Thomas Davis say no to split

Thomas Davis, one of the largest clubs on Dublin's southside, has described as "ill-advised" the Strategic Review Committee (SRC) proposal to split the county into two for football purposes. It is the first detailed response from a Dublin club since Sunday's announcement.

While the club welcomes the recognition given in the SRC report to the need for Central Council and the Leinster Council to invest more in Dublin, it disagrees with the "headline" conclusion that Dublin should be divided in two for a number of reasons.

"Unfortunately, what the committee is proposing is an ill-advised, poorly researched, arbitrary and painful disbandment of a unique core strength of the GAA: the county identity," says Thomas Davis chairman David Kennedy.

"The proposal envisages, for example, the ridiculous anomaly of Dublin fans being forced to have divided county football loyalties one week but united county hurling loyalties the next."

Firstly, the club feels that the committee provides no underlying research or support for its sweeping solution that "Dublin should be divided, using the River Liffey as the boundary, into two counties - Dublin North and Dublin South".

Nor is it satisfied that any analysis is offered to show how these proposed new administrations will deal better with the issue of establishing new Dublin clubs than a single, properly financed and enhanced Dublin County Committee.

The club says the SRC sets out no evidence of having laid any groundwork for introducing these proposals with the people in the Dublin clubs who would be needed to support them. "The prospect of anything being achieved without the strong support of Dublin clubs and Dublin supporters is naïve in the extreme."

In addition, the SRC assumption of an "anticipated new rivalry between two new counties" and that this "will logically result in the need for two separate county teams in the short-to-medium term" is viewed as similarly naïve.

According to the club statement, "it is hardly creditable that two new counties without any meaningful GAA heritage or history could replicate, let alone surpass, the existing healthy rivalry between clubs like Thomas Davis and Ballyboden St Enda's from the Southside and Na Fianna and St Vincent's to the North.

"Numerous clubs throughout Dublin are investing considerable self-raised funds in schools coaching initiatives to develop their player base and through that Dublin GAA. The factor limiting Dublin clubs' ability to extend these initiatives is lack of finance, not lack of administrative structures in Dublin."

Based in Tallaght, Thomas Davis currently fields 40 teams in football, hurling and camogie and has more than 1,000 members. The club sparked an upturn in the fortunes of south Dublin football by winning three consecutive Dublin senior championships in the early 1990s and are the current holders of the Dublin Senior Football League Division One title.

The club does welcome some of the acknowledgements of the report: "that Dublin clubs provide hugely important focal points for many communities in both urban and rural areas of the county; that Dublin faces unique issues relative to other counties such as increased competition from other sports and the challenges arising from rapid population growth; and that the strains on the current structures and the lack of resources available to Dublin County Committee have meant the investment in the development of the games has not kept pace with the county's needs in recent years".

Yet these points, say the club, have been repeatedly made by Dublin GAA people to the GAA administration but have not resulted in the necessary investment: "this despite the huge and disproportionate contribution Dublin teams and supporters have consistently made to the enormous growth in GAA revenues".