It's safe to say that there hasn't been a year like it in about a century. GAA DG Tom Ryan could be forgiven for not knowing where to start when he sat down to compile his account of the past 12 months.
There have been fundamentals like the collapse in the association’s finances, a tumbling drop in income from the heady heights of last year. Ironically, the 2019 accounts appeared to show that Croke Park’s revenue streams were surging again after the lost decade of economic depression with income of nearly €74 million.
Last year’s accounts show a tumble of 57 per cent from that peak – and that’s including the Government subventions that inter alia kept the championship on the tracks last winter.
Even more fundamental was the navigation of the GAA through the difficulties and uncertainty of the first pandemic in over 100 years.
Ryan captures the stresses inherent in coping with a crisis and its ever-changing consequences. Much of what he has to say though is inscrutable, understandable given the complete lack of certainty at present but also as if restraint were all the more necessary in extraordinary circumstances.
There is no obvious leading sentiment but a survey of what fed into an unforgettable year.
The positive experiences of community involvement and the hard work that went into devising and running a games programme under enormous constraint are detailed but there is also shade to offset the light.
In a remarkably nuanced section, ‘Collective Responsibility and Compliance’ Ryan writes about last year’s training restrictions and what he remembers as the more avid interest in proposed sanctions to underpin them rather than their actual merits.
“Now I am sure there was the odd breach here and there,” he writes, “but the overwhelming sense was of measures that were observed not because of any threat but simply because everyone concerned recognised it was the right thing to do.”
Although the DG is at pains to deny that he is naive, the central focus of the above section comes across as at least ethically demanding even if – with more than a hint of exasperation – he couches the need to do the right thing in practical terms.
“That is exactly where we need to get to. Observing standards through threat is neither desirable nor practical. It’s not a very impressive premise upon which to base an organisation of our scale and import.
“Now I’m not naive enough to think we have arrived at that state yet. In fact I know we have not. But I hope that in reflecting upon the year we’ve all had we might recognise that there are things more important than stealing a march on the authorities or on prospective opponents.
“Things like our collective reputation, the health of our community and – when Covid is long gone – respect for ourselves and the association.”
Of course he has a point when he explains that all of the good things achieved by the association last year were founded in good leadership at county and club level – or as he puts it, the simple communication: “this is what we are doing, and this is why”.
The sentiments are the flip side of his almost visceral disappointment with having to shut down the county championship season, which has left several clubs around the country stranded like refugees at a wartime border, wondering will they ever reach their destination.
Ryan has little tendency towards finger pointing but we all know what he means when he says:
“It is a matter of real regret that we didn’t manage to finish the championships in every county. I regret also that this was largely our own fault. Faced with the health risk and reputational damage from a number of high-profile post-match events we had no alternative but to suspend the games in the remaining counties.”
Without shouting about it, he is challenging clubs to look at their own leadership and ask the salient questions. No matter how long a club has waited for a title, there is no justification for threatening public health through heedless and reckless celebration.
If the passage on training restrictions was unduly allegorical, it’s presumably because at the time of writing Cork’s fate had yet to emerge from the Central Hearings Committee.
The apprehension of the county footballers while training on the beach in Youghal early in January led to the recommended penalties of lost home advantage for their first league match as well as a 12-week suspension for manager Ronan McCarthy.
It can be argued fairly forcefully that the committee has tied its hands in this matter by their decision in the case of Down football manager, Paddy Tally, who after a similar recommended 12-week ban saw the CHC reach a more lenient conclusion – eight weeks.
They are meant to be hearing the matter ab initio so the verdict wasn’t a straightforward slap-down of the original recommendation from the GAA’s management committee, who had taken the case because of the gravity of breaking regulations in the middle of a public health crisis.
But it was an extraordinary application of the minimum punishment prescribed in the rulebook for the breach of ‘discrediting the association’, Rule 7.2 (e).
If the organising of team gatherings outside the window of permitted activity - and we now know that the event wasn’t even in accordance with public health directives even if thanks to our stealthy legislators, this wasn’t altogether clear – in the middle of a deadly pandemic doesn’t move the needle beyond a ‘minimum’ penalty, is there any point in designating the ‘eight weeks’ in that way?
Good behaviour may be its own reward but Tom Ryan knows that sticks are sometimes needed when carrots don’t work.
smoran@irishtimes.com
