THIRTY-three years ago this month, the GAA found itself stood in front of the High Court.
A row had broken out in Waterford over the services of a Down man.
The late Joe McGrath was a Downpatrick native who lived his married life in Cork.
He coached Cork footballers to a Munster title and their U21 hurlers to an All-Ireland, Limerick to a National Hurling League title and Blackrock to two All-Ireland club successes.
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Waterford appointed him as manager in late 1990. It was seen as a coup.
Within weeks, county chairman Eamonn Murphy had been voted out.
It had emerged the cost of McGrath’s services were much greater than the county board had anticipated.
Figures reported at the time ranged everywhere from £15,000 to £25,000 for the year.
Murphy was voted back in in the January at the AGM but two months later, the GAA set up a four-man committee to investigate the affair.
The chairman was suspended for 12 months for “bringing the association into disrepute”.
Waterford county board were fined £2,000 for breaching a rule relating to the GAA’s amateur status.
In the end, Eamonn Murphy became the first man in over a century of the GAA to take the association to the High Court.
It declared his suspension invalid.
Ever since then, the GAA has had to try and protect its amateurism with a lighter touch.
Three decades on, the dam wall is in bits.
In an interview with The Irish Mirror last week, Pat Gilroy confirmed he had stood down from his role in Croke Park.
The former Dublin boss also claimed that a motion will be put forward to this weekend’s Special Congress.
Gilroy claims the GAA will lay a motion to formalise payments to inter-county managers.
Like a bed of nettles growing up through the middle of the Croke Park pitch, the GAA have just cut around it and keep hoping nobody will notice as it gets completely out of control.
They’ve landscaped the entire organisation around it for three decades.
In many ways, it’s a miracle it’s taken this long.
I admire Pat Gilroy’s stance. Fair play to him. It’s the kind of principled move we rarely see now.
Driven by the political sphere, long gone are the days of resigning from a position over something you find unconscionable.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the film Frost-Nixon again.
Imagine if Watergate happened now. Not only would Nixon have sat tight and rode out the short storm, he’d probably have won the next election off it.
But that’s the way the world is now.
So what difference does it make after 40 years whether the GAA legitimise payments to managers or not?
Just because we close our eyes to the nettles doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
The debate around it is important, if not just for the issue that’s on the table Peter Quinn famously couldn’t find.
Pat Gilroy’s resignation refocuses the conversation around what exactly the GAA is.
We have to be honest with ourselves.
At the top end, and we include senior club in that, it is not an amateur association any more.
We can stick to the party line that they’re legitimate expenses but 45p per mile in the north is the threshold above which you can be taxed.
To put that in context, a 50-mile round trip to take a training session would entitle you to £22.50 per night.
Very few people have the luxury of 30, 40, 50 hours a week they can offer up to Gaelic football for free.
The only thing that makes involvement in inter-county viable for many people is getting paid.
What has happened in the last 20 years especially is that coaches are spending a lot of money on educating themselves.
You’d be amazed at how much you need to know just to earn the right to stand in front of a changing room of educated, strong-minded, high-achieving 20-somethings.
This column has almost come around on the payment debate in recent years.
It would still be dead against it if such a stance was reasonable. But it is not.
That in itself should make us re-evaluate where we’re at as a sporting organisation.
In terms of how it brings people under the age of 18 under its umbrella, the GAA remains brilliantly true to itself.
It does an unquanitifiable amount of good for young people.
But money is the river that flows through senior activity, flooding all from one bank and offering a drink from the other.
There are very few people involved with an adult team, at club or county level, who are not being paid for their time.
That drives costs that are pushed on to others, particularly supporters.
Before Jarlath Burns took office, he spoke of trying to stop the juggernaut, to rein things in.
Less than a year in, the futility of such thinking has become apparent.
Genies don’t go back in bottles.
Amateurism is not realistic with the standards and demands the way they are.
And it is becoming increasingly unfair on the players, not from the sense that they should be paid, because I don’t believe they should be.
It’s just that they’d be entitled to look at it and wonder how everyone else is and they aren’t.
Recently Dr Noel McCaffrey, former Dublin footballer and father of Jack, opined that the move away from the club ethos was killing the GAA.
Dr Noel was right, but laid the blame at the foot of the split season, which was wrong.
Eight years ago, I asked Jonny Cooper at an event in Croke Park how many club games he’d played in the whole of 2016.
Four, he replied.
On one weekend in early 1994, then president-elect Jack Boothman told of the “bad vibes” he’d been getting from club players about the inter-county season taking complete command of the fixtures programme.
At the same meeting, Limerick chairman Gerry Bennis told delegates that “we need to be very careful” about the growth of monetary interests in the GAA and that the temptation for “individuals and teams to demand payment…must be resisted at all cost.”
Donegal reported spending £89,000 on their inter-county teams the previous year and were embroiled in a very public row over players not getting their expenses paid.
This was thirty years ago.
Pat Gilroy’s resignation is admirable but it will not make the blindest bit of difference.
If the GAA set the table under which payments are made out on full view out in the middle of Croke Park, the nettles will still be underneath.
Pretending we’re not where we actually are on the scale of semi-professionalism only harms the ability to deal with it properly.
The only way back to amateurism from here is to strip the thing completely bare.
We’re talking a manager, a selector or two and whatever physio treatment is needed for a panel of 26 men that train collectively twice a week.
That’s just not happening.
The runaway train has broken an association that is now trying to run down the platform after it.
It is slow-moving. It won’t crash out today or tomorrow or next week or next year. It could stay on track for another 20, 30, 40 years.
It will crash in the end, but if it doesn’t move with the times does it seize up and cease to exist anyway?
All the GAA can do from here is keep the tracks clear.
Legalising payments to managers is only lifting a few leaves and twigs. No nettles.