@cluaindiuic and Chuck Norris’ poker hand.
Yes, jackpot!
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My latest frustration with the Athletic. This isn’t woeful probably but it’s still irksome. Daniel Taylor is probably one of their better writers but this sort of backstory introduction to his articles is maddeningly repetitive.
Mourinho:
Leeds:
Keane:
Or his other intro is the one about the surrounding area:
Everton:
Fleetwood:
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Can someone post the text of this one up. I haven’t read it as I refuse to give the indo my email address, but the start is about banana art.
Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan sold a piece of art entitled ‘Comedian’ last week for $120,000. The artwork was a banana taped to the gallery wall in Miami with a piece of grey duct tape. Cattelan bought the banana at a local market, then taped it to the wall.
A day after it was bought, before it rotted, the banana was eaten by a New Yorker called David Dattuna. “The artwork has not been destroyed,” said the Gallery Director, Lucien Terras. “The banana is the idea.” The banana was described in the gallery brochure as “a symbol of global trade, a double entendre, as well as a classic device for humour.”
The Mayo GAA International Supporters Foundation must think the buyer of that banana got good value for money. They donated an initial €150,000 to the Mayo County Board in 2018, with certain stipulations about how it should be spent. They have another €250,000 waiting to be transferred, and have also said they would make around €1m a year available to the Mayo board subject to structural reform which would ensure good and transparent governance in the future.
The Foundation’s concerns were initially raised when they asked for a breakdown of how the €150,000 had been spent and the request was greeted by personal attacks (the chairman of the foundation was described as a donkey and at a subsequent match in MacHale Park between Mayo and the Underdogs, the song ‘Shoe the Donkey’ was played over the tannoy) and the usual GAA closing of ranks.
When the foundation subsequently issued a solicitor’s letter requesting a detailed breakdown, a random batch of receipts was sent. These included (this is not a misprint) an invoice from Walter Donoghue Curtains & Blinds for the supply and fitting of 12 vertical blinds for the sum of €2,023. Where they were fitted is not explained. The blinds leading the blind?
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Amongst this humorous collection of modern art, one of the stand-outs was a grocery bill in the sum of €62.90 which includes pitted prunes (€1.25) and . . . fun-size bananas. However, unlike the visitors to the Miami Art Gallery, the Foundation did not see the funny side, and have now issued legal proceedings for the return of the entire €150,000. At least the buyer of the banana taped to the wall got to eat his banana.
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I have been writing and speaking about the culture of cronyism and incompetence in GAA governance for over a decade, warning that sooner or later the system was going to collapse. But the GAA hierarchy — which has a vested interest in keeping things just as they are — has closed ranks, bailed out boards as and when required, and allowed the status quo to fester. If a light is shone on the working of county boards, soon it will be shone on Croke Park. They are all part of the same hypocrisy.
To try to defuse the Mayo problem, it was reported that the chairman of the foundation, Tim O’Leary, offered to fly from London to Dublin on Monday, December 2 for an 11.00am meeting with the GAA’s director general Tom Ryan. Another of the trustees, Terry Gallagher, an Achill native who runs a high-end limousine business in London offered to travel too.
O’Leary’s only stipulation was that the meeting had to be at his offices in Leeson Street as he is an international currency trader, and with the UK election, Chinese-US trade war and other significant events ongoing, he needed to be in the office to monitor currency fluctuations and be in contact with his traders on the ground. These successful businessmen were prepared to fly to Dublin. The meeting never happened, as the GAA delegation was not prepared to travel the two miles across town to meet them.
Without good, transparent governance, the GAA at central and county level is starting to come apart, but like all incompetent governments, the response is to deny the problem, attack the critics, close ranks and hope that it will go away. The status quo must be protected at all costs.
Two things are required to ensure the good health of GAA communities: a passionate volunteer culture and good, transparent governance. At the most recent census in 2016, County Kilkenny had a population of 99,000. Between 2000 and 2015, this small county won 11 senior hurling All-Irelands. No warm weather training, no overnight stays, no frills, just good governance that has the trust of the clubs, and as a corollary of that, a passionate volunteer culture.
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These are the foundation stones of success, on and off the field. We see this with the great club teams. Slaughtneil, with their parish of 1,800 people. Their own 100-acre farm, run for the benefit of the community. Their own theatre. Their own Irish schools. Since 2014, they have been three-time Ulster senior club football champions, three-time Ulster senior club hurling champions, three-time Ulster and All-Ireland club camogie champions.
