Moynihan More Than a Game

The GAA and where it's Going
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80458-205-3
Verlag: Gill Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

The GAA has always been about more than sport. It's the pulse of Irish communities - a shared language of identity, belonging and pride. But today, as the Association finds itself at a crossroads, urgent questions arise. Is the GAA still a grassroots, amateur movement? Or has it become a machine for elite competition, real estate development and media influence? Acclaimed journalist Michael Moynihan exposes the real forces reshaping the GAA, from under-the-table payments and controversial stadium deals to fixture chaos and the impact of pop concerts. Thoughtful and unflinching, he reveals an organisation grappling with its identity and why the outcome matters to every parish, player and supporter in Ireland. 'Michael is rooted in the GAA but never bound by it. He sees our games and Association through a unique and unflinching lens. For anyone who loves the GAA and Irish sport, this book is essential reading.' Donal Óg Cusack 'No one writes about the GAA like Michael Moynihan.' Pat Spillane

Michael Moynihan is an editor with The Irish Examiner. He has written many books and co-produced documentaries such as The Game, Christy Ring: Man and Ball and GAA Nua. A regular contributor to TV and radio, he lives in Cork with his wife and children and is a member of Glen Rovers/St Nick's.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moynihan, Michael

Leseproben

The two (at least) GAAs

I started by chatting to Tom Ryan, Ard Stiúrthóir (director general) of the GAA, who didn’t blink at the prospect of some fundamental questions, and there are few as fundamental as the most obvious of all: What is the GAA for?

My opener with interview subjects was to offer them a choice. Is the GAA a delivery system for elite sport at inter-county level, or is it a mass participation movement? Is it a real estate undertaking that manages and maintains stadiums and club grounds all over Ireland or a media company dealing with GAA+, RTÉ, TG4, online and print outlets, radio stations? All of those? Some of them?

To give Tom Ryan his due, he got to first principles pretty fast.

‘I’m sure there were the same existential issues in the past. I can only imagine the period of independence and the Civil War or the Emergency. The Troubles was another challenging time. There’s always something external to the GAA that is a “threat” but then you look at the calibre of the people and the strength of the movement and the good will that there is behind it and the heritage. We’ve been able to thrive in adversity in the past and we will again because of all those people, working in clubs that just get on with it.

‘So it might look different. It might be played a bit differently. It might be played in different places and might be played by different people, but as long as it’s recognisable as the GAA that’s enough for me.’

Ryan’s pragmatism on the GAA’s essence was a reasonable foreshadowing of what many contributors thought. An element of adapting and changing without bending it out of all recognition can be found at all levels of the GAA, and he pointed to a concrete example in the way clubs adapt to different challenges and circumstances; sometimes by amalgamating clubs. That can be seen as a defeat in some eyes, but as we’ll see later in this book, that’s not always true.

‘It’s a really increasing phenomenon; you see it a lot in terms of whether it’s the clubs formally amalgamating or whether we haven’t enough on our under-sixteen team this year, so we’ll fall in with the neighbours. It’s to people’s credit that they’re responding to circumstances. As an organisation, we need to: number one, be more open to that and make it easier to happen and number two, to change our thinking in terms of how things are structured – that that maybe becomes more accepted. The reason you’d be worried about that is actually the whole thing is to do with where you’re from. I don’t want to see a Carlow team made up of people from outside the county, for instance.

‘One of the great strengths we have is that a club is a solid thing. A GAA club is not easy to set up, which is maybe a bit of an impediment, but once it’s there it’s a solid thing. Other sports maybe have a different model, and it works for them in terms of being more easy to get together to play something with your friends; the downside of that is, maybe it’s a bit more transient.

‘It’s something to look at, though – if you don’t have enough people in your club to make up a team or if you’re not on the team or even if you just want to play with a few other people, that could be another use for these centres of excellence. To put on a programme two or three nights a week, for particular age groups but irrespective of clubs, so people could fall in for a game. That kind of thing has a value to it in keeping people involved. Whether it keeps people involved or stands on its own without the competitive, I’m not so sure.’

