GAA Congress 2011

Momtion to give beaten provincial finalists 13 days off defeated.
Louths proposal that unpires come from a county other than that of the ref defeated.

Cooneys speech was interesting - A review of the county split in the provinces

Was the motion for minor to be moved from under 18 to under 19 defeated???

The Puke wrote:Was the motion for minor to be moved from under 18 to under 19 defeated???

Dunno puke. Just getting a few updates on Twitter.

Match bans to be trialed in next years league.

The Puke wrote:Was the motion for minor to be moved from under 18 to under 19 defeated???

I think that was motion 32 Puke which was withdrawn.

just read this on Teamtalkmag website - never paid much attention to what went on at Congress until i read this and it made me stop and think

Something happened at the weekend which may have far reaching consequences for the future of Gaelic Games but few of us if any picked up on it. Shortly before lunchtime on Saturday motion 26 was passed. Tyrone spoke forcibly against it but as is normal at congress these days the top table got their way.

Motion 26. To establish a standing committee to monitor the interpretation and implementation of playing rules in football and hurling and with the power to propose changes deemed necessary regardless of the five-year year rule was passed.

So what? Well here’s the way the Croke Park can now legitimately operate. The future rules of our games have been taken out of the control of our clubs and county boards and now relies solely on a small committee in Croke Park. That means that they can now dream up any rule which they believe will ‘enhance’ our games and bring it to congress to be rubber stamped every year.

The days of calling a mark, kicking the ball into the crowd to end a game, and all that closed fist pass rubbish could become a reality again and sooner than you think.

The grub was lovely!

Jayo Cluxton wrote:The grub was lovely!

you doing a bit of waitressing on the side Jayo to make ends meet!!!!

bocerty wrote:

Jayo Cluxton wrote:The grub was lovely!

you doing a bit of waitressing on the side Jayo to make ends meet!!!!

No but she kept trying to lash wine inta me - and me off it for Lent!! An driving!!

The sooner they bring in a seperate rulebook for both codes the better

Don't say that you weren't warned

By John Greene


Sunday April 24 2011



The ferocity of former Kilkenny hurler Eddie O'Connor's attack on GAA president Christy Cooney last week was quite startling. O'Connor called Cooney a "gobshite" and a "hypocrite" for describing payments to managers as "a cancer running through" the Association.

In a stinging rebuke of Cooney and director-general Páraic Duffy, O'Connor said the duo should carry out their work for the GAA for free, or at least on vastly reduced salaries. "Some of the people in Croke Park, they're not in touch with reality at all. Dopes, really is what they are. They're not in touch with the people on the ground. It's the people on the ground doing all the work."

O'Connor said clubs and counties know what they can and can't afford. "If a county board wants to bring in an outside manager to do a job, that's their entitlement. It's up to each county if they feel the need for an outside manager. Each county makes its own decision, each club makes its own decision and it's none of the business of the hierarchy of the GAA after that."

O'Connor won two All-Ireland medals with Kilkenny hurlers, first in 1992 and then a year later he had the honour of raising the Liam MacCarthy Cup as captain following victory over Galway. The county board chairman at the time was Nickey Brennan, who later became team manager and, later still, GAA president. Brennan too spoke publicly about the issue of payments to managers, but I haven't been able to find any public outburst from O'Connor calling his countyman a gobshite, a hypocrite or a dope.

Nor is hypocrisy an accusation Kilkenny GAA folk should be bandying about the place given the county's ongoing suppression of Gaelic football to retain its status as the number one hurling county. (Following on from the senior footballers failing to score in a National League game against Leitrim in February, the minor footballers last weekend failed to score in a Leinster championship game, conceding 7-17 to Wexford.)

But perhaps the most curious thing about the outburst was the timing. Cooney's performance at Congress last weekend caught many observers by surprise. He gave a strong address, lasting over an hour, which contained radical solutions to some of the problems facing the GAA, including redrawing provincial boundaries, breaking up Dublin County Board to help the county deal with its massive population, and removing weaker counties from the National Hurling League to allow them focus on improving their club structures.

More impressive, however, was that a concerted campaign by Cooney and Duffy to ensure that delegates voted on critical motions with their eyes open seemed to make a difference, even if not all of the final outcomes were to their liking.

In the past, major decisions at Congress were taken by delegates, many of whom did not grasp the full consequences of them, or, more often than not, without having been instructed by the clubs in their home county. One of the most infamous of these was the decision to exclude Division 4 teams from the football qualifiers in 2007, which was reversed a year later such was the outcry.

There were some motions at Congress last weekend which were a direct threat to the amount of time available to club football and hurling and Cooney and Duffy challenged the grassroots to be aware of this. Among these were proposals to introduce a back-door system in the under 21 championship, to reintroduce semi-finals in the Allianz Leagues and to revert to having replays instead of extra-time in certain championship games.

