or read the book knows the insidious subtext).

If this does somehow happen, it is only the game that will suffer. Egos on both sides will emerge intact.

There is a rather unpopular possibility that, like Affleck’s Nick, the county board is not guilty of all the misdemeanors it has been accused of. But, because of past behaviours and decisions (the bungled Holmes/Connelly appointment, the mismanaged Rochford departure), they remain very much exposed.

They chose to accept the ‘help’ of the MGISF, undoubtedly in good faith, but probably without effectively fleshing out how the consequences of that relationship, - especially in the context of their alleged disregard for proper financial procedures (this is clearly what the Foundation’s ‘conditions’ are going after) — might play out.

Their argument that “monies raised in the name of Mayo GAA etc.” is a legitimate one, however, the very modus operandi the board have adopted for nearly a generation; one of little transparency and even less ability to communicate effectively through a crisis of their own making, has ensured there is little trust amongst the people they claim to serve.

And those people are not even the delegates, but the kids and parents who tonight will go to their clubs to volunteer and to pursue their passion based on the love of Gaelic Games, of sport, not of its blazered, faceless kingmakers. The executive, the MGISF, the money, the bills, the Cipriani in New York, — they will all come and go. It is the people that remain.

The coming weeks mark a potential tipping point for the organisation in a county that has long congratulated itself on its wholesomeness. It is now up to the foundation, the sitting board, and those who, with however pure a motive, choose to usurp them, to put self-interest aside, and do what’s best. That won’t happen behind closed doors. It won’t happen with “widely circulated emails” or leaked letters. What’s best might be that both parties walk. The board’s position in now untenable. The Foundation’s money now coloured with the dye of sanctimony. Mayo GAA people don’t need either.

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