How ‘Croke Park hours’ have eroded GAA in schools’Croke Park hours’ are words guaranteed to make most primary and secondary school teachers shudder. Fri, 04 Sep, 2026 – 06:03John Fogarty
Croke Park hours. Three words guaranteed to make most primary and secondary school teachers shudder as they complete their first full week of the 2026-27 school year.
Introduced 16 years ago under a public pay agreement “to increase productivity and protect public sector pay” signed off in GAA HQ and retained in subsequent deals, it requires a primary school teacher to work an additional 36 hours per year and a post-primary teacher 33.
The irony in the phrase is that none of the hours can be done via sport, be it taking a training session or a game. The extra work pertains to non-teaching elements of the occupation such as planning, supervision and meetings.
The GAA has moved with the times. Games that once were played after school hours are now arranged within them. Their workshops aimed at developing teachers’ Gaelic football and hurling coaching count towards the extra hours.
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However, there is anecdotal evidence the additional week’s work over the school year on top of expecting to take teams outside of regular hours has eroded the number of teachers slash coaches or, at the very least, dampened their enthusiasm.
“Teachers are not willing to give up time to train kids on their lunch breaks,” says one Munster-based primary school principal. “Not everywhere, but if it counted towards Croke Park hours like supervision does, there might be more of an uptake.”
Former Cork minor, U20 and Imokilly senior hurling manager Denis Ring has been the principal of Blackwater Community School in Lismore for 23 years. He has not experienced the same difficulties and would prefer if the definition of Croke Park hours, as troublesome as they are, was to remain the same.
“We have a culture in the school where people volunteer to coach teams and so on and so forth. The difficulty with coaching or training a team and it being representative of Croke Park hours is it would cause huge division in the staff. What you do then with the teachers that are putting in all the extra time preparing students for engineering projects, construction projects, or French or German orals?
“That would create resentment, because suddenly you’d be saying, ‘Well this matters more than this.’ With the new senior cycle redevelopment, there’s also projects representing about 40% virtually in all subjects going forward.”
The GAA’s national games development committee chairman Micheál Martin, who previously chaired his county Wexford, is the principal of Scoil Realta na Mara in Kilmore. He has seen the impact Croke Park hours have had on teachers’ eagerness to coach.
“The tradition of volunteerism among teachers, I think that has continued but everybody now places a value on their time and since Covid that has exacerbated.
“There would be a challenge in the motivation and I’m talking about this with a broad brush. The fact that teachers’ efforts to promote Gaelic games are not formally recognised by the department is a frustration for them.
“A lot of schools and clubs would ensure they are whether it be providing wet gear or tickets to championship games. They might have less supervision if they are involved in teams.
“I’ve raised this with ministers for education and there was previously a cross-departmental group involving education and sport. I thought that had potential but I don’t think it exists anymore.
“I’d be disappointed that the new primary school well-being curriculum of which physical education is a part and Gaelic games is not reflected in it. In the old curriculum, a line which (former GAA director of games) Pat Daly went to great lengths to have included, stated, ‘Gaelic games should be given particular consideration as part of the PE games programme.’ Given its cultural significance, it should be included.”
It’s Ring’s belief that Croke Park hours will become a thing of the past in the not-too-distant future. Fourteen of the 36 hours are now “high trust”, the likes of planning and communal efforts which aren’t timetabled.
“Croke Park hour have made the running of schools problematic in many ways, because people were already doing an awful lot of this extra work and it created a bit of a bad feeling in terms of it being imposed.
“I would say the school worked equally as effective before Croke Park hours. If I was to predict, I would say in a few years’ time that they would be a thing of the past. It’s already happening because a lot of the hours are ‘high trust’. Things that people always did.”
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