Principled approach to effecting policy

 Interview with Liam MulvihillSeán Moran talks to the man who for over 25 years has guided the GAA through major upheavals

The past might be a different country but the GAA, whose affairs Liam Mulvihill took over 25 years ago, more resembles a different planet. Everything from the physical surrounds of Croke Park to the radically altered championship formats is testament to change. Everything from surging income - and towering debt - to exponentially increased media coverage tells the story of an escalating profile.

Mulvihill, a young man when he reported for duty in 1979, is 58 this year and will step down in 2006. When he has completed his term of office he can look back on how he fused the modern needs of a vast organisation that doesn't always look as if it knows where it's going with a careful stability appropriate to a body that has had only four chief executives in over a century.

In the ferment of its inaugural years the GAA managed to have 13 secretary generals in the 16 years from foundation to the turn of the 20th century. There have been just four successors since, Luke O'Toole, Pádraig Ó Caoimh, Seán Ó Síocháin and Mulvihill.

One of the reasons for this longevity has been the strict adherence to bureaucratic principle. GAA secretary generals administer policy in public and keep their own views private.

None of his predecessors had experienced the sort of upheaval through which Mulvihill has guided the association. In keeping with precedent he has turned down the volume when controversy bleeps onto the screen but that hasn't prevented him offering a succession of provocative views in the pages of his annual reports.

Accordingly this year there will be no discursive treatment of the controversial Rule 42, which is used to prevent Croke Park being used for other sports but which will be debated at next month's annual congress.

What in your experience have been the major changes of the past 25 years?

"The Croke Park development and whole scale of the organisation and of the games. When one looks back at the newspapers in 1979 at the amount of media coverage, we're operating on a completely different plane now in terms of interest in the games.

"The amount of championship games - hurling and football - has more or less trebled. That's related to media coverage. Another aspect is live games have given a huge boost to the championship programme as well.

"So in terms of shop window we have gone from being a small, back-of-shop area to being very much out there in Grafton Street or O'Connell Street.

"The redevelopment of Croke Park I always felt would have a more lasting impact on how the GAA saw itself than to any other degree. I think that's going to be proven in the longer term. It has given us a stadium that hopefully will give the association the wherewithal to maximise on its revenues going forward.

"It has also given the association something to be proud about. Some might accuse us of boasting about it at times. It certainly has raised the self-confidence of the association and has put it on a different footing in terms of its commercial involvement.

"It has created a very easy relationship between the GAA and commercial partners, which is new and couldn't have been foreseen in 1979. The GAA was making very tentative moves towards its involvement with commercial partners.

"The sponsorships being entered now by counties are beginning to reflect the overall value of the GAA to a greater extent than 20 or 25 years ago.

"The other major element is the increase on games development and having coaches at club levels and in the schools. To an extent it's a reflection of changing circumstances within the organisation and in terms of competition with other sports."

To what extent do you feel the GAA has become primarily a sporting organisation to the detriment of its broader cultural aspirations?

"There would have been very significant changes in society over the period. In the decades prior to 1979 there would have been very strong nationalist feeling among the vast majority of our followers. Then there were the difficulties we had in relation to the North between political developments and the H Blocks hunger strikes and the controversy caused and the long period of attacks on GAA members.

"Even the membership down south hasn't altogether appreciated the extent to which our members in the six counties suffered during that period. Subsequent to that, as part of the movement towards change and trying to find a solution, there has been a re-evaluation of basic principles in the country overall.

"A consequence of that has been a re-evaluation of basic cultural principles. As part of that the GAA did move towards a concentration on the games and even our own rules were changed so that rather than promoting Irish culture, we changed the words to 'support Irish culture and the Irish language'.

"A lot of our members would probably feel it's a pity we can't keep the two ambitions to the forefront, that we can't do more for the language and Irish culture, but as the organisation has become focused on a much busier games programme, it's been more difficult to keep the cultural side to the fore.

"The values of the organisation or the values of the sport are things a person tends to appreciate, as they get older and not something that's of interest to younger people.

