Will President’s show of solidarity be the answer to Mayo’s prayers?

Jarlath Burns admitted saying a decade of the rosary while on his way from Croke Park to Westport for last Monday’s special meeting of Mayo County Board. He isn’t the first man to have resorted to prayer on matters Mayo GAA.

His journey west to another Sorrowful Mystery had transported the GAA president back to his boyhood and to the Burns’ family’s annual Easter pilgrimage to Knock. He recalled the three rosaries that had to be said along the way.

You’d wonder why just the one this time then. Like the Glorious Mystery of Mayo GAA’s debt, the rosary had received its own write down.

But rather than being a holy show. this was, according to Jarlath Burns, a “tragedy”. A story of GAA volunteers at breaking point because of a relentless campaign of ‘vicious, nasty, bullying, intimidating and threatening’ behaviour.

And, of course, there is no mystery about Mayo’s debt. Just a bottom line. €7.8million is to be paid to Croke Park in monthly instalments of €25,000 for the next 32 years. It would have been €1million more if Croke Park had not decided to wipe that amount from Mayo’s balance sheet after relieving the banking sector of some bad GAA debts, Mayo’s included.

It's unlikely, however, that anything Director General Tom Ryan said last Monday will have swayed the cohort who, in just one of a string of allegations, have campaigned that Croke Park secured a greater saving than €1m when acquiring the Mayo GAA debt but never passed that full saving on. What is certain, however, is that Jarlath Burns, Tom Ryan and the rest of the Croke Park hierarchy (the pair were joined in Westport by Ger Ryan, Head of Finance and Michelle McAleer, Head of Audit and Risk) have no intention in leaving the officers of Mayo GAA to paddle their own canoe.

Explaining that he would often receive “five or six emails” a day from people with gripes about aspects of the GAA, some of them legitimate but others irrational, Burns said the “level of threat, intimidation and toxic activity” that was directed towards Mayo’s officials at present, had “gone way beyond what is normal for disgruntled and angry people to correspond with us for”.

The president had on that day itself received eight emails from Mayo GAA’s same correspondent.

“That is very difficult, when you have access to email on your phone, on your watch, and everywhere else, and you see this person, his name coming up and you’re saying ‘Not another one. What is this person threatening?’ 

“My name is mentioned all the time by this person. I would have members of my family asking me, ‘What’s that you are being linked with in Mayo GAA?’ I’m a big boy, I’m president of the GAA, I can take that. But I can understand how other people would feel very lonely and isolated.

“Who in this room would want to take over this [county board] in the knowledge that the day you take over, you could very well get your first email. And by the end of the week that maybe you’re on your fiftieth,” Burns asked Mayo GAA delegates, reminding them that the top table is fluid and will always need new blood.

Acknowledging that governance, audit and risk were words the GAA had not heard of less than two decades ago, President Burns said it was partly out of concern for “inauditable” aspects of their own operations that the association then moved to become totally cashless. Now, said Burns, Croke Park ranks Mayo above all other counties in terms of its audit and risk, financial control and transparency. The president displayed particular support for Valerie Murphy, Mayo GAA’s treasurer.

“As president, one of the most important positions that you nominate is the finance volunteer on the Croke Park Board. I needed to pick someone that I knew was forensic, totally competent and totally in charge of their brief. And of all of the people I knew in my own county and in Ulster and around Ireland, I asked Valerie Murphy to take that position on, because of her ability and because of her competency.

“Valerie arrives at every meeting totally read up, interrogates the life out of every single thing that’s there. You would be proud of Valerie and her performance on that board; she certainly puts me to the pin of my collar on many, many issues. And that’s what she’s there for – to support and challenge.” 

Together with chairman Seamus Tuohy, Valerie Murphy has been on the receiving end of some of the most targeted and hurtful emails in her role as Mayo GAA treasurer, and Jarlath Burns said there is a limit on what the GAA can ask volunteers to do in the face of such bullying, intimidation and unjustified threats. He added that the most worrying part of this saga was who was assisting the bullies in their behaviour.

“The people who are reporting back to these people are in this room. All I’m going to ask you to do is examine your conscience. Just reflect and ask what is my role in this, if I am on the side of people who would be so vicious and nasty and bullying and intimidating and threatening.” 

Questioning the motives of an individual who he claimed had reported five members of the Mayo senior football panel to a local authority for living in accommodation in Dublin that was not certified for residential use and who subsequently vacated that property, Jarlath Burns asked: “What is the mentality of someone who would do that? Is that person for Mayo GAA or what is their agenda? Why would you be so vicious as to want to do that to five of your county men?” 

He also suggested there was no difference between his native Armagh and Mayo, and that if Armagh could transform from a divided county in Division 3 to becoming All-Ireland SFC champions, then there was nothing, except a lack of unity, to stop Mayo from doing the same.

“But you won’t do it until you take this nonsense on full steam ahead and expose it for what it is – bullying, intimidation and threats. Please God, tonight will be the night where things change in Mayo finally, and we can put all this behind us.”