GAA director general Tom Ryan has said the organisation was “just not ready” for the integration of the GAA, the LGFA and the Camogie Association within the 2027 deadline of the Steering Group on Integration.

His comments follow the resignation of former president Mary McAleese from the steering group and her assertion that the GAA’s management committee was “less than impressive” and “lacking in vision”.

McAleese had remained steadfast in her belief the integration of three organisations could be completed by the 2027 deadline, but scepticism around that time frame from some of the parties involved had led to friction and her “devastating” decision to resign. Ryan described the integration process as “a complex undertaking” and the GAA now recognised the organisation was “just not ready to do that”.

“We’ve missed a deadline. It’s our own deadline that we’ve missed. And in hindsight, I think what we were aiming for just proved a little bit too ambitious. So, we just need to refocus and recast our plans. And above all, the commitment remains firm and absolute,” he told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland.

“There were a couple of specific things that we needed to get approval for at this juncture, and they were going to be tricky. First of all, we have proposals around a common membership and reciprocation across the three organisations.

“That’s universal membership fees, family memberships, membership systems, and so on. And the second part was the organisational structures from the club level up to national governing body. The membership piece is ready, and the structures piece is not.

“People might remember, we arrived at what we thought would be a good-looking structure, and we brought that around the country at a series of roadshows before the summer. The feedback from that, from members and delegates, was people wanted us to revise those and to look again at that and to do another pass.

“So, we’re still in the middle of that exercise. And really, in order for the thing to work, you’d have to propose both together. You know, it’s very difficult to envisage a common membership when you don’t know precisely the shape of the organisation that you’re going to be a member of, hence the delay.”

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Ryan acknowledged that the resignation of McAleese was “a setback”, but that there would be bumps in the road. The GAA remained committed to the integration process, he said.

“The commitment remains firm and absolute. I don’t see a future for us as a stand-alone organisation promoting and offering male sports only. Our future is together.

“We would be far stronger as a combined organisation. I believe that. The GAA believes that. I know that my colleagues in Ladies Football and Camogie believe that.

“All we’re looking at here is, as I said at the outset, we missed a deadline, our own deadline. Our job now is just to recast things in the light of that. To learn from that and to push ahead.”

Ryan said he could not offer a precise timetable for integration, a key element would be phased implementation. “Not a single big bang.”