First we were obliged to bail out the banks … now certain highly-paid GAA officials want us to use scarce GAA money to bail out a private limited company called the Gaelic Players Management Company Limited.

And they want us to rubber-stamp a split in the GAA, where 0.5% of members free-wheel within one system whilst the other 99.5% toil within another.

Those are our reactions to Saturday’s amazing announcement by GAA President Christy Cooney and Director General Paraic Duffy that they intend to commit €1.60m of GAA money to the GPA and simultaneously create, for the first time in the GAA’s 125 year history, two official classes of GAA membership. Saturday was a long, long way from the brave words of July past.

Like many other GAA people Of One Belief stands bemused and disillusioned by this whole sad and sordid mess. Let’s begin with a few observations: 

• A couple of weeks ago GAA Director of Finance Tom Ryan quite rightly told us that “central” GAA wasn’t there to bail out GAA units that had got their finances wrong; that the GAA worked to fixed, set budgets; and that financially things were currently very tight and would be so for some time. Put plainly: “Get those GAA belts tightened.” That’s exactly what we’d want a GAA Director of Finance to tell us in these times. Then lo-and-behold, €1.60m suddenly becomes available for something that’s not even a GAA unit to start with. It’s an insane move that flies in the face of all basic corporate governance principles. 
• The GAA’s National Infrastructure Committee (NISC) has recently made it very clear to GAA County Boards how the GAA’s national funding regime is going to work. It’s a brilliant model, teeming with best corporate governance practice. Counties will apply for money for projects which meet certain criteria. They will all be equally scored against those criteria. They won’t get money for work that’s already been completed without NISC approval. They’ll have to show how they themselves will come up with the majority of the project funding beyond the NISC grant. And they’ll all work within and be governed by the same funding parameters. Yet on Saturday highly-paid GAA officials drove a horse-and-cart through that model by gifting a non-GAA body a special status within the GAA and earmarking huge sums of GAA money for it in a totally different; arbitrary; and discriminatory way. The message seems loud and clear: if you’re a County Board wanting to invest in proper GAA work, you take your place in the queue. But if you’re the GPA, then: “Suits you, sir!” 
• Most GAA County Boards don’t even come close to having an annual budget of their own of €1.60m … yet now our top highly-paid officials deem it right and proper that this amount of GAA money should be handed over to a group that isn’t even part of the GAA. And in return that group says the new dispensation won’t “gag or muffle” it in any way. And uses phrases like “our own industry”. Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane! This is just the first of many, increasingly large pay-offs. 
• It’s long past time the GPA and Croke Park paid staff-propagated myth of, in their joint words, “inter county players as core contributors to the commercial success of the Association in the modern era” is shown up for the absolute fallacy it is. Firstly, the only reason we have a modern era is because those who went before us gifted us the infrastructure and GAA legacies we currently enjoy. And they gifted us it for free, with no strings attached other than the reasonable expectation that we might hand it on in no worse shape to those who came after us. Inter-County players and the highly-paid people at Croke Park are amongst the few GAA people who are insulated from the reality that far from being “core commercial contributors,” County teams are by far the biggest financial drain on the real GAA. Ireland’s 32 Counties currently spend on average €0.75m pa each on their County teams and invest at least the same amount again in terms of volunteers’ (remember them, anybody round Jones Road?) time. That’s an investment of at least €48m per year. Boys (and the odd girl), you need us much, much more than we need you! But through Saturday’s actions you simply started turning off the tap to yourselves. Back in July you told us the GAA “exists because of the voluntary efforts of its members:” what’s happened to your thinking in the subsequent three-and-a-half months? Even more worryingly, what’s going to happen to it in future? 
• The GAA has a full-time paid President and a full-time paid Director General. Why then was the role of “facilitating” this secret process handed over to an outside barrister? We had the same disastrous abdication of leadership responsibilities in the first Cork coup d’etat (that coup of course has since been followed by six more in the following 18 months). Is this now the accepted way of doing business at the highest levels of the GAA? And if it is, just what is it that we pay our leaders to do? It seems leadership is the last thing we can expect. 
• The GPA has won its war hands-down. And it’s won it without conceding anything. After a year when it sustained heavy losses and in the worst economic climate for decades, it now says it won’t go looking for its own sponsorship. That’s big of it! Anyway, why bother when the volunteer GAA is now being rail-roaded into picking up the tab! That’s a volunteer GAA that’s losing its own sponsors and sources of income by the day. Further, the GPA positively flaunts the fact of there being “no question of us being gagged or anything like that”. What has the GAA got out of this appeasement? Not even the promise of “peace in our time”. 
• The GPA victory does nothing for GAA players. It actually leaves them in a worse position by siphoning off scarce resources that could have been used to great effect in increasing and improving real GAA facilities. The €1.60m earmarked for the “welfare” (sic) of an elite 0.5% of players could have provided six sand-carpet pitches. In one year. And another six the year after. And so on. For the ordinary GAA player, the real hero at the end of the day, this deal just means they’ll have to dig ever deeper into their pockets to subsidise their so-called betters. 
• Starter for ten to the GAA’s top table: just what will you not concede to the GPA? Where actually would you hold the line? What actually is left to hold? So far you’ve given in to a strike threat; conceded on pay-for-play grants; created a special status for a non-GAA group (and parallel lesser status for the rest of us); introduced outside arbiters to do jobs we reasonably believe you’re paid to do; and don’t seem too worried about who actually decides whether a County GAA panel is legitimate or not. Increasingly we have people in GAA office. But they’re not in power. In Ireland we handed power over to tiny, self-regulated elites. Look where it got us. Sadly the GAA now seems hell-bent on following suit. 
• Finally, and this is strictly business, not personal. It really is time the GAA went back to having volunteer Presidents. We badly need volunteer leadership again. And we need to start publishing openly the salaries we pay our top people. Because the growing suspicion on the ground is that we’re not getting value for them. Any chance of a voluntary pay cut on Croke Park’s sixth floor? After all, there’s €1.60m to be found from somewhere. 