"I'm not describing it as a problem; it's a fact. We have come to realise that that is the situation but we still have a feeling we would like to do more for Irish culture while at the same time appreciating the games are becoming more and more popular abroad and more and more of the people who are taking up the game in Australia, Switzerland or France or wherever.

"When you hear of them looking for a rulebook and wonder what sense they make of rules one, two and three. It's an aspect that's the subject of a motion to this year's congress from Australia, asking that we look at changing the basic aspirations insofar as they apply to units abroad."

Despite the frequently aired anxieties about competing sports, hasn't the GAA in fact been very successful in maintaining profile during an era of unprecedented international success for those competitors?

"The general sports public tends to be very fickle. You only have to look at cycling and the huge interest in the Tour de France and Seán Kelly and Stephen Roche. But once they stopped competing, there was nothing like the same interest. It's the same with athletics.

"That's the great thing the GAA has going for it. The All-Ireland comes around every year and has a broader appeal, which leads into one of my hobbyhorses - that the All-Ireland needs to be competitive and that it will go the same way as the cycling if it becomes the domain of only a few counties. The rest of the country will lose interest.

"That's why the remarkable success of the Ulster teams over the last 20 years - I can't claim any credit - in winning All-Irelands with five different counties has been so important. In hurling you'd Galway winning a breakthrough All-Ireland and Offaly winning a first, the revival of Wexford and Clare - in football as well as hurling.

"We were very lucky in that sense. There's no doubt that variety and new teams coming through has been hugely important. I don't think that can be over-emphasised. That's why I keep saying that competitions must be competitive.

"That leads me to another hobbyhorse - the importance of Dublin being there or thereabouts in hurling and football. The seeds which we're sowing now - my successor won't see any result for quite some time. It's a long-term project but I think it has huge implications for the GAA going forward because what influences Dublin will influence the rest of the GAA.

"More importantly it's going to be the blueprint for how the GAA comes to terms with urban growth. As I've said, what's Dublin's problem today is going to be someone else's problem or opportunity tomorrow. You can see that in the growth in Meath, Kildare and Wicklow."

How much ofan impact is urban deprivation having in Dublin and what are the implications of the trend that suggests the primary GAA expansion in Dublin is largely in middle-class areas?

"Corporate people are more friendly towards the GAA now and have a higher regard for it than they would have in the past. So in middle-class areas - and there's some evidence this goes across the country - you tend to get very well developed GAA clubs that have the movers and shakers as members.

"But it would be wrong to say the GAA is developing exclusively in those sorts of areas. In fact probably the greatest development it has made has been in the poorer areas in the city. The GAA together with the other two major sports organisations have been involved in projects sponsored by the Irish Sports Council for poorer areas of Dublin and other cities.

"The GAA has been very successful in that but you're right to this extent. It does take an awful lot more resources to support a club in a poorer area than it does to support a club in a well-off area. And it takes a lot more to establish a club because in a well-off area they'll have contacts and be able to raise the money more easily and will tend to have the know-how as to how to get things done. But we're very aware of that and that's part of our intervention in Dublin."

With the vast revenue potential of the new Croke Park and ancillary developments, there is likely to be intensifying pressure on the policy of amateurism. How much of that policy is based on principle and how much on pragmatism?

"It's a mixture of the two. The principle argument isn't as sometimes portrayed that the boys at the top of the GAA want to prevent the players earning something out of the game. It's simply about valuing what has made the organisation what it is, which is the voluntary input.

"That voluntarism, that state of mind among our members - people being prepared to give so much of their time and their resources free to the organisation - has made the GAA what it is. That's the principle. The practical side is we just don't have the resources. The pot isn't large enough. We're well aware of all the demands that are going to be on us. There will be extra money raised but if I had €20 million tomorrow, I'd spend it on areas like our major county grounds that are crying out for development or on coaches for clubs.

"A negative change I have experienced over my 25 years is that when I came in here, no county committee received a penny from Croke Park. It just wasn't done apart from a few pounds here and there for a county ground. Otherwise there was no scheme of grants for the counties. In the last year every county received in excess of €200,000 from us and some of the top counties got a lot more.