Delegates were well warned in advance that in approving any, or all, of these motions they would add to the number of weekends required for inter-county games and so reduce further the limited time available to play club games.

The outcome was mixed. Replays will return in all drawn provincial first-round and quarter-final games, as well as All-Ireland quarter-finals, and semi-finals were restored only to Division 1 of the football and hurling leagues. The proposal to introduce a back door in the under 21 championship was defeated.

So, next year, if club footballers and hurlers feel the squeeze on their fixtures' programme, no one can hide behind last weekend's decisions and say they didn't realise what would happen. Delegates were well warned. When they voted for the restoration of replays, which presumably was based on the additional revenue they bring in, Cooney (pictured) said: "I hope we won't regret this." But he knows ordinary club players will regret it, they will be the ones to suffer.

At least this time clubs will know who to blame -- their own representatives, and when the opportunity comes to take them to task at annual convention later in the year, it should not be let pass. Did all those who voted in favour of these changes do so with the backing of their clubs? That's the first question they should answer.

There were no semi-finals for this year's leagues. That meant there was a weekend for club games in football last week and hurling this week. Most counties had a full programme of football games last weekend, with some even playing a round of championship fixtures.

So there are plenty of dopes, hypocrites and gobshites in the GAA alright, it's just that the men with the megaphones are looking in all the wrong places.

Imports add insult to penury

By Eamonn Sweeney


Sunday April 24 2011

A couple of weeks back Vincent Browne was quizzing some gimp from the Irish Exporters' Association who thinks the national minimum wage is too high. So Browne asks your man, "Could you live on 7.60 an hour," and the reply is, "I couldn't but that's not the issue."

If confronted by someone who's struggling and wonders why they should take a cut to wages which are a paltry fraction of what he earns, Gimpy's basic argument would be, "Because I'm special and you're only a bollocks." He might not put it in those words exactly but that's what it boils down to.

Similarly, people who are struggling to keep their head above water might wonder why former AIB managing director Colm Doherty was paid €3m for 11 months' work when, to the untrained eye, it might appear that he hadn't exactly covered himself in glory. If one of us plebs managed to corner Mr Doherty in his mansion, what would be his answer be? Yep. "Because I'm special and you're only a bollocks."

Because I'm special and you're only a bollocks. It could be the motto of the bankers, the developers and their political cronies who have propelled the country down the road to ruin at a speed Lewis Hamilton would envy. You could put it on a little coat of arms and hang it over their fireplaces.

Nothing has done more damage to national morale than this notion that there is a special class of people, smart ballsy guys who don't have to abide by the same rules as the rest of us. Why not? Because . . . you know the rest. It's a wonder they didn't emblazon it on the side of the ministerial cars. If there was ever an attitude which should have had its day, it's this one. Yet those misguided souls who are arguing that inter-county managers should be paid are asking the GAA to enshrine this attitude in its rules.

Because if inter-county players, who have been told that pay for play would destroy the Association, who have been refused a cut of the lucrative television rights and sponsorship deals negotiated by the GAA on the back of their efforts, who have even seen the money squeezed by the GPA out of the Irish Sports Council cut so severely as to become a mere token, have to flog their guts out for managers who are being given big salaries by the county boards, they might want to ask the boss why.

And there's only one reason he could give them. "Because I'm special and you're only a bollocks."

The deployment of a cadre of professional managers in a sport played by amateurs makes a nonsense of the egalitarian and democratic nature of the GAA which is the Association's greatest strength. And, to his credit, the outgoing president Christy Cooney knows that. That's why he came out so strongly against the payment of managers in his final speech to Congress.

"This is a cancer running through our organisation," said Cooney, "which is nurtured and supported by poor or complete abdication of leadership and sometimes carefully orchestrated through supporters' clubs or so-called friends of the GAA, people very often with an interest in the realisation of short-term goals only and no interest in or understanding of our rules and regulations. What is the point of our so-called voluntary ethos and our amateur status? Why are we in denial? Why do we proclaim our values and then fail to deliver? It is time to stand up and be counted."

Christy Cooney has been an immensely impressive GAA president. He put an end to years of ____________footing by recognising the GPA, he made the hugely important gesture of carrying Ronan Kerr's coffin, he has spoken intelligently about the issues facing the Association while, equally importantly, resisting the temptation to talk when he had nothing to say.

But if his Congress speech manages to get the GAA to face up to the mockery being made of the Association's ethos by the payment of managers, it might be Cooney's greatest legacy. Because there is something obscene about the fact that counties are forking out big money to high-profile outside managers at a time when many of their players are unemployed and struggling to make ends meet.

Even before paying managers became a fad, the record of imported managers wasn't very good. You have to go back to 2001 for the last time a non-native boss won an All-Ireland football title, John O'Mahony working the oracle for Galway that year. In fact, if you leave O'Mahony out of it, from 1999 to 2010 only one outside manager has even brought a team to a final. In hurling, the stats are even less impressive. Michael Bond, in 1998 with Offaly, is the last outside manager to win a Liam MacCarthy Cup.

