“If ye really believed nobody should benefit financially why don’t ye do the same as GAA players and go to games on Sundays, submit your stories and then go away and do a job nine to five Monday to Friday, or a couple of nights work like the players are?”

You see it’s when GPA members blurt out comments like that, that I really begin to question the pureness of their motives, and that of the organisation they represent. Is it simply improved conditions for players they are looking for, or is it their intention, in the long term, to seek something more substantial - like pay for play?

I only ask because when I read Donal "g, as quoted, what screams out at me is that what he really means is: ‘Lads, if you can make a living out of reporting full-time on gaelic games then why can’t we do likewise by playing full-time?’

Whatever way you dress it up, that’s professionalism, but according to GPA Chief Executive Dessie Farrell, in his address at the recent Gaelic Players Awards, to profess such beliefs classifies the likes of me as a begrudger.

“Affording inter-county players the status associated with the grant scheme would be a wonderful thing for the GAA - think about it, its star players achieving parity of esteem with international athletes. Instead of supporting this situation, we have petty begrudgers bleating on about pay for play and scaremongering about the destruction of the GAA. It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so maliciously divisive,” blasted Farrell.

Irony is, nothing carries the danger of being as divisive as the players following through on their threat to strike. Furthermore Dessie, I’m in full support of the grants concept!

My views regards inter-county players are no different to those of most other fair-minded grassroots GAA people - that, without exception, they should be paid fair mileage and fair expenses, receive proper medical care and gym memberships and be in receipt of whatever other benefits or nixers might be going. In fact, I think I’m in favour of everything the GPA says it stands for...including the proposed grants. If anything, I’d suggest the figure of •2,000 per player could be improved upon, incrementally, using a results based format. However, for supporters of the amateur ideal (this scribe included, however romantic the root cause of my belief), the crux is in deciding how far any set-in-stone financial reward, for example grants or bonuses, should stretch.

“People are saying players should-n’t get money but they’re being paid themselves,” continued Donal "g. Now where did we hear that before? Oh I remember, sure wasn’t it just a few days earlier that Bertie and Brian told us all to tighten our belts, and it announced just a couple of days before that, that An Taoiseach would be receiving a pay rise bigger than the current average industrial wage! Life’s just not fair, is it Donal?

Of course, he is correct when he says that there are many people, full-time GAA officials and journal-ists among them, earning their living on the back of Gaelic games, but without the expert administration of Croke Park staff or the widespread exposure afforded top GAA players and teams by national and local media alike, our Gaelic games would not be in as healthy a state as they are, nor would the top players, more attractive to sponsors now then ever before, be benefiting to the degree that they are - a fact that continually seems lost on the GPA.

The reported earnings, through endorsements, of one top hurler in 2005, were said to be so great that if divided among a squad of 30 players, each would have received a healthy single figure amount. You can do the sums yourselves!

In recent times we have heard of players taking a year off work in order to concentrate on their GAA career. How many of us can afford to take a year’s unpaid leave? When players depart to play ball in the USA, either for the weekend or for an extended stay, as was rife in the late 90s and early 00s in particular, is or was it simply done for the love of the game? I think not.

Consider too job offers, scholar-ships etc, and it’s not all about play-ers giving all and receiving nothing.

John O’Mahony recalls post All-Ireland final 1989, in Keith Duggan’s excellent new read ‘House of Pain - Through the rooms of Mayo football’, when the manager was trying to prepare his side for the next summer’s championship: “Willie Joe came up to me and told me he had to go to London for another function. There was good money on offer, too. Like, it was hard for lads to turn down. I said, ‘F*** it, Willie Joe, you’ll get twice as much if we win the All-Ireland next year’”.

The ability and marketability of an individual might play a part in determining how great the rewards can be, but there always has and always will be opportunities for good players to make a few quid out of the GAA. It’s something that people have and will always continue to turn a blind eye to, in recognition that the players are deserving of whatever perks they can get out of the game.

It irks me that some GPA members seem to think it perfectly acceptable, based on a double standards principle, to take pop shots at GAA pundits like Joe Brolly and Dara " Cinnéide, who might question the actions of the GPA yet earn payment for their media work. Why? Because you can be damn sure that there are a handsome number of players affiliated to the GPA (far greater than the number of paid GAA pundits) who are doing just as well out of Gaelic games - and best of luck to them, nobody begrudges them. But if it really did ranker with the GPA that all bar the players were benefiting financially, why not tackle the most obvious issue first - the managers - or is it just too difficult to speak out against those who’ll run you into the ground at training, and who’ll be paid for the privilege?

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IF

it is romance that fuels my hope that the GAA, at a playing level at least, remains amateur, I’ve been thinking that perhaps it’s my involvement in traditional music that is part responsible.

If there’s one organisation in this country comparable to the GAA, in both size and purpose, it’s Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. Where one promotes our national sports, the other is the bastion of Irish music, song and dance, both associations drawing its members, be they nine or ninety years, from all corners of the land, inner city, suburbs and rural outposts alike. Their objectives, broadly speaking, are mutual - the preservation and promotion of our culture.

The GAA has its All-Ireland finals and Comhaltas has its Fleadh Ceoil na hEireann, an event for which an attendance averaging 250,000 shows up annually but one which always struggles to attract more than a couple of paragraphs in the national papers, papers that in the same summer will provide wall to wall coverage of Oxegen, Slane, The Electric Picnic and whatever other rock concert/festival you’re having yourself - the combined attendances of which would still fall short of the Fleadh. That latter point probably has little relevance to anything else in this column - it’s just a bug-bear I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for quite some time!

To get back to addressing the issue of any possible threat to amateurism in the GAA, is it that culture and heritage are better protected when money is not a motivator? For example, some of the country’s best musicians will flock to the Fleadh and play their tunes for nothing more than a couple of free pints and a tray of stale sandwiches (if they’re lucky) as the publican rakes in his tens of thousands of euros for the weekend. Hardly seems fair does it, yet the musicians will go home and repeat that process all over again, at sessions in the pubs of their local and not so local towns and villages. Why? Because it’s part of what they are and what they love to do.

Most play traditional music, not for money but for the love. It’s something they’re taught yet it’s also something that feels as if it comes from within. Should the same not be said of gaelic games? Have we as a nation a duty to protect and preserve something special and unique that’s ours and ours only?

Of course, as opposed to footballers and hurlers who can only play under the auspices of the GAA, you don’t have to be a member of Comhaltas in order to play music at the highest level, and then there is the possibility to play for money too, but the number of trad bands who are able to pursue a full-time career by performing on this island alone are few, if any.

In fact, with those bands traveling abroad to play in countries where the music is much sought after, perhaps it highlights the lack of an international dimension to either football or hurling as being reason why Gaelic games might never be able to sustain a professional tier, in the foreseeable future at least. But that’s okay though, because there’s no one looking for that, is there?

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