It is the language of the play-ground, but two years on from the fateful events of late 2007 when pay-for-play was introduced to the GAA, well, we told you so! The malcontents got the scenarios right. Saturday’s capitulation marked another inevitable step to a new model GAA. It’s one that’s a poor shadow of the one we were gifted. Sic transit gloria … !

www.ofonebelief.org

And So It Goes On …

There’s no doubt corporate Ireland became an increasingly bizarre place on foot of the depredations of the Tiger economy. But the saga of just how and why the GAA continues to deal in secret with what appears to be a private limited company called the Gaelic Players Management Company Ltd still takes some beating.

Try these on for size: 

• The GPA has long since been gifted a seat on Central Council, the most important decision-making part of the GAA after Congress
• The only legal manifestation we can find of this “GPA” is the Gaelic Players Management Company Ltd
• This is a private company whose shares are now owned by Brian Corcoran; DJ Carey; and Liam Hassett
• Over the last year it lost €143,843 and now has net assets of just €15,851
• Dessie Farrell is a director of this company
• As a director he is legally obliged to act only in the best interests of his shareholders. 

So, when Dessie Farrell sits at our Central Council, having the same status there as any GAA County in Ireland, just who and what is he representing? As a director of the company, it has to be his shareholders. Why do we continue to allow a privately-owned company to have access to and an influence on GAA business that ordinary GAA members don’t have? We all now know how corporate governance went up the left in Ireland over the past couple of years. But even in that chaotic context this arrangement takes the biscuit.

And that’s not all. Meanwhile: 

• The GPA has recently announced its membership of the EU Athletes Association … whose website describes itself as the European Elite Athletes Association, representing over 25,000 professional athletes (our emphases)
• Irish professional rugby players also belong to that same Association and its website is littered with examples of Collective Bargaining Agreements
• The GPA’s own website spells out 22 benefits of GAA recognition … 17 of which are a shameful litany to do with business; grants; careers; and so on … real core areas of GAA activity that really turn us volunteers on!

But, we’re told, it’s OK to discuss “GAA recognition” with an outfit of this ilk. Of course the people who tell us that are the same ones who argue that by taking/approving the taking of pay-for-play money they safeguard GAA amateurism! Is the next pig-in-a-poke they’re going to try to sell to GAA members got anything to do with bailing out unsustainable private companies? Or the need for the GAA to put in place Collective Bargaining Agreements with our elite players?

Finally, in case people are interested … the Minister of Sport when all this pathetic grants pay-for-play nonsense started … was … the one and only … John O’Donoghue. But, sure it was all done within the guidelines.