It won’t feel like it just now within the GAA but it’s very likely Mary McAleese has done them a favour here. When integration does finally happen, the road to it will have had a very clear timeline. The years of drift before the former president walked away and, if they’re smart, the years of knuckling down and getting it done that followed.
The biggest problem the integration steering group has had so far is that their work has been so opaque. McAleese was appointed as chair in September 2022, but in the four years since then, they’ve been, to put it mildly, sparing with their communications. There have been 21 press releases in 48 months but their interaction with the media has been negligible.
They admitted as much themselves when they finally appeared in front of an Oireachtas Committee last December. It was pointed out by Senator Evanne Ní Chuilinn there had been an information gap, essentially that the steering group hadn’t done enough to tell the people what they were doing and how they were doing it. McAleese put her hands up that day and copped to the charge.
“Going back to the Senator’s earlier point about the information gap, because it is a good point well made, one of our difficulties over these past few years as we have gathered, analysed and distilled all the information, is that we are an advisory body. We are not a decision-making body and we have three separate organisations with their own ways of deciding things.
“We are not in a position always to go public with what we think is the best way forward until that has been put to those individual groups. It would be disrespectful of them, would it not, for us to get ahead of it and go out? The Senator is right about the information gap. We are very conscious of it.”
It’s obvious now that McAleese was frustrated in the role. She was the only member of the steering group not to belong to one of the three organisations. She was the only independent voice. Clearly, she felt constricted in what she could say. The result was that sense of drift, of nobody really taking charge.
The reason this stuff matters is that there’s such a glaring disconnect between the presumed outcome of the whole situation and the day-to-day chatter about it. Everyone knows that integration will happen. Everyone knows it hasn’t happened yet. Everyone wants to know why.
Of course it’s complicated. All the more reason to keep everybody apprised of how it’s going. There are any number of people in Irish life who could have been press-ganged into chairing the steering committee. This is a task of administration, of project management, of plate-spinning. It is also a task of communication.
GAA ‘just not ready’ for integration, says director general Tom Ryan
Surely part of the reason for getting Mary McAleese involved as the figurehead of the operation is precisely so that it can be explained, plainly and authoritatively, by somebody who can get the ear of the whole nation when she has something to say. As she showed when she commandeered the news agenda on Tuesday evening, the former president is well able to communicate when she wants to.
But time and again over the past four years, the steering group has demurred when asked to explain various issues. They came up with a neat bit of phrasing somewhere along the way, boiling the issues down to “the three fs: finance, fixtures, facilities”. In reality, the first f dwarfs the others – where there’s a will, county boards will find a way to navigate any fixtures and facilities speed bumps. Largely, they already are. But they can’t magic finance out of the air.
“If you want to talk about apprehension or anxiety as opposed to resistance,” Jarlath Burns said at that Oireachtas Committee meeting back in December, “that is mainly coming from county boards. Is [the €40m spent on intercounty GAA teams] going to be multiplied by three?
“The biggest challenge facing us is trying to reduce the amount of money we are spending on county teams. That is why amateur status has been one of the main planks of my presidency. In preparation for integration, we have to make ourselves integration-ready as well. That is one of the major areas in which we are going to have to do that. We simply will not be able to sustain an organisation if we are spending €120 million every year on preparing county teams. That will not work for any of us.”
This is the stuff that people understand. The GAA’s director general Tom Ryan made one of his rare media appearances on Wednesday and talked on Morning Ireland about one of the significant problems being “the organisational structures from the club level up to national governing body”. Stop 20 people on the street and ask them what that means and 20 of them will stare at you like you’re speaking in tongues.
But cash money, they get. Mary McAleese burning the boats upon her exit and claiming that the GAA top brass includes “people who are not entirely happy about the idea of including women in decision-making at the top level of Gaelic sports” – they get that too. Even if it’s an unfair charge (nine of the GAA’s 19-person management committee are women and Ryan rejected the notion on Wednesday morning), it lights a fire under everything.
The GAA is well able to simplify things when they want to. When Covid happened, the easiest thing would have been for an amateur sport to declare it was too complex an undertaking to hold a championship, not to mention one that cost too much money. But they were guided by a simple credo – people want a championship so let’s do it.
People want integration. Anyone who is involved in the Gaelic games at any level will tell you it’s already de facto in place. The days of limping along, hinting at complex issues and refusing to explain why it’s all taking so long can’t continue.
If nothing else, the spectacular manner of Mary McAleese’s departure has made that clear.
Mary McAleese’s scathing criticism of GAA leadership is highly damaging