IT TRULY IS a wonder the GAA took so long to adopt the split season, given it split its conscience decades ago.
The GAA operates off a kind of wink-and-elbow economics, whereby an amateur status is sanctified not by the absence of money but by its concealment.
GAA managers and coaches across the country are paid for their roles: we know this. We don’t know how many are paid and we don’t know how much they are paid, but we know money is changing hands. Hell, the sliotar-swallowing wolfhounds on the street know it goes on.
But we also know that nobody really wants to acknowledge it. It’s over 20 years since Peter Quinn’s deathless phrase that “not only could we not find the payments, we couldn’t even find the tables under which the payments were being made”.
But, of course, the cost of this acknowledgement would be greater than the collective sum of the payments. It would be akin to a mass disenchantment; the moment the facade of amateurism is forever shattered. If this money came out into the open, how could any self-respecting Gael complain about the naming rights to Páirc Uí Chaoimh, the launch of GAA Go, and the Grab All Association’s general embrace of sordid capitalism?
Safer to shovel the money under the table and maintain the exquisite hypocrisy.
Successive GAA leaders have been brave enough to point out the double standard, though, and last week Tom Ryan joined this band of commendable objectors.
Ryan warned of “a relentless erosion of the volunteer ethos”, writing that county set-ups are increasingly professional in all but name. He went further still by acknowledging that, by common perception, club management is now largely a paid undertaking as well. Ryan didn’t blame any specific individual, but the GAA as a whole. “The failure is on the part of the Association,” he writes, “in espousing one thing and doing the opposite.”
The GAA is fortunate that it is run by people like Ryan, leaders who are willing to baldly state these facts for the sake of an ethos, and a determination to stand for something beyond the accumulation of money.
Another line from Ryan on the topic of managerial payments stood out: “There are risks here for clubs for the individuals concerned and for the entire Association in terms of financial resources, taxation, and reputation.”
Taxation has always been the secret within the secret. Payments to managers beyond legitimate expenses are supposed to be subject to tax and PRSI, but under-the-table payments can escape the attentions of Revenue.
Not every manager and coach working in the GAA is being paid; many are doing it on a genuine volunteer basis. And of those being paid, some will be fully compliant with tax obligations. But as Tom Ryan warned, the status quo has led to a situation in which some others making money may not be compliant.
When JP McManus made his recent donation to the county boards of Ireland, there was some caviling about his tax status, but what about the tax status of those handing over and receiving clandestine payments in the GAA? Why should the outward maintenance of the GAA’s claims to amateurism be prioritised over the maintenance of society at large?
Some of our tax monies are redistributed under the sports capital programme and the large scale infrastructure fund, which pit sports against each other by design. How galling must it be for rival sports bodies with a professional, tax-regularised arm to miss out on grants to the GAA?
But the greater implications are for the GAA itself.
Much has been done to try and mitigate against player burnout, for instance, but nobody is openly willing to tackle the insanity of incentivising coaches to flog players by paying them per session.
Meanwhile, the cost of preparing teams has exploded, with volunteer club executives and county boards stretched and squeezed like never before. Club membership fees have risen, fundraising schemes have become more baroque, wealthy benefactors have been found and seduced, but the well will eventually run dry.
Perhaps managers and coaches are paid because they deserve to be paid, given the hours involved in the gig. But if that’s the case, those payments have to be regularised. And if you’re doing that, there is no good argument as to why the players shouldn’t be paid as well. A refusal to pay the players is held up as the last bastion of amateurism, as if giving them a fair share would be like the fall of Rome.
But it has already happened: the GAA’s claim to amateur status is dead. It was a beautiful, noble idea, but one that has been reproached from within. Amateurism in the GAA is better understood now as an aspiration, a high ideal by which everyone is edified in the basic act of striving for it.
Parts of the GAA will always be amateur, and the organisation will always be backboned by volunteers, but this will make it just like every other sports body in the country.
The duplicity of the GAA’s language around money was captured long ago by Brian Friel, as it too is filled with mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception. But too many people have decided not to worry about tomorrow, simply because there’s such opulence on offer today.