The opposition of events, as Harold Macmillan put it before someone edited his reply into something snappier, is the greatest difficulty for all leaders and not just British prime ministers.
Larry McCarthy comes to the GAA presidency with a sackful of qualifications and interesting experiences but his career grasp of global sport and its interactions with the business and commercial worlds is frustratingly hard to apply in current circumstances.
As he noted himself at his first media conference, the main priority is simply to get the games back on the field. Everything flows from that.
Nonetheless, the last few years and including the weekend’s remote annual congress have been nothing less than seismic for the GAA and sometimes events force change for the better.
In early 2017 the Club Players’ Association announced itself and crystallised the long-standing and inadequately addressed concerns about the state of club fixtures. The CPA, which on Wednesday morning announced that it was disbanding, coined the slogan, ‘Fix the Fixtures’.
Wheels were already turning in Croke Park but the CPA's founder secretary Declan Brennan startled everyone when advocating an intercounty season that would end by the August bank holiday.
This was at a time when the experimental plans for an All-Ireland championship were already envisaging taking two weeks off the intercounty season but losing another fortnight was seen as science fiction. Four years later and the CPA have accepted that their work is done.
Accepting that it took the first pandemic in a century to hit Ireland and the improvised response to that crisis before the split season emerged as the obvious solution, the GAA face into a future unrecognisable back in 2017.
When – we hope – normality returns, it will be with All-Ireland finals taking place two months earlier than previously and not as some psychedelic experiment but as prescribed by rule. That this new dispensation went through unopposed was further indication of how far the mood for change had swung.
If that wasn’t sufficiently ground breaking, the main scrap in terms of debate ended equally dramatically. Hurling was eased away from its twin predilections for high-horse superiority and light-touch regulation to see how it gets on during a trial period of not turning a blind eye to calculated fouling.
Although McCarthy appeared a bit vague about it when asked, it’s another interesting string to his bow that he sat on the ‘Towards 2034’ committee, established to look at challenges for the GAA as it approaches its 150th anniversary.
The committee’s report was completed just over three years ago before being popped into a sack with a pile of rocks and dropped down a well.
Asked about it, a couple of months later, on his accession to the DG's job, Tom Ryan explained its disappearance.
“The report itself – there are quite a number of things in the course of any year that we’ll commission or ask people to work on or prepare a paper on and so on; it’s not really a policy statement when you do or don’t publish any of those papers.”
Yet the stated purpose of the document with a number of radical proposals, such as paying allowances to intercounty players and managers and restructuring the GAA’s governance, was “to generate the kind of widespread debate that is now required”.
The new president assured his first press conference on Saturday that he would re-read it and when he does he may be surprised at how familiar much of it now appears.
For instance and topically, “ . . . it is imperative that the association creates separate and distinct playing seasons for inter-county and club championships in order to provide a regular and meaningful schedule of games for all players and, in turn, recognises the important on-going work taking place in this regard at the time of writing (November 2017).”
If the attachment to the provincial system has strengthened in recent years, the committee argued strongly for tiered championships and the replacement of provincial councils with regional authorities.
“It could be argued that the provincial system, as presently constituted, is an impediment towards progress and, in effect, could be counter-productive to the development of Gaelic Games in less competitive counties.”
Some of the recommendations, like the split season, have already become reality.
Opening up GAA property to other sports again required an unseen intervention – the Liam Miller testimonial in Páirc Uí Chaoimh – but the committee had already proposed that such questions should be the remit of a new board of directors, which would effectively replace both Central Council and the Management Committee.
The weekend’s congress demonstrated progress in advancing the role of women in the GAA with McCarthy undertaking to appoint a woman to all of his committees. ‘Towards 2034’ is also explicit about this.
“The Committee foresees a central role for women across the decision-making and organisational structures of the GAA by 2034 . . . under the direction and guidance of a GAA governance structure with responsibility for all sports codes incorporating Gaelic Games: men’s and women’s football, hurling and camogie, rounders and handball.
“It envisages that the GAA will become, as part of its mission, a beacon of best practice in gender equality in terms of clear pathways for progression, participation levels, official status, administration arrangements, management positions and Board membership.”
If some of these epiphanies owed a great deal to the unexpected, that too is referenced.
“Geopolitical events lay bare the difficulties in planning for the future. Attempting to imagine the precise nature of the impact of such developments is impossible, hence the importance of retaining flexibility of operations to deal with all eventualities.”
Events, dear boy, events.
smoran@irishtimes.com
