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The first President of Ireland, Dr Douglas Hyde, attended a soccer match in 1936, which led to his ban from the GAA. Decades later, former President Mary McAleese faced challenges integrating the GAA, with issues over membership, gender balance, and funding. The complexities highlight ongoing tensions within Irish sport governance.
Declan Bogue BACK IN NOVEMBER 1936, it was the attendance of Dr Douglas Hyde at an Ireland soccer match against Poland – a 3-1 home win in Lansdowne Road for the record – that caused the bother.
He wasn’t even six months into being the first President of Ireland. Accepting an invitation to a sporting fixture might have seemed straightforward, but as a patron of the GAA it became complicated. In some eyes, his attendance at Lansdowne Road was a grave mistake. Pádraig MacNamee of Forkhill, Co Armagh was the GAA President, himself only in his first few months in the role and, somehow, the decision was taken to ban Dr Hyde from the association.
Not an easy thing to come across your desk first thing on a Monday morning. Wind it on almost 100 years and another Doctor, another President of Ireland, and another public relations disaster for the GAA. Dr Mary McAleese blew the doors off when she resigned as the chair of the Steering Group on Integration, charged with glueing together the GAA, the Ladies’ Gaelic Football Association and the Camogie Association before a good sanding down and a varnish.
She had been in the role since September 2022 and, even for those that know how glacial the progress of fundamental change can be for the GAA, a date of 2027 for full integration seemed to give plenty of time to get everything lined up. Concern The three areas that were causing most concern were aligning memberships, how committees would be comprised with a 60/40 split between men and women, and how a new, imagined GAA might better address the finances available to pay for team preparation in the female codes.
Thorny issues for sure, but not insurmountable. The drip-drip of stories and briefings in recent months pointed towards a certain reluctance from the GAA side. Eventually, they made it known they could not commit to the timeline, ahead of what some held out hope was going to be a rubber-stamping Special Congress in October. McAleese has not gone quietly.
That is her judgment. She has shown herself to be a polished diplomat at various junctures, but not afraid to state her position on divisive issues either throughout her political career. Dr Mary McAleese accompanies Queen Elizabeth II around Croke Park. Morgan Treacy / INPHO Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO In recent times, she had started a two-hander podcast with Mary Kennedy called ‘The Allenwood Conversations’.
In this role, Dr McAleese will have learned more about today’s media environment, and the need to speak plainly and forthrightly if you are to command attention. Accusing the GAA’s management committee of being ‘less than impressive,’ and ‘lacking vision’ is as clear and direct as it gets.
As was following it up with: “But I also suspect, and I hate to say this, but I suspect that there are people who are not entirely happy about the idea of including women in decision-making at the top level of Gaelic sports. ” She clearly felt it required such robust language. Exasperation can do such a thing.
Many will take the remarks as referring to GAA president Jarlath Burns – who coincidentally doesn’t live too far away from McAleese’s homeplace – and director general Tom Ryan. Soundings from those close to McAleese would contend that she was widening her scope with that accusation to include county board figures – those that arguably have most to lose with a potential merger. Advertisement Either way, the return of serve from GAA figures has featured mixed messaging.
On Morning Ireland, Ryan rejected the charge of misogyny, outlining the difficulties faced: “We have proposals around a common membership and organisational structures,” he said.
“The membership piece is ready and the structures piece is not. ” A few hours later during News at One, Burns stated that they had membership ready to go, that structures were almost there, but they could not conceive of being able to fund county teams equally.
“The €45 million that we currently spend on preparing county teams goes to €90 million. We just simply cannot sustain that rate.
“. . . It’s about resources, and the allocations of resources.
” GAA President Jarlath Burns. Tom O’Hanlon / INPHO Tom O’Hanlon / INPHO / INPHO Sources close to the LGFA and Camogie Association indicate that this has never been a red line.
However, as a means of eliciting sympathy from most people who would see the current spend on teams as bordering on sinful, you can see how effective it might be. Having said all that, he clearly believed that integration was happening under his watch when he said about getting a handle on the spend of intercounty teams back in February 2024 when he was freshly elected.
“I think it will be a major test of my own leadership if I can achieve this, if I can achieve the slimming down of the county game to a level that is commensurate with an amateur status in a country the size of ours, running two national games with the definite scenario that we’ll have two more that we’ll be managing in the next three years,” he said. Integration is not, now, going to happen under Burn’s term as President.
It might not even happen within his successor Derek Kent’s timeframe. But it will happen. And people will be realistic about spending on teams. In time, the current situation will come to be seen as embarrassing as the ban on Dr Douglas Hyde.
Grassroots What this episode shows us is that the best elements of the GAA are to be found on the ground. It is a bottom-up organisation. Grassroots, if you like to use that term. Today as we stand now, there are 792 clubs operating as a ‘One-Club Model.
’ That equates to around 32% of the total number of clubs that sought to give parity to men and women within clubs when it came to priorities, facilities and so on. Now, within those clubs various mini-battles may still be fought, but the important thing is that they at least aspire towards fairness and equality. The odd thing is that in the years since the integration group began, that number hardly grew at all.
In the meantime, we take you back to 2019 and the GAA paying the advertising agency BBDO Dublin to create a campaign encapsulating what the association meant to people. It targeted all the emotional buttons and released the appropriate dopamine. You found yourself rooting for a little girl in an urban setting, trying gamely to learn the roll lift, before she could progress to being a full-blown camogie player. Seven years on, they can’t stand over that campaign.
GAA Dr Douglas Hyde Mary Mcaleese Sport Governance Gender Integration
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