"We're paying now several million in terms of subsidising the counties, which is a huge change, and if we weren't doing that, certainly half our counties would be bankrupt. In a way it's a very false situation we're living in and if we were to move towards professionalism, you could write off that half of the counties and probably more. It would be a very different GAA that you'd be left with."

There is mounting evidence hurling and football are becoming more antagonistic. Isn't this a major crisis in the pipeline for the GAA?

"I've dealt with that at fair length in my report for this year's congress. I think it's an issue that hasn't got sufficient attention. It has been developing over a few years and was an inevitable consequence of the pressure on county team managers for success.

"There's no overriding authority. In the old days when you had a county chairman or secretary with all their faults, whoever was the person in the county who was involved with the county team, he had a role and an equal responsibility for both hurling and football.

"You're appointing a person now who has sole responsibility for one game and for the success of that one game and whose tenure is linked to the success of that one code. Nothing else counts. You're obviously cooking problems for yourself down the line and the GAA's going to have to look at that problem.

"A little bit of tension is no harm. But you have to control the tension and I think there's now a need for intervention from the top in terms of what delineation there should be between the two codes. The logic of the current progression is if something isn't done the two are going to grow apart. That's what's happening on the ground at the moment at county level. They're developing in separate directions."

Doesn't this trend make almost impossible attempts to promote hurling and develop its catchment?

"I feel the time has come for a fairly major intervention in hurling and it must be sustained. We've had various interventions and programmes and it goes from whatever's the flavour of the year but I think we need a long-term intervention that will be sustained over a long period. I think hurling needs a 10-year plan.

"Hurling committees tend to come with presidents every three years and then a new group comes in and has a new focus. They soon run into problems and then the new crowd comes in and they have all the answers. You end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again. If you could get a group that would concentrate on the longer term, I think that's what hurling needs: planning in terms of financial expenditure and an integrated programme of intervention."

Your annual reports are known for their wide-ranging ideas. Is there any one in particular over the years that you feel stands out?

"That's hard to say. The change in the structure of the championships is something I had been arguing for for quite a while. There was a very strong resistance to it for a long time. People were afraid what they had and what was particularly strong could lose its strength. But I think it's more vibrant than ever and a much stronger competition as a result. It's one example of where change has been shown to be successful.

"One thing disappoints me is we haven't done more to tackle the unequal division in the population. We talked about trying to get a transfer system and various solutions but the strange thing is the counties that have resisted most strongly are the weaker counties. Until such time as they see the writing on the wall - at times it's a bit like dealing with the alcoholic - you can't begin to treat them."

Do you ever feel constrained by the limitations of the office of director general?

"At times you'd wish things would move a little bit more quickly but I suppose I'm a disciplined sort of person and I've never spoken out of place. That's not to say I mightn't have thought out of place and said things to my friends but I would never rock the boat. That would be very much my style.

"I've always seen my duty as the association deciding on policy - and there have often been occasions when I was very annoyed with some of the policy decisions - but from the moment that decision is taken, it's my policy from there on."

Like Sir Humphrey?

"I must say I enjoyed that programme (Yes Minister), maybe for that reason. But you have to be like the top civil servants. It's your duty to defend and implement policy. You can't even afford to query it because if you do, it's going to affect your commitment to it.

"I think if I were to do otherwise there's no way I'd last a long time. Now if I went in as an older person, say joined the GAA at 50, I'd be in more of a hurry. I'd say 'well, I've 10 years' and you might go out in six or seven years, knock a lot of heads together and end up with a sore one yourself.

"When you go in for the long term you're able to take a longer view and your whole approach is different. I couldn't imagine a situation where I'd be in conflict with the GAA about anything. It's unthinkable in terms of how I have grown up and how I have learned to work with the organisation."

And the future?

"My contract expires in 2006 so I suppose I haven't that long to go. It appeared to be a long time at one stage but my contract's to 60 so it's only two years away unless they decide they want to keep me longer, which I doubt and anyway I wouldn't be interested. By this time next year they'll need to be thinking abouthow they approach the question of replacing me, which is a very big decision for an organisation especially with the way things are changing."