ON GAELIC GAMES:I REMEMBER a priest at school nearing retirement from teaching. One day he surveyed the classroom with dismay. Snorting aggrieved authority and ferocious with it, he had been affronted by some outstanding display of ineptitude in which he divined the essential troubles of a generation and more broadly, the nation.

“The emblem of this country should be a harp with a couple of broken strings and the motto, ‘Musha, ’Twill Do’.”

When dangerous teachers cracked a joke the more nervous boys broke into unrestrained hilarity and most of the others helped them to laugh.

The episode has stayed with me because it’s an accurate summary of a great deal of anti-reform arguments in general but more specifically – and appropriately for a great national organisation – within the GAA.

The situation of intercounty managers has been a focal point of the year to date. In January the issue of payment arose with the belated publication of the discussion document on the subject and more recently the haphazard nature of their appointment and disposal has been in the news with a procession of comings and goings and more intrigue than Cold War Berlin.

This range of considerations from how possibly to reward managers to illustrations of how fragile their status can be reflects poorly on the administration of the GAA.

Paying people under the table is a prime indicator of a broken system, as it’s such a deliberate flouting of a rule, which if its most fervent advocates are to be believed constitutes a “core value” of the association.

With wearying predictability the GAA shied away from any attempt to deal with reality and instead collectively voted to enforce more rigorously the rule on amateur ethos. There may be those who believe that the smack of firm authority is needed to defend the “core value” but they’d be in a minority. Selecting the hard-line option can be seen as a way of shelving the issue for the foreseeable future.

There are indications that Croke Park will get serious about compliance and parallel regimes such as colleges’ sport in the US are being looked at for any guidance they can offer about enforcing amateurism but the structure of the GAA doesn’t equip it to ensure rules compliance if units are determined to ignore provisions that they themselves voted into the Official Guide.

For example, on the recommendation of the task force examining player burnout an intercounty close season in November and December was accepted by a special congress in January 2008. It rapidly entered the files of those rules more honoured in the breach than in the observance to the point where the failure to adhere to it became an embarrassment for the association. Ultimately it was changed or modified at annual congress earlier this month and is now another of those rules that will “need to be enforced”.

As former president Nickey Brennan once put it, Croke Park officials can’t be expected to hide in ditches to catch those breaching the close season but counties are meant to be policing the rule book within their jurisdiction. The appetite for controlling the managers of senior county teams isn’t uniformly hearty, as the state of club fixtures in various counties would attest.

A code of practice for the appointment of managers was introduced to regulate areas of possible contention, such as use of players and peaceful co-existence with clubs. Again it has to be activated and implemented by counties.

Managers are under enormous pressure to win trophies in certain cases, to achieve less high-pitched targets in others but there is no mistaking disappointment at intercounty level whatever the frame of reference. Accordingly an intercounty manager will frequently have just one item on his agenda and it won’t be anything holistic.

One of the potentially most significant issues addressed by incoming GAA president Liam O’Neill after congress a couple of weeks ago related to managers and the need to train and direct them in what they do.

“At some stage we are going to have to set a standard for the person in charge of a team,” he said, “whether it is the team manager or whatever. With International Rules we have a tour manager and then you have people who coach the team and I wonder should we change the model around a bit or look at it.

“Should the GAA devise a course for managers and explain to people on the course that you don’t get to be a club or county manager without having done the appropriate course? Could you set standards and use this as a way of getting into their heads what you want on discipline, what you want on the demands of players and so on?

“It wouldn’t be about control – it might be able to effect change. We have to look at some way of doing it. If there was a club management course and you did that and got your badges and coaching accreditation you might then be able to inculcate into managers the behaviours that you want.”

This covers important ground. Coaching courses and the emergence of qualified people to run teams have had a major impact on games development. Instituting something that would prepare people to take over teams and impress on them the duties and responsibilities that go with the position would be very worthwhile. Successful managers may be able to do it instinctively but for all of those volunteers, who would like to have an involvement with a team there should be a career path and greater resources than currently exist.

If these ideas concentrate on what managers can do for the greater health of the games there should also be consideration of what the GAA can do for its managers and that’s not happening. There is no excuse for the discourtesy and mean-mindedness that has been shown to some of them in recent weeks.

The central relationship is like a marriage in that the parties can’t be forced together but there must be better definition of the parameters of behaviour. You would imagine that appointments should be made with a level of gravity that obliges county executives to stand by their choice when results are going badly and not, as in Meath, connive at getting rid of the manager a few weeks before the championship.

Players, clubs and managers are all stake- holders in teams right up to intercounty level and it shouldn’t be permissible for any parties to disrespect each other to the extent that appears to be becoming acceptable.

In other words, it won’t do.