Pragmatism doesn’t always cut it in dealing with major problems

Kevin Egan Column

One of the main attractions of sport is that it serves as a distraction from the wider world, or a form of escape. So we’ll try to get back to what we know and love quickly, but let's lead in by saying that global affairs have been completely disrupted, and the potential downsides are huge. Here in Ireland, thankfully we have avoided the tidal wave of authoritarianism and warmongering that has taken down so many of our neighbours and friends, but our response to crises, both external and internal, has largely been pragmatic – and this reporter would say, far too much so.

The old adage of politics being “the art of the possible” rings true, but it can get frustrating that the handy quick fix is invariably the first response, rather than the last resort. Whether it’s the housing crisis and the subsequent flood of emigration among younger generations, the Occupied Territories Bill, rural depopulation, children with scoliosis going untreated, vulture funds profiteering off desperate Irish people and Irish property owners doing the same when it comes to housing migrants, it can feel like we’re trapped in an endless cycle of “it’s all we can do, our hands are tied”, or “it’s not great, but we can’t fix it overnight”. And this tends to be followed by absolutely no attempt to ensure that anything gets fixed over the next month/year/decade either.

The unfortunate reality, to take the immigration situation for an example, is that nobody looks around and thinks big. Where is the voice today saying that we desperately need construction professionals and tradesmen, we need healthcare staff, we need teachers, we need young families to avert a pensions crisis, we need pretty much everything; so let’s take advantage of this and get these people straight into training and education, and let’s get them pitching in to become part of our society. Instead we get direct provision, ostensibly to hide the problem out of sight, which is a nonsensical solution, while in the short term, giving space to disinformation and the far right.

And so we come back to the GAA, which is succumbing to a similar mindset. While supporters revel in the stories of the heroic players and managers who break moulds and make the impossible possible, Croke Park invariably gets sucked into opting for the easy solution, or going where the wind blows, rather than stepping back and asking the fundamental question – is this the right thing to do?

Integration of Gaelic games

The first issue is integration with the LGFA and Camogie Association. At a lower level, there has been pushback to this from units within the GAA, who can’t visualise how it will work in practice, given the pressure that already exists on facilities. That’s a human response, but the response from the Steering Group for Integration Committee, chaired by former President Mary McAleese, has been to confidently assert that “we believe we have found that pathway”, without giving any details that might help the general membership of the three associations to share and work towards that vision. A nice sentiment, but hardly dealing with the nitty-gritty concerns.

The correct approach would be to say that this needs to happen, and to be able to state definitively what will be required in terms of facilities and upgrades to make it so, all across the island.

Share a vision of what clubs of different sizes will need to successfully cater for all codes in their areas, and lay out exactly what supports will be there to help them get to that point, as well as what they will need to do themselves. Crossing fingers and hoping to ‘manifest’ what is needed won’t cut it.

The split season

We see now that the idea of extending the inter-county season has crept back onto the agenda, with talk of the promotional and marketing value of capturing the sports pages of national papers for a bigger chunk of the second half of the year.

In a world where the job of the GAA was to maximise revenue, that would be defensible. But in the world where the GAA is a sporting, social and cultural organisation built around the core unit of the club, it is not. There would undoubtedly be some financial gain from extending the inter-county season, though there would be considerable cost too when the bill for team preparation falls due. But the impact it would have on participation, particularly for dual players, would be significant and detrimental. There are also more games on television than ever before.

Who are the children left, who need another month to tip them over the edge and make them pick up a hurl? And if that is the primary concern, how on earth can the decision of charging children €5 to attend league games be justified?

The cost of playing at county level

Like countless other organisations who have been quick to put their hands up in this current era of buoyant tax revenue, the GPA (Gaelic Players Association) said last month that inter-county players are out of pocket by an additional €1,499 per annum relative to 2018, when the expenses grant was brought in. Their argument was that it needs to raise to meet that shortfall.

We’ll park for the moment some of the extremely dubious methodology of the study, such as the assertion that the median amount of distance travelled during the season for an inter-county player (3,556 miles) would incur a fuel cost of €4,813, or that an inter-county athlete spends two and half times as much (€159 vs €64) as an ordinary adult on food and nutrition during the week.

What cannot be argued is that the demands are significant and are growing all the time. But the elephant in the room is – from where are those demands coming? It’s not from supporters, who are not likely to notice if the average body fat of an inter-county player goes from 10.5% to 10%.

It is a zero-sum arms race. If everyone took their foot off the gas a very small amount, there would be the very same number of winners and losers, the same number of heartbreaks and hooleys, and crucially, the same emotional connection between supporters and the players that represent us.

The right thing to do is to work with the GPA, but pulling them into line if needs be, to ensure that demands are more reasonable, that an average county panel isn’t made up of 40% students, 30% teachers and 30% everyone else, and that all hobbies come at a cost, but that the GAA will work with them to bring that cost down, rather than bringing the subsidy up.

But then, doing the right thing is hard. Not everyone will gain. No Irish person, or vulture fund for that matter, who owns five, 10 or 500 properties wants to see housing supply go up and house prices come down, so they’ve done a wonderful job of convincing the person that owns their home and only their home that high house prices are good for them too. A brave politician would highlight this fallacy, but perhaps too many of them are in the 5/10/500 bracket.

Likewise, no high-ranking GAA official wants to be the one to say that while we like All-Ireland finals later in the year, it’s not viable if we want to continue to see Cormac Egan or Dylan Hyland with a hurl in their hand, or to see Oisín Kelly and Donal Shirley play club football. And nobody wants to be the one to say to their own county management that they need to pull the reins in, when that manager is selling the idea to everyone that going that little bit harder will make all the difference.

But then in a world where a recent debate on Russian State TV talked off the US colonising the western half of Europe and Russia taking the east as they did under Catherine the Great and Alexander I, it might be time to accept that sometimes, pragmatism and taking the path of least resistance just doesn’t cut it.