ON GAELIC GAMES:Antrim's right to contest Leinster for three years has made automatic relegation from the MacCarthy Cup unfeasible, writes SEÁN MORAN

ONE DISADVANTAGE of the organic process through which the GAA has been developing its championships in the past 15 years is that things can get incrementally complicated along the way. Hurling has been a particular problem for administrators.

Rationalising championship structures across a range of counties amongst which the standard fluctuates wildly has never been easy and with the tension between the interests of competitiveness and games development always taut, complications to the process have been inevitable.

The current mess, involving Antrim’s right to contest Leinster for three years, has only come to light in the unexpected circumstances of Antrim’s defeat by Laois the week before last. (There is naturally cynicism in Laois as to whether this would ever have become a problem had they operated according to script and been defeated.) The terms and conditions of the relocation to Leinster included a requirement to be governed by the rules of promotion and relegation, which at that stage stipulated a play-off between the bottom-ranked MacCarthy Cup county and the winners of the Ring Cup.

That changed at this year’s GAA Congress when it was decided to grant MacCarthy Cup status to the Ring Cup winners, rather than make them scrap for a place in the top flight in a play-off. That meant that relegation would be decided between the poorer-performing counties amongst the top 12.

According to the mechanism agreed at congress, that would be the four counties that lost their initial qualifier engagement this year – Antrim, Clare, Wexford and Offaly.

Antrim, however, have maintained that the terms of their three-year entry into Leinster would only involve relegation after they had got a shot at the Ring Cup winners. In other words, the regulations moved in one direction without making a necessary shift in another.

A couple of points need to be made here.

Firstly, Antrim are protected by the rules as they existed at the time, but their moral claim is unconvincing. After all, the move into Leinster was an initiative intended to help the county compete at senior championship level, not to insure them against relegation.

Secondly, the decision to allow the Ring Cup winners a guaranteed place in the elite senior championship the following season presents a problem in that the title will simply hop around every two years to the county which gets relegated from the MacCarthy Cup the previous season. Were Antrim relegated this year, they would almost certainly have bounced back next year, as this year’s Ring Cup winners Carlow, in all probability, travel in the other direction.

An obvious solution lies in the old system of making relegation and promotion dependent on a play-off. Otherwise, the promotion process is being undertaken for purely developmental purposes, a praiseworthy aim, but not one appropriate to elite competition.

Whenever this type of affirmative action is mentioned, reference is made to Offaly in the 1960s being given a leg up into Division One of the hurling league and the great benefits that had. But Offaly by 1969 were capable of eliminating the then All-Ireland holders Wexford from the Leinster championship.

Antrim, for all their efforts to compete at the top, have managed just one senior championship victory over serious opposition in 65 years. This season’s migration afforded the county a crack at two of the counties it would have regarded as being within their realistic sights, Dublin and Laois, but a championship victory was still beyond them.

It’s looking likely that this year’s relegation play-offs will have to be shelved because the rule book didn’t keep track of the championship changes and Wexford, Clare and Offaly can hardly be expected to dice for relegation while Antrim stand by unaffected.

Consequently, a special congress will almost certainly have to be convened in the autumn to sort out the matter. The most obvious solution is to restore the status quo ante, where the Ring Cup winners then play-off with the lowest-ranked MacCarthy Cup county.

Within the GAA, there is too much of a sense of entitlement about elite competition. Neither is this just prevalent in hurling where discrepancies in technical ability lead to vast differentials on the scoreboard.

The 2008 congress decided to reverse a policy decision of two years previously to require NFL Division Four counties to compete in the Tommy Murphy Cup rather than contest the All-Ireland qualifiers. Wicklow, co-incidentally having a fine run in this year’s qualifiers, led the charge and within a couple of months had defeated Division One side Kildare in Leinster, which was used as an argument to decry the original decision.

Yet, there is nothing wrong with requiring teams to justify their inclusion in any elite competition. Granted, this is a bad year to uphold such an argument because Division Four sides Antrim, in a first provincial final in 39 years next weekend, and Wicklow have won championship matches whereas Sligo did well against Galway and defeated Division Three winners, Tipperary, in the qualifiers.

But that’s not the point. Antrim and Sligo would, in any event, have been categorised as Division Three counties having earned promotion, but, more importantly, if rules state that a county has to get out of Division Four to enjoy full senior championship status, then it should simply concentrate fully on the league during the spring.

Were Croke Park feeling really radical, this could actually be extended to the National Hurling League with Division One and the top half of Division Two comprising the MacCarthy Cup field in any given year. This would allow the Leinster (and to an extent, the Munster given Clare’s presence in next year’s Division Two) championship less time to conduct a draw and make fixtures, but six weeks should surely suffice.

Such a structure would provide welcome continuity between the league and championship and make Division Two of the NHL and Divisions Three and Four of the NFL particularly competitive. Either way, there should be more of a sense that championship participation is something to be earned and defended rather than automatically granted.