GAA in serious administrative trouble

Whereas the Government windfall over the weekend has come as a great relief for the GAA, there is reason to believe that the £60 million has merely papered over the cracks in an organisation in serious administrative trouble.

Financial problems have been averted, but unless the money is put to good use the GAA will inevitably lose ground in the battle with other sports. Its power structures are simply untenable for an organisation as big as the GAA in the modern age.

At the weekend, the long-standing complaint against Congress was again vividly illustrated. Disproportionately weighted towards the elderly and conservative, the profile of the GAA's supreme rule-making body makes it difficult for progressive decisions to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority.

Significantly, the delegates drawing exasperated attention to this were all on the verge of middle age. God knows what 20year-olds would make of the process. Even the youth quotas tend to be filled by relatives of county officers.

After the debate on Motion 16, Antrim's proposal to have e-mail included as authorised communication, the measure was duly accepted. But two (at least) venerable gents were to be seen raising their hands against the motion. What could they have been thinking of? And what were they doing having a say in the affairs of a large organisation with an almost insatiable demand for written communication?

In recent years, a motion to translate the GAA's membership database onto computer was defeated and officials are still obliged to write out the names longhand.

The fact that such a gathering calls the shots in the association on a once-a-year basis gives the GAA all the quick responses and decision-making flexibility of a brick. Even the decision-making process within this unpromising context is flawed. The show-of-hands voting system is both unreliable and inappropriate for major issues.

When the GAA elects a president, the delegates are balloted.

The value of Congress as the GAA's highest authority is best illustrated by the fate of Motions 14 and 24 at the weekend. They were simple motions seeking to implement a decision - about the establishment of round-robin championship groups for weaker counties - taken by the 1999 Congress but written into the Rules in a significantly altered fashion by the subcommittee charged with the task.

Both were ruled out of order for not citing the appropriate rules affected by the "change". This was despite a specific provision of Rule 78 that such deficiencies can be remedied by the Motions Committee and that counties are to be informed in advance in writing about the flaws which render a motion out of order.

The upshot of this bizarre interlude on Saturday was that a provision, accepted by Congress in 1999, will not come into effect for three years at the earliest.

At Central Council, Sean McCague apologised for having to rule the motions out of order but explained that he had been so busy in the lead-up to congress (which indeed he was) that he hadn't had time to peruse the motions properly.

As president, he is on the Motions Committee along with Director General Liam Mulvihill and past presidents of the association. A proposal to establish a new committee to vet motions for congress was - inevitably - ruled out of order.

Within Croke Park itself (or Westward House for the moment) there is an administrative crisis in the full-time secretariat. Around 18 months ago, the decision to fill four badly-needed executive positions was reversed. Not only have those positions not been filled, but in the interim there have been departures from headquarters.

Debbie Massey, the highly regarded secretary of the Policy and Planning Committee, left earlier this year for the Irish Basketball Association and last August Frank Tierney, the GAA's financial controller, went to the Irish Rowing Union. Neither has been replaced. Mary Boland retired from the press office last year and is only being replaced in the near future.

There have been difficulties filling the position of stadium manager. One of the perceived difficulties is that the association doesn't pay sufficiently well to attract widespread interest from the right calibre of applicants.

Against this backdrop someone is going to have to initiate a debate on the administrative structures of the GAA. It is no longer tenable for an organisation this size to be run by an amalgam of full-time and voluntary labour.

Last week it was offered as an excuse for the much-delayed broadcast negotiations with RTE that there weren't the personnel to attend to such matters. At present, nearly every item of importance has to be personally attended to by Mulvihill and McCague - as evidenced by the Motions Committee above.

Yet Mulvihill and McCague are the very people who are bound by protocol not to express opinions when the GAA is formulating its rules for the coming year at congress.

As an amateur association there is perhaps an understandable reluctance to streamline the voluntary structures, but unfortunately for the GAA the world is changing and the current shambolic structures will not be good enough even with the present Government's open-wallet policy.