THE DISPARITY OF resources between GAA and soccer clubs was up for discussion on the Football Family, a podcast for subscribers to The 42.
Cobh Ramblers manager Shane Keegan is ideally placed to observe the difference, given that his day job is as a games promotion officer for Portlaoise GAA club.
Keegan also headed up the Treaty United academy in 2022 before taking the job at Cobh.
“I was the academy director at Treaty United, on a part time wage, doing part time hours and with volunteers working under me,” Keegan said. “That’s a League of Ireland club, so the top of our underage food chain, certainly for that area.
“I’m a full-time employee of Portlaoise GAA club. A club, not a county, a club. They have my full working week to themselves. You’d say something if we’re talking about a county here but this is a club and almost all of the clubs around Laois now have an equivalent of me. If they don’t have one for themselves they’re doing a part share on one, they’re paying half the wage each and getting half the hours. But that’s right across the whole country.
“I’m able to put my 40-hour working week into Portalise GAA club, you compare that to the 20 hours I was contracted at Treaty United who are a League of Ireland set-up.
“Now, Treaty United are doing a phenomenal job. We played them at the weekend, they had two of those players who were in that underage structure when I was involved in their starting XI, they brought on another two or three, they are doing an unbelievable job, not by themselves either by the way, obviously the schoolboy clubs that had them beforehand deserve a huge amount of the credit too.
“But it is the miracle of the loaves and the fishes at underage football in Ireland, we’re managing to produce so, so much on so, so little.
“Then the other side of it is the facilities. Fair enough, Treaty were based in UL, but I’m not exaggerating when I say you had U15, U17 League of Ireland teams training on a third of a full-size astro. That’s all costs allowed.
“Portlaoise GAA club have seven full-sized GAA pitches. We have a gym that you genuinely would be in no way embarrassed to bring the Irish international senior soccer team into. If you brought the Irish international senior soccer team and said, ‘That’s your facilities of the week in the lead up to an international game’ they’d go ‘Yep, looks class, about on par with what we’re used to’ . . . that’s in a club GAA setting.
Gavin Cooney, journalist with The 42, said: “Shane, it’s more than they have. You read the document (The FAI’s 15-year, €863 million infrastructure plan) and you realise what they use out in Abottstown . . . The players get changed in the hotel and then arrive on the bus and put their boots on when they get out.”
Cooney added this was not the biggest issue to be addressed, and it should not be solved with public money as there is “little social benefit”.
But he added: “Twenty odd years after Saipan, Stephen Kenny’s analysis team are working out of a single reclaimed trailer that they’ve plonked beside the pitch. For the women’s team, when they had their home-based training, they had to get two portaloos set up beside the pitch. It’s mad.”
Keegan said: “They’re asking for a colossal sum of money, but at least this time they’re doing it with a very clear plan of where it’s going to go and why it is so badly required in those areas.
“I’d be surprised if they manage to get the whole hog of what they’re asking for but if we could get two thirds of the way and the money is implemented in the correct way that they’re setting out . . . to say it could have a transformational effect is putting it mildly.”
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