Ryan’s flexibility surprised me. The perception of the GAA as a monolithic bastion of conservatism is a tired one in any case, but the head official praising different forms of participation and advocating fluid club memberships?

He didn’t stop there.

‘We characterise things as parish rules, for instance, which have less to do with church boundaries as much as that’s how we define who we are. Parish rules have stood us in good stead for a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty years, but the future of the country is going to look very different.

‘Does that model of a GAA fit? Woe betide anybody that tampers with any of that stuff, but we need to be thinking about it and not in the context of playing strength or fighting other counties. It’s in the context of sustainability: you look at your county structures. Is that the right way to be structured? You look at championship structures within counties – are they structured the right way? You look at the means by which fifteen people can come together to play, to represent something. Do they need to be bound by geographical boundaries that are rooted in the sixteenth century?

‘Look, does it even have to be fifteen people?’

When Ryan mentioned fundamentals, he wasn’t kidding. Even that relatively throwaway comment about the number of players on a hurling or football team brings us up against the basic principles of the GAA pretty fast. Readers will be familiar with various 13-a-side competitions around the country, particularly in areas with demographic challenges, but reducing the number of players from 15 would be a huge step for the GAA to consider. To take the playing side alone, it would open up new tactical challenges and developments; it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say the sports would change completely overnight. For the man who runs the GAA to suggest that change is staggering.

‘I think we need to be thinking along those lines. If the country is going to be different maybe we need to be different as well.

‘I don’t know if we’re really ready for that, and you wouldn’t like to get to the stage where a crisis means that we need to change things, to actually be able to respond. I think there will always be a cohort of people that want to play Gaelic and hurling. There are clubs all over the country which are fantastic resources; they take on the identity or they personify the locality. It’s the de facto social community, public hub, which in some ways is a big burden for them to bear. But there’s also a reassurance in that people know, whatever else happens, that that’s going to be there.’

Burden and reassurance. It could be a motto for the GAA. But which GAA?

*   *   *

Ideally those contributing to this book would have had hard positions on the questions I raised in the introduction, perhaps saying the GAA is definitively about the action on the inter-county stage; or complaining that its property portfolio is so vast that it needs to be minded carefully at the expense of everything else. Some unambiguous statement of fact would be of huge benefit (to an author, anyway). A stark declaration of the GAA’s focus would have set up some handy binaries, plenty of contradictions, duelling perspectives.

The reality was far less straightforward, of course. Elsewhere in this book a contributor picks out the GAA’s ability to exist in ambiguity as a significant advantage for the organisation. Distilling down what the GAA is – its fundamental focus – certainly proved that.

For instance, Ryan came down firmly on the side of participation.

‘It’s the best thing about the GAA in a lot of ways. We use this term all the time, how we’re unique. We’re not really unique in a lot of respects, but that is one of the things that is special about it. Whether it’s tennis or soccer or whatever, participation is the lifeblood of those too, but I’d like to think anyway that [GAA participation] does get a profile and a primacy in terms of people’s thinking. The number of eight-year-olds that are playing hurling around the country, that’s something we do take pride in.

‘And it should drive the decisions that we’re making. Now, it doesn’t all the time, I know that, I know other things from time to time can take precedence, but if you’re talking about what you want it to be like in fifty years – and that’s the bit that is worthy of protection, worthy of promotion – then that’s the bit that really does define the state of the organisation’s health.

‘And it isn’t – though I might regret saying this – about the number of people that are watching the All-Ireland final. It’s not the number of countries that the game is played in. It’s the youngsters. That’s a trite thing to say, but it is the truth that they are the people that will be playing senior club hurling in fifteen years’ time, they are the people that you hope will be taking teams in thirty years’ time and will be county chairperson, club secretaries. There’s an organic aspect to that which I’m not sure applies in other codes or sports. With some the sense that you get that there are key families or maybe key geographic areas that perpetuate them. With ours we’re very fortunate we have something far bigger, and that’s the bit to protect.

‘If you were to talk about primacy – and anytime you do that you run the risk of offending somebody – the bit that sets the pulse racing and the bit that you’re getting excited about is, say, Patrick Horgan coming on to get a point for...