GAELIC GAMES:Eamonn Fennell's transfer drama has major implications for the GAA in Dublin

DUBLIN’S NEW year began as usual, with supporters gazing fretfully up at the vertiginous heights that the team will have to ascend if there is to be any improvement on the hollow disappointments of recent years.

Dublin’s fortunes have become a national soap opera: most of the country shifting uneasily, as the team blasts through Leinster trailing a few reasons why this year will be different, before relaxing when each championship turns out to be much like every other for the past 14 seasons.

There are so many conflicting agenda: not wanting Dublin to succeed but needing them to progress sufficiently far to maintain revenue streams; dreading another All-Ireland remaining in the capital but aware that the games need profile in the country’s major population centre.

Of course the stereotype of people from outside the city seething with resentment at the “Boyz in Blue” is as distorted as its mirror-image and anyway the GAA knows that Dublin is special.

That’s not a reference simply to the merry jingle of the cash registers during big summer days in Croke Park but also recognition of the challenges that are posed by urban areas in general and the biggest one in particular – a challenge that the GAA acknowledges is not being met.

“There are six out of 10 people in urban areas,” said director general Páraic Duffy at the start of last year’s 125th anniversary.

“We’re very strong in rural areas, that is areas where four out of 10 people live but we’re not strong where six out of 10 live. That’s the reality.

“The GAA needs premises and a presence in the community. That’s not easy to organise in urban areas and it’s not easy to get volunteers either. It’s very, very difficult and we’re not doing it very well.

“It’s far too hard to start a new club because we make it hard with rules and costs and in very few instances do other clubs want to see new clubs established. Our participation in urban areas isn’t anywhere near where it should be.

“In working class Dublin, soccer is by far the biggest sport. We have some very good clubs in working class areas but overall participation and interest in our games is very, very low. In vast tracts of urban Ireland there is very little interest in our affairs. That’s the reality.”

So Dublin is different. One of those differences emerged quite vividly after Sunday’s O’Byrne Cup defeat of Wexford.

It’s increasingly unusual to find players – particularly Dublin players – chatting away animatedly after matches but there was centrefielder Eamonn Fennell taking questions on the pitch.

Aside from the unsettling fact that he started by paying tribute to his former team-mate Warren O’Connor, who was knifed to death last week in one of those witless but chilling acts of violence that now proliferate in our towns and cities, what Fennell had to say was of interest because he finds himself in a quandary that has major implications for the GAA in Dublin.

For the past three years the player has sought to leave his club O’Toole’s and transfer to other clubs, firstly Ballymun and then St Vincent’s.

On each occasion O’Toole’s have blocked the move. Last year Fennell played for nobody; injury and illness played a role but principally he was blocked from doing so.

His reason for wanting a transfer is that O’Toole’s is a hurling club where football is played only to maintain fitness levels.

He acknowledges the ties his family have to the club – which ironically was a football powerhouse for the first half of its history but developed into primarily a hurling outlet.

Fennell is a promising footballer, who had an encouraging 2008 but was unable to build on it last year.

Now he wants to re-establish his playing career and Dublin manager Pat Gilroy is obviously keen that this should happen – even to the point of playing him as an unlisted replacement when Ross McConnell dropped out before Sunday’s throw-in despite the ambiguity over his current status.

O’Toole’s have apparently said that they disapprove of “big clubs getting bigger” and that is the theory behind the GAA club: the basic unit of the association and an allegiance that theoretically stays with someone for all of their life.

This role is particularly pronounced in smaller, more rural areas where geography makes the local club an obvious outlet for people wanting to play sport or involve themselves in the community.

This fosters strong, family-based links with that community but even so there are transfer dramas in these situations as well.

In Dublin there is no parish rule, effectively freeing players from the obligation to affiliate to the nearest club – partly recognition of the difficulties for anyone wanting to stay in the neighbourhood where they grew up.

Consequently there isn’t the same sense of community in the capital. Clubs are committed and involved in their own areas but the localities don’t always reciprocate to the extent that would be common elsewhere.

Complicating the situation is the modern emphasis on elite performance. Coaching methods have developed at every level of the GAA and especially in the top, inter-county stratum. County teams are the big revenue engine for the association and their players are accorded a specific status within the structure of the games.

It’s hard as a result to tell a player who feels his development is being held back by his club’s prioritising of the other code that he must stay there as a sacrifice to the community ethos of the GAA, particularly in a county where that ethos isn’t as marked.

What is the Dublin County Board to do about this issue in general?

On one hand it’s ridiculous to tell someone who’s dedicated to playing that he can’t. In an amateur sport it’s possibly not even constitutional to restrict a player in Fennell’s position to the extent that has happened.

On the other hand this type of manoeuvre, if widespread, would inevitably demoralise small clubs and eventually wipe out dual clubs.

In another irony, Fennell is actually a games promotion officer, attached to Naomh Fionnbarra in Cabra: working for the GAA but not allowed to play Gaelic games.

There are arguments on both sides of this issue but ultimately the rule is like the old prohibition on divorce.

It may be able to blight Eamonn Fennell’s future playing career but it can’t force people together and stop one party walking away.

smoran@irishtimes.com