Football

"This should really be like pushing an open door" - Westmeath's Connellan on the Dublin funding debate

Like every county in Leinster, and many others beyond, Westmeath have been no strangers to a hammering at the hands of Dublin in the last 10 years. Now, one of their former players is taking the initiative to try and level the financial playing field in the inter-county game. John Connellan spoke to Cahair O’Kane...

John Connellan (left) during his playing days with Westmeath. Now retired, he has taken on a public role of trying to pressurise the GAA into rebalancing its games development funding. Picture by Seamus Loughran
John Connellan (left) during his playing days with Westmeath. Now retired, he has taken on a public role of trying to pressurise the GAA into rebalancing its games development funding. Picture by Seamus Loughran John Connellan (left) during his playing days with Westmeath. Now retired, he has taken on a public role of trying to pressurise the GAA into rebalancing its games development funding. Picture by Seamus Loughran

“I just have this weird feeling in my stomach that something special is going to happen tomorrow.”


- John Connellan’s text to team-mate Denis Corroon on the eve of the 2015 Leinster final

WHEN you’re in the bubble of an inter-county team, belief can be manufactured. John Connellan sent that text firmly believing that the following day might be the day it all comes together for Westmeath.

At half-time, they trailed by just four points. Five minutes later, the gap was out to ten and the same crushing feeling washed over yet another Leinster final opponent for Dublin.

The following year when they returned to the final and met a similar fate. They lost the two games by a combined margin of 28 points. It is with hindsight that Connellan is able to better assess what their chances really were.

“I can only really say it now, having stepped away: Honestly, did we really have any chance going into the game? Maybe a snowball’s chance in hell.”

Now retired, the former Ireland U19 soccer international who spent his best playing days in the maroon of his county instead of pursuing dreams across the water, has become a voice for change.

On Monday evening, Connellan published a painstakingly-researched 23-page document that he and a group of people from various counties had worked on over many months.

Entitled ‘Fair and Equal Funding for all GAA Clubs - Addressing the Dublin GAA imbalance’, the Athlone man outlines in stark terms how the GAA’s funding stream flows like a river into Dublin while other counties search for a brook to work with.

There are some reminders of figures we know, but which bear repeating. Between 2007 and 2017, Dublin received 48 per cent of the total games development funding allocated to counties in the Republic. Broken down per registered club player, it’s €270 in Dublin compared to €22 in Mayo, €21 in Tyrone and €19 in Kerry.

We know this. But where this document turns the debate on to new terrain is in laying out the position of Dublin’s ‘super clubs’, how the GPO system has aided them and how that, in turn, has fed the football, hurling and ladies’ inter-county teams that have all grown exponentially over the last 15 years.

Dublin county board’s last published accounts show an operating profit of €2.7m and almost €500,000 in payroll costs.

The document claims that one club in Dublin that is not even at Senior ‘A’ level secured a sponsorship deal worth €35,000-a-year.

Other clubs have been able to put down deposits of €100,000 and maintain cash reserves.

Money never kicked the ball over the bar, you say?

“The clubs in Dublin have become so strong that they effectively have 20-plus mini-academies,” says Connellan, who claims one club in Dublin have increased participation by 98 per cent in five years.

“Participation is through the roof, they’re investing in top-quality coaching that has led to players being more ready for senior football. It’s like an academy system.

“If I go to Arsenal and I’m their academy, there’s a very small chance I’ll make their first team but if I do, I’m a highly skilled, highly conditioned soccer player. That’s due to investment in top-class coaching, S&C expertise, that’s what the Dublin clubs are doing now.

“It’s just so simplistic to say county boards have to do more because they can’t attract an AIG or Sports Direct.

“Cuala’s sponsorship is a multinational pharmaceutical company and they’re offering academic scholarships. That’s not even in the wheelhouse of most county boards, forget about clubs.

“To criticise them and say ‘ye need to sort yourselves out’? If anyone spent a life in the day of a volunteer county board official, someone who’s maybe not commercially minded but is just doing their best for the county, to criticise them and tell them to get their house in order, it’s not fair on them.

“If you fail to acknowledge that the investment in games promotion and coaching in clubs has had an effect on Dublin's senior team, then you must be walking around with your eyes closed.”

The protestations of Dubs past, former and present that they have worked their way up the tree and others need to just climb a bit harder or better, and that money had nothing to do with how they earned their spot, irks him.

“If it had no impact, then what an incredible waste of money.

“It’s not gracious. What they’re saying is ‘ah look, the GAA came in, put the structures in place, put John Costello in place, put €16m over 13 years in, but sure it didn’t have any effect’.

“When someone comes to your aid, the least you could say is ‘thanks a million, that worked a treat’. It’s very ungracious and, yeah, it is hard to stomach.”

In his native town, there are two clubs servicing a town of 22,000 people. His own Athlone (who share the town with Garrycastle) have, he says, struggled in recent years to field a single team at minor and U16 level.

The GAA have spread deeper pots of money into urban areas in recent years. The east Leinster coaching project focuses on counties on the commuter belt around Dublin, while the likes of Antrim, Derry and Cork have received extra funding for urban projects.

But while the GAA would contend there is not enough money to go around, John Connellan believes that the answer is staring at them.

“This should really be like pushing an open door,” he says.

“All you’re asking for is fairness, to redress the imbalance that has clearly been created. You see the likes of [former president] Sean Kelly, who spearheaded the injection of cash into Dublin back in the late 90s, coming out to say ‘we’ve done enough, time to address the imbalance’, yet the GAA won’t acknowledge there’s a problem.

“The disproportion is accepted in the old Ard Stiúrthóir reports from the late 1990s. What we need now is a disproportionate amount of funding to be redirected away from Dublin to other counties that need it. That’s it in a nutshell.”

It remains rare for even a recent past player to delve so deep into the mechanics of trying to fix a problem in the GAA. Most will wail and roar through the echoey streets of Twitter or sit