Or what about Corofin, parish of 1,500 people, four-time All-Ireland club football champions, hurtling towards the three-in-a-row. Or Crossmaglen, with 2,000 people, the six-time All-Ireland football club champions. Or Kilcoo, new Ulster club football champions, with their minors now in the Ulster club semi-final and massive participation at every level in the club, on and off the field. I was up watching their seniors training recently and in this small parish in the middle of the Mournes, they have a panel of 45.
In the course of a long chat with Brian Cody a few weeks ago, I asked him to explain what the GAA is. He paused for a moment, then said, “It is about a sense of who you are and what you stand for. It is about being part of something bigger than yourself. Loyalty, spirit, on and off the field. It is about unity, the county board and the clubs striving together for something that is hard to explain. Something that cannot be infected by money. Something that cannot be bought.”
This unity Cody describes between board and clubs depends on strong, transparent governance. In Kilkenny, they spend around €200,000 per annum on their senior hurlers and run a very tight ship. The twin pillars of their approach are coaching and volunteerism.
We see the same in Dublin. When John Costello came in as CEO in 1994, he began by creating good transparent governance, disbanding the 17 boards and consolidating them into two — one juvenile and one adult. The focus was and remains participation and coaching. Dublin spent €1.2m on coaching this year. In that same period, it cost €1m to run the Mayo senior team. Dublin have 52 full-time coaches in schools and small clubs. Their salaries are around €30,000, with the clubs making a contribution towards the cost.
Mayo have four full-time coaches, and two working 19 hours a week. Eight extra coaches in Mayo would cost them around €250,000 and would — pro rata — give them more coaches than the Dubs. Instead, like most counties, the money is disappearing down the black hole of the senior county team, including vertical blinds and fun-size bananas and God only knows what else. No wonder there is civil war in Mayo between the county board and the clubs.
As there is in Galway, where they have made a loss of €261,248 this year, their main sponsor is seeking a breakdown of how his substantial donations have been spent, and there is general uproar in the county. The same sort of turmoil is happening in Meath, Derry, Sligo and beyond. The list is endless.
Let us take the example of Cork, a once proud county now brought to its knees.
Cork GAA lost €500k in the most recent financial year alone. For the new Páirc Uí Chaoimh they received €13.75m initial funding from the GAA centrally (between Croke Park and Munster). The cost of the project has spiralled, with a new estimate of between €100m and €110m, a fresh bailout from the GAA would need to be of the order of at least another €25m. There is civil war between the clubs and the board.
Cork’s commercial revenue for 2020 is projected to be of the order of €2.5-€2.9m. Yet they are broke, at each other’s throats, short of coaches and woefully short on spirit. Is it any wonder their senior teams are in limbo and the clubs and club players disillusioned?
Bad governance is a poison that inevitably results in closing ranks, power trips, shortcuts, money being wasted and incompetence. We see this with the FAI, where John Delaney created a culture of cronyism, surrounded by yes men, did what he pleased and walked away leaving them €55m in debt.
The estimated €10m debt in Mayo, or the estimated €30m debt in Cork, for example, are substantially more proportionately than the FAI’s debt. The frightening thing is that the overall debt of county boards is vastly more than the FAI’s. There are two reasons for this, both obvious, both caused by a vacuum in strategy. Firstly, the GAA has permitted the creation of a culture of professionalism in an amateur sport, with the senior county team becoming the be all and the end all and the clubs left to fight a losing battle. Secondly, the hierarchy has no strategy for creating a modern, fit-for-purpose governance structure for the association.
John Delaney may have gone from the FAI, but not before they used another €69,000 from the black hole of their overdraft to fund his retirement party. Interestingly, €40,000 was recently spent on a similar retirement do for a prominent GAA official. Journalists have asked for clarification of the details but those requests have been ignored. Like Tom Ryan’s salary, it is ‘commercially sensitive’ information. In other words, fuck off and mind your own business.
Dublin GAA is constantly attacked, accused of buying success. But this is a fallacy. If it weren’t, their minor teams would be dominating. Instead, they have won only two minor football titles in the past 35 years, in 1984 and most recently in 2012. Their senior hurlers have had the same investment and work put in as the footballers since 1994, and are stuck in Division 1B having been well beaten by lowly Laois in this year’s championship. Their senior footballers won in 1983. Then, a 12-year gap to 1995 (they were lucky that day), then a 16-year gap to 2011 when a needless turnover by Declan O’Sullivan with five minutes to go created a Dublin goal that helped to turn a four-point lead into a one-point deficit.
Since then, Dublin have had three draws and replay wins and all of their victories — bar last year’s over Tyrone — have been close-run affairs. They have won because there is now a vibrant GAA culture in Dublin, with the board and clubs operating together in harmony. They have won because they have had two outstanding leaders in Pat Gilroy and Jim Gavin who have imbued them with humility and spirit.
