Sign up here for the Gaelic Managers Association.
It’ll be a long slog - we can’t promise any quick resolutions - but we can promise some sparky times along the journey, if the experience of the players representative body is anything to go by. An official organisation representing intercounty hurling and football managers around the country isn’t as far-fetched as it seems.
Certainly on the basis of TV3’s findings last night it seems only a matter of time before we’re summoned to a hotel conference room, subjected to some lukewarm coffee and plain digestives, and told that where there are one and two bainisteoiri gathered together, there also will you find the GMA.
The nuts and bolts of the TV3 survey make for quintessentially GAA reading, particularly the confirmation by 21 different county boards that yes, they believe that senior intercounty managers are being paid.
That “believe” must be one of the most delicately proffered verbs ever seen outside of a Jane Austen novel. The phrase ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’ probably never had more applications.
For years the payment of managers has been the subject of much discussion - not whether it actually occurs, but how much, exactly, some managers are getting.
Wild sums were bandied about during the Celtic tiger years, with high-profile managers’ names being attached to compensation packages that would give pause to the CEO of Anglo Irish Bank.
This fella was on fifty; that fella on one hundred; the other was on fifty plus apartment plus (insert brand name of fancy motor here). Yet despite the odd nod of acknowledgement, GAA headquarters never seemed keen enough to eradicate the problem to actually do anything about it.
Why not?
Credit is due to the five county boards which were willing to state that they pay their managers. On the face of it that’s not an admission that’s likely to have anybody reaching for the smelling salts, but at least they were willing to come out and admit it.
Elsewhere, some GPA members might be excused a self-satisfied harrumph or two this morning. A huge amount of light and sound was wasted in attacks on the player body when it was peering in from outside the stockade, and much of that fury centred on suggestions that militant player representatives were seeking to introduce pay for play by subterfuge.
Nobody seemed willing to point to the big contradiction that many intercounty players were accommodating then and now: they were being told to stay amateur at the risk of destroying the GAA, but someone else in the dressing-room was being paid for his time.
There are likely to be repercussions as a result of yesterday’s admissions. Croke Park will have to act, so expect a high-level task force or committee to be appointed within the next couple of days to look into the matter. Whether the appointment of the committee will suffice as action only time will tell.
Other organisations are unlikely to be as indecisive. If those payments aren’t fully tax compliant then the relevant authorities are likely to take a keen interest in the financial affairs of people who, after all, are visible to hundreds of thousands of supporters in stadia every summer.
Given the financial climate we all operate in nowadays, we would be expecting the Revenue Commissioners to circulate an internal memorandum on the matter within the next couple of days.
That’s a situation which many an intercounty manager would be inclined to welcome, by the way. With all those fuzzy implications floating around, who wouldn’t like to see their name cleared?
They don’t even have a representative to speak out on their behalf, but that could change soon. The internet domain name gaelicmanagersassociation.com isn’t taken yet. It should be soon.
