THE right of all counties to participate in the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship has been stoutly defended by Tyrone manager Mickey Harte.
Last weekend, the GAA's ard comhairle proposed that a motion be included on the clár for congress in Carlow next month that those teams who finish in Division Four at the conclusion of the National League will only play in their provincial Championships.
Furthermore, it is proposed those same counties will take part in an All-Ireland Senior B Football Championship and that the winners will be guaranteed a place in the following year’s All-Ireland Football Qualifiers. The teams who are currently in Division Four of the National Football League are Antrim, Louth, Carlow, Wicklow, Leitrim, Wexford, Waterford and London.
If passed, the changes will come into effect in 2017. But for Harte, the whole notion of a B competition is not wanted by these counties and is the antithesis of what the association should be about.
“I don't think that it would be fair and I think that it has been offered before - an alternative or subsidiary competition to the teams in that particular division and nobody in those positions want it at all,” said Harte.
“They want to be a part of the real deal and I think that they deserve the right to be part of the real deal. And I can't see anybody in their county or their county players getting excited about playing in a second competition - it's just not part of what Gaelic football tradition has been about. People like to be involved in the big one - in the race for Sam - regardless if, at any given time, the bookies or anybody else might count them as no-hopers.”
The three time All-Ireland winning manager, who guided Tyrone to yet another McKenna Cup final this weekend also stressed “the feel good factor” to be gained by building momentum through winning and the glory of potentially taking down a big gun.
“They don't even need to be in it to win it to get real fulfilment out of it,” said Harte.
“They need to be in it to have the opportunity to create a shock - to have the opportunity to maybe get a lucky draw in the early stages that gives them the confidence to go on and maybe show what they can do.
“It’s about making progress - it’s about a feel good factor that comes with winning games and there is no feel good factor better than a team from a very unfancied position taking the scalp of someone who they are supposed to fall to. I mean, that opportunity is there still and that will not be there if these teams are sent to a subsidiary competition and it deflates them entirely I feel.”
Harte clearly recalls a time when the vast majority of counties in Ireland, including his own, could not get a look in due to the dominance of counties such as Dublin and Kerry and cannot understand the argument that something should now be done about ‘mismatches’ in the GAA.
“The world changes - some teams are stronger at some stage and maybe not so strong at another time,” added Harte.
“But people need to know that, if they have a good number of people coming along who are particularly talented at a given time, that they get a chance to perform at the highest level. I don't know why there is this thing about too many mismatches [in the GAA].
"There have been mismatches since the GAA was started. For a whole generation, there were mismatches - outside of Dublin and Kerry, nobody could live with them - in the decade of the Dubs and ‘the Golden Years’ of Kerry.
“You know, if an Ulster team or a Connacht team didn't meet each other in the semi-final, they had no mission of going near the All-Ireland at all. So should they have all given up and forgotten about it and said ‘leave this to Kerry and Dublin - let them play this just head-to-head every year?' Only one team is going to win the All-Ireland so does that mean that the rest of us are failures?'."
Also important to Harte is that individual players from such counties get to play against the best players around and he argued to deny them that chance will result in players simply drifting away from the game.
“It’s true - just to be spoken of in the same sort of forum as the Dublin's, the Cork's, the Kerry's, the Mayo's, the Donegal's of this world is what they want to be and, if you take away that opportunity from them, then they are just something different and will be forgotten about and that's not going to bring them on,” he said.
“It's actually going to turn people away from Gaelic games in those counties and I think we need to be reaching out to them. As I say, they don't have to win the competition to get great value out of it. If they get a run at all through the qualifiers [or] they maybe get a couple of wins in the provincial championship - then we've seen how Leitrim managed to get to Connacht finals and how London even ended up in a Connacht final. So have Antrim... they got to a final there not too many years ago and that is a great boost for the county.
"If they are out of the provincial championship, there wouldn't be much appetite to play in anything else. I mean that's been known for a number of years now - the teams that find themselves in that position - their players just drift off - they don't be around to play in the subsidiary competition and they just don't want it.
“And that's what does happen [and] what's likely to happen and that cannot be for the betterment of Gaelic games in the counties that that might pertain to.”