Dublin’s unity is a result of good transparent governance. In researching this piece, I rang Parnell Park and asked a series of questions about their finances. Every one of them was answered as soon as the details were punched up on the computer screen. "Hold on Joe, it’ll take me a minute to get that, ah here it is now . . . "
In 2009, all Dublin county teams (hurling and football) at all levels cost €1.2m to run. In 2019, which featured the footballers’ five-in-a-row success, the cost was €1.3m. In 10 years, the cost of their county teams has gone up by just €100,000, which with inflation factored in, means a net decrease in spending.
The additional revenue garnered has been spent on participation, coaching and supporting the clubs. Jim Gavin famously never claimed expenses (nor did Pat Gilroy before him). Nor did any of Jim’s management team. The doctors are also volunteers. The Dubs are ready to win big when the right group of players comes along because, like Kilkenny, things are being done properly. They should not be pilloried for being competent.
It is no coincidence that the most successful counties on the field are the best run off it. The problem is that because governance in the counties has been left up to the individual counties, this is hit or miss, and mostly miss. The health of the GAA community is too important to be left to chance.
The GAA’s governance at central and county level is demonstrably not fit for purpose. Most county boards are incompetent. This is mainly because they have been given an almost impossible task, volunteers trying to run million euro businesses in their spare time, submerged by the task of running amateur games on a professional basis. Some have been corrupted, prevented from disgrace only by the protection given to them by the hierarchy and the culture of secrecy. No wonder they have come to feel they can do what they like and get away with it.
I presume the €40k goodbye party was for the great Frank? And the county board laden down with debt. 
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Padraic O’Duffy is the only other one I could think of, and it would be unlikely for him I’d imagine.
they love an expensive goodbye party in cork
Someone else can post it up
Kimmage has part one of an interview with Gary O’Toole in the Sindo today. Might be worth a look later. I’m going for a spin.
Darragh O’Se
Watching the New York v Sligo game on the weekend reminded me of the time there was a shooting in Gaelic Park. This must have been around 10 or 15 years ago at least. Nobody was too badly hurt or anything. If I remember rightly, the headline in the paper over there was something like “Gunplay at Gaelic Park”. Gunplay!
Anyway, I didn’t need the newspaper to hear about it. Somebody always knows somebody so the story came back from fellas who were there in the clubhouse bar when it happened. After the initial panic at the gunshots, it didn’t take too long for everything to calm down and for the place to get back to normal.
The NYPD arrived to arrest the lad in question and to take witness statements and secure the area and the whole bit. By all accounts, there were a couple of fellas from Listowel sitting at the bar and after a while they got impatient at the fact that their night was being interrupted.
“Come here to me,” one of them says to the cop. “There’s no need to be going to all this fuss. Everybody knows what happened. That fella there shot that fella there and that’s all there is to it. Everybody saw it. So could ye get with it? We’re having a pint here. . . ”
Never mind the gunplay, serious business is serious business.
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Brutal
The larcenous nature of the opening* words of boring articles about sport, their habit of breaking in on others when we are least prepared, has seldom been more sickeningly demonstrated than in most sports articles you’ll read, as people run out of things to write about and so plagiarise, steal words or insert shite comparisons or twee, made up anecdotes to pad out the article to the required word count.
*Not necessarily just the opening words.
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You have to admire his willingness to get to that word count. No matter what it takes
I am aware that I frequently make performatively absurd comparisons and analogies between sporting events and more serious events, ie. recently I compared Dublin’s loss of their first four NFL matches to Vladimir Putin suddenly looking toppleable (Is that a word? I don’t think so) and comparing the military state of play and outlook in war between heroic Ukraine and the sub-human Nazi scum of Russia to a finely balanced cricket Test Match. So don’t bother pointing that out.
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Not a sport.
Dafuq?
Cahair O’Kane: No great team means a great journey for everyone
The journey is where it’s at for supporters, and the fact that there’s no outstanding team in this year’s championship is allowing everyone to dream a little. Picture by Philip Walsh
26 June, 2023 15:46
THERE’S a lovely Audi Q2 in front with two collie dogs in the back seat.
One staring out the back window, its head tilted to the side, a kind of a cross between ‘hmm’ and ‘what are you looking at?’.
The rear window on the driver’s side is screwed down just enough for the other dog’s head to fit out through.
Eyes closed, the cool breeze billowing through its hair, the contentment dripping like the slabbers from its flapping smile. It wouldn’t have looked out of place on the strip in Las Vegas, headed for the Bellagio in a limo.
But this is not Vegas. This is Athlone on the return leg of the run from Salthill on Sunday, having seen Galway’s All-Ireland dream brought crashing to a halt.
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