Yet the notion that a big-name boss can be parachuted in to achieve miracles persists despite the evidence to the contrary furnished in recent years by some high profile catastrophic misfires in football and hurling. In many cases, the counties involved would have been better off looking for home-grown expertise. Instead they ended up with the worst foreign interventions since the South Vietnamese government decided they needed a few Yanks about the place.

The outside manager fetish __ which is not to be confused entirely with the payment fetish __ provides us with such entertaining absurdities as Meath deciding that they need to bring in the famous winning mentality of Monaghan and a county with the tradition of Galway appointing Tomás ó Flatharta, whose main achievement as Westmeath manager was . . . (hang on, I must look this up) . . . whose main achievement as Westmeath manager was finding the dugout and not tripping on the way back to the dressing rooms.

Meanwhile, the likes of Down and Roscommon were richly rewarded last year for having the gumption to stick with their own.

Of course, counties are perfectly entitled to choose an outside manager. But the problem is that these decisions fuel the campaign for the professionalising of inter-county management which is being led by the likes of Tipperary County Board chairman Barry O'Brien.

O'Brien's statement last week that "instead of pushing things under the table, it is time we came out front, do it straight and do it the right way. We have to bring a modern solution to it," is the kind of spiel which looks reasonable until you think about it for, oh, five seconds. It's the old 'everyone is doing it anyway' argument. But if people are cheating the system, it doesn't follow that the solution is to change the system. You could always try to stop the cheating instead.

The Tipp chairman's argument is like saying that because political corruption is rife, you might as well make it legal. I can think of a certain former Tipperary GAA official who might think this is a great idea but he'd be in the minority.

Note also the use of the word 'modern'. It's a sad fact of Irish life that if someone invokes modernity or progress as a reason for doing something, their arguments are probably going to be nonsense. It's not long since it was all the rage in certain counties to argue that historic county grounds should be sold to developers who would then build new stadiums somewhere out on the bypass. That was apparently the 'modern solution'. And if it had been adopted, more than one county ground would currently be occupied by a ghost estate built by a developer who hadn't enough money left to build a plasticine dog let alone a new GAA stadium.

In fairness to Barry O'Brien, his suggestion that managers could earn their pay by doubling as games development officers within a county would seem to arise out of the particular circumstances in Tipp football where John Evans has done fine work at underage level. But it's very easy to see how less scrupulous counties would treat such an arrangement as a mere smokescreen. The big-money managers aren't taking these jobs to be coaching under 12 teams in their spare time. In any event if that money is available for a development officer why not give it to an ex-player from within the county? Or why not spend it on creating coaching positions for unemployed players? And perhaps it's precisely because they don't have confidence in their own ability to solve their own problems that the weak counties stay weak.

One point on which Cooney and O'Brien are in agreement is that the time has come to stop sweeping this issue under the carpet. Because in the past the GAA's response to the issue of payment to inter-county managers has been to say that it's impossible to prove that anyone is getting any money. Now, it may be the case that there isn't the kind of evidence which would stand up in court. But the GAA is not the government, it shouldn't need ten-year tribunals before it can point the finger.

We all know that there are certain managers who are being paid and most of us could name a few of them. But what's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. If pay for play is wrong, so is pay for manage. Or else we're making a couple of the mistakes which characterised the Tiger era. One is that people at the top deserve special consideration and the other is that only money can motivate people to produce their best efforts. The idea that a county can only find success by paying out big bucks is a cousin of that old Tiger mantra that 'if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.' But as we now know, you can shell out a lot of gold and end up with a prize pack of baboons.

This pay-for-manage blight is also having a corrosive effect at club level. I only had to walk down the street this morning to meet a former county player who was recently offered money to manage a senior team. He turned it down because he'd prefer to work at underage level with his own club. But another outsider has taken the job since and is presumably collecting the shekels. The contagion has spread to such an extent that you hear about junior teams who wouldn't win a county title if they had Jose Mourinho in charge giving a few hundred a week to managers who move from one club to another offering their services.

The problem is that at local level it's the club lotto which is paying for such largesse. And times are hard now. Hard enough for people to start resenting buying tickets to put money in the pocket of some fly-by-night from outside the parish, money which might be better used preventing some young player from having to emigrate. It's not good for those clubs and it's not good for the GAA as a whole.

Managers shouldn't be paid because it's against the ethos of the GAA. But they also shouldn't be paid because it is an insult to players. As one GAA man commented to me, some clubs are quicker paying a manager than they are about settling a player's physio bill.

Either the GAA is an amateur organisation or it's not. And if there's money there for the general there should be money there for the soldiers. Because it's hard enough work being an inter-county player without being told you're a bollocks.

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- Eamonn Sweeney