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Funding Row

'They get everything' - Jerry Kiernan stirs another GAA row by slamming government for €600k grant

“Let them do it out of their own funds,” argues former Olympian following funding for London redevelopment.

JERRY KIERNAN HAS slammed the GAA again and lashed out at the government for funding the Association with taxpayers’ money.

Kiernan — who made headlines last year when he controversially branded inter-county players as “unfit” — insisted that GAA should not receive any government grants despite being the largest sporting organisation in the country.

And the former Irish Olympian took another shot at players’ skills by claiming that “there’s not an awful lot required” to play football and hurling.

His latest comments follow yesterday’s announcement by Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore that €600,000 will be given towards a €5 million redevelopment of London GAA’s headquarters in Ruislip.

The GAA has pledged €1.4 million of central funding for the project with the outstanding balance to be met by the London County Board and its clubs.

But Kiernan, who finished ninth in the marathon at the 1984 Olympics, said the Association is capable of funding itself and that government money would be better spent on sports that represent Ireland internationally.

“My views on this are actually quite blunt,” he told Shane Coleman on Newstalk. “I don’t believe that the GAA should get any amount of taxpayers’ money.

They’re the richest association in the country. They get everything. [They had] bumper profits last year, €600,000 isn’t an awful lot to them. If they have a project to revamp the stadium over in London, let them do it out of their own funds.”

ruislip-redev-4 An image from the Ruislip redevelopment. GAA GAA

Kiernan, who coaches some of Ireland’s best track prospects, pointed to a huge disparity with the funds available to other amateur athletes.

“€600,000 is not a huge amount of money but it’s a lot of money that could be used in certain areas.

“I’ll just give you an example. In one of my training groups tonight, there’s a kid coming up from Athlone and he’ll spend €15 on the bus.

He’s a sub four-minute miler, he gets no state money, he gets nothing like that. He doesn’t have that much money to play around with. €15 is a huge amount of money to him.That can be replicated all over the country, with swimmers, with rowers, with boxers, with athletes.

“To give €600,000 to the GAA, I’m just wondering did the GAA lobby the government for money, which in that case requires a lot of nerve for someone with so much of it, or did the the government decide to give it to the GAA out of their own bat, which strikes me as being a version of stroke politics.”

Kiernan, who admitted that he is not fan of Gaelic games in general, again took issue with players’ skill and fitness levels.

“I don’t actually think it’s a particularly skilful game but I commented more on their fitness more than anything else.

“If you’re training five times a week for the whole year, that’s good enough to run a reasonably respectable 10k road race in the Phoenix Park. If you’re an international athlete, you train twice a day every week for 50 of the 52. It’s a different thing entirely.”

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