GAA president Jarlath Burns has said the issue of funding for female intercounty teams has been a significant roadblock in the integration process.
Burns asked Mary McAleese to reflect on her comments suggesting there are some within the association “who are not entirely happy about the idea of including women in decision-making at the top level of Gaelic sports”.
McAleese made the remarks on Tuesday following her decision to step down as chair of the Steering Group on Integration (SGI), tasked with overseeing the merger of the three Gaelic games associations – the GAA, LGFA and Camogie Association.
In a wide-ranging interview on RTÉ Radio 1’s News At One, Burns insisted the GAA remains committed to integration, adding that he sees equity as a “staging post” on the way to equality.
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However, explaining the main stumbling blocks to integration becoming a reality in 2027, Burns conceded the financing of intercounty teams was one of the most difficult circles to square.
The cost of preparing intercounty teams climbed to €45 million in 2025, the GAA reported earlier this year, with the figure expected to rise again when the 2026 figures are tallied.
Asked what the GAA meant by using the phrase ‘equity rather than simply equality,’ Burns said: “It’s mainly at the high-performance level, not at club level, not at national level, it’s the high-performance county level.
“You have to remember that GAA county secretaries reside in a world of logistics, and GAA treasurers reside in a world of invoices. We have to be respectful of those volunteers.
“If you look at the main areas of high-performance, development squads, gear, nutrition, catering, gym membership, size of panels, number of sessions per week, travel expenses, transport, team holidays and training weekends, we already operate an equitable model within the GAA, where maybe in a county where football might be the developing code, the hurlers get more resources presented to them. It’s the same with the opposite [in counties where hurling is the developing code].
“We actually have a poor record in the GAA of controlling expenditure currently. If we go straight into equality, the €45 million which we currently spend preparing county teams goes to €90 million. We just simply cannot sustain that.
“In every county I go to, I hear the same thing from county treasurers and county chairs, (who) say ‘we have to be very careful that we don’t just double our expenses on county teams’.
“That is why I have set up a certification committee to ensure that we try and regulate county expenses in the interest of whenever we move towards integration, that we can do a better job of it. But it is not a question of trying to create a two-tiered approach.”
Pushed on whether the core issue is that far greater resources would be required to fund women’s intercounty teams, Burns said: “Probably in a nutshell, yes, that’s it, because we just don’t have the resources currently to be able to provide for that.
“That is not to say that at a later stage, if we were in a situation where we were having similar crowds going to female games as male games, that we couldn’t get there.”
On McAleese’s stinging criticism of the GAA on Tuesday night, Burns took exception to the former president of Ireland’s view that some within the GAA didn’t want women at the decision-making table. The GAA’s Management Committee is comprised of 10 men and nine women.
“The GAA Management Committee that I chair is one of the most wonderfully dynamic, intelligent committees that we have in the GAA,” said Burns.
“Their job is to support and challenge, and they support and challenge me significantly at every meeting, no more so than the females that are on it.
“Having the 40-per-cent gender quota has transformed that committee. We’ve done that under my presidency, and I just hope that in the fullness of time Dr McAleese will reflect on that part of her remarks yesterday, and maybe clarify them, because it is quite offensive to the people who are on that committee.”
Burns indicated a lack of clarity on the look of the new organisation could have led to a damaging vote against pushing ahead with integration at a Special Congress in October, but he said the GAA remains fully invested in the process.
“I’m still absolutely committed to integration. I want every single girl who plays the game to feel the same way as every boy playing.
“There was a lot talked yesterday about the words equity and equality. I feel that equity is a staging post on the road to equality.
“Of course, we all want equality. We want every girl to feel exactly the same as every boy. The GAA has committed significant infrastructure resources to ensuring that that happens.
“There’s no point in voting for the [integrated] membership [approach] first until we have the structures, the high performance, everything else agreed, and then we can proceed.
“I and the GAA are 100 per cent committed to the full integration of all three organisations. It’s something that is very, very important to us. I said at the Oireachtas Committee that a fully-integrated GAA would be unstoppable. But we just want to do it right.”
Earlier, GAA director general Tom Ryan said the organisation was “just not ready” for the integration of the three associations.
McAleese had remained steadfast in her belief that integration could be completed by the 2027 deadline, but scepticism around that time frame from some of the parties involved had led to friction and her “devastating” decision to resign. Ryan described the integration process as “a complex undertaking” and the GAA now recognised the organisation was “just not ready to do that”.
“We’ve missed a deadline. It’s our own deadline that we’ve missed. And in hindsight, I think what we were aiming for just proved a little bit too ambitious. So, we just need to refocus and recast our plans. And above all, the commitment remains firm and absolute,” he told RTÉ Radio’s Morning Ireland.
“There were a couple of specific things that we needed to get approval for at this juncture, and they were going to be tricky. First of all, we have proposals around a common membership and reciprocation across the three organisations.
“That’s universal membership fees, family memberships, membership systems, and so on. And the second part was the organisational structures from the club level up to national governing body. The membership piece is ready, and the structures piece is not.
“People might remember, we arrived at what we thought would be a good-looking structure, and we brought that around the country at a series of roadshows before the summer. The feedback from that, from members and delegates, was people wanted us to revise those and to look again at that and to do another pass.
“So, we’re still in the middle of that exercise. And really, in order for the thing to work, you’d have to propose both together. You know, it’s very difficult to envisage a common membership when you don’t know precisely the shape of the organisation that you’re going to be a member of, hence the delay.”
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Ryan acknowledged McAleese’s resignation was “a setback”, but added there would be bumps in the road. However, he said the GAA remained committed to the integration process.
“The commitment remains firm and absolute. I don’t see a future for us as a stand-alone organisation promoting and offering male sports only. Our future is together.
“We would be far stronger as a combined organisation. I believe that. The GAA believes that. I know that my colleagues in Ladies Football and Camogie believe that.
“All we’re looking at here is, as I said at the outset, we missed a deadline, our own deadline. Our job now is just to recast things in the light of that. To learn from that and to push ahead.”
Ryan said he could not offer a precise timetable for integration, a key element would be phased implementation. “Not a single big bang.”
Labour TD Alan Kelly, who is chairperson of the Oireachtas Sports Committee has expressed shock at the resignation of former McAleese. Representatives of the GAA had been before the Sports Committee a few months ago when they said “everything was hunky-dory”. He had spoken with McAleese in recent hours and had been shocked, he said.
“There are so many questions. I mean, you’re going in front of an Oireachtas committee representing the people, the people who have given hundreds of millions to what is the best organisation in the country. I love the GAA, and yet they can just do this,” he told Newstalk’s Claire Byrne show.
“I’m not surprised she resigned because it wasn’t tenable for her to go in front of the people’s representatives by our committee a few months ago and tell us that basically this was happening as the plan, and then for it to be pulled by one management committee of one of the organisations.
“There’s obviously a democracy issue there, but that’s not tenable for anybody, especially somebody of her status. Even her tone, she’s very upset about this.
“Look, let’s call a spade a spade here. This was always going to be a challenge. We knew that. We weren’t expecting miracles. But the idea was that 2027 was going to be the year where you have one club, one organisation. And yes, there was a whole range of strands that had to be dealt with and will be dealt with over a couple of years, et cetera.
“That’s what we expected. But for this to just be torpedoed. I think the Minister and the Government should probably reflect on that.”
Kelly said that McAleese’s resignation had to be “a line in the sand” with regard to the issue of equality. “Ordinary people across the GAA, female and male, really need to stand up and hopefully will in relation to this issue, because it’s 2026. We need to treat everyone equally.”
