Ian O'Riordan hears the Tyrone manager reiterate his numerous and passionate objections to the hybrid International Rules game
Stage-managed, over-promoted and over-hyped by vested interests. Does nothing to promote an international dimension to Gaelic games. Actually helps the Australians to poach Ireland's most talented footballers. And insults the GAA's one truly representative competition.
That's not being thrown out there for argument's sake. It's what Tyrone's two-time All-Ireland winning football manager Mickey Harte thinks of the International Rules. And he reckons he's not alone.
"I was never a fan of the game," says Harte, "I don't like it. I don't think it's any good. But that's an aside. I just feel it's been marketed to the last to make it seem popular to people. And much more than that, it's about the whole concept. It's about what are we doing here. We are engaging in a so-called international series, and yet it's not Gaelic games.
"Why should we pursue that when we have a wonderful product of our own that we could just as easily be developing worldwide? For me that's the criminal thing. Every day we pursue this we're postponing the day that Gaelic games could become truly international, because this thing just doesn't serve us at all in that regard."
Harte isn't trying to spoil the party in Galway this Saturday, and Croke Park a week later. He wouldn't attend either of those games even if he had to.
He spoke out against the series last year after the violent play that developed in Australia, but feels that criticism was interpreted as a sort of sourness in the moment. His disapproval in fact runs far deeper and he believes the whole GAA community needs to ask some hard questions.
"I think the authorities at the headquarters of the GAA need to step back and ask what are we promoting here. Are we promoting Gaelic games, or something that pretends to allude to it? Let's face it, that's what we're doing.
"Some people seem to think I'm anti-Australia, or that I'm too insular. It's not that at all. Quite the opposite. I would love for our games to be truly international. But this is not the way of doing it, because these players are not representing Ireland in Gaelic games. We seem to forget that.
"I think there is a much better way of doing this. That starts at club level, because there are teams in virtually every continent now playing Gaelic games at some level. Why can't they be brought together on the world stage?
"Even if it's at junior or intermediate level in Ireland, that they're the ones representing us. But that would at least start to build for the future, which maybe could become county level, and maybe even provincial level. And then we'd a have a truly international sport."
Tyrone footballers have played a big role in the series over the years. Seán Cavanagh is sure to be one of Ireland's key men this year, and so could Stephen O'Neill, one of the three standby players. Yet Harte makes it clear he'd prefer if they didn't go near the thing - although he understands why they do.
"Sure that's a gimme," he says. "I mean who wouldn't like to be 'representing their country' - and put that in inverted commas - and travel to Australia, be well looked after in terms of getting loads of gear and expenses, and being covered for a good holiday?
"And of course the media see nothing wrong with that either, who have the same vested interest in it. There are those vested interests from various parts.
"I certainly think there are lots of people that share my feelings. It's just difficult to articulate it in as strong a fashion as those for it, such as the media. I mean lots of journalists see it as a good opportunity to write it up for the two weeks before, the two weeks when it happens, and maybe the week after. That's five or six weeks' work there, so I can fully understand why all the journalists like to promote it. But is that a true reflection of how we all feel? Or have these people taken the time to step back and ask what exactly it is we're engaging in here?
"And look, ultimately, the total insult to me is that while we're doing all this, and putting huge amounts of money and promotion into making this hybrid thing popular, we are burying the one truly representative game, the Railway Cup. It's pushed from pillar to post, on a Saturday evening to a Monday morning, from Killarney to Ballyshannon.
"And we saw players coming from International Rules training to play for their province. How insulting is that? And other players can't play in the county finals the weekend that it's on. And that's what saddens me most about this whole affair."
And Harte's criticism of the International Rules doesn't end there. He also believes it helps the AFL tempt the GAA's finest young talents to join their game: "People say we're losing a player here and there, that it's only a trickle, and they should be allowed the opportunity to go and do this if they so want - that it happens in soccer and rugby too, that people from our game go to those sports as well.
"But the big difference here is that we're not facilitating soccer and rugby to do that. We don't encourage them by way of playing a hybrid game with the rugby clubs or the soccer clubs, yet we're doing it with the AFL.
"And the other difference is they're taking the cream of our players. And to me one player we lose is one player too many. And they're going to a mediocre-enough sort of professional set-up, especially in terms of what professionalism is in sport nowadays."
Any repeat of the violent play could yet force the GAA's hand and end the series, and yet Harte is not holding his breath.
"You can stage-manage that too," he says, "and make sure it's not violent so that it will stay on for another year. And then if the interest is waning a little bit you get something in there to rip it up a bit again. Sure that's what's happened over time.
"When it wasn't violent enough and nobody was going to it they just introduced a little violence, and then when it got too violent people started to say that it would have to stop if it doesn't cool off. I just think all of that is stage-managed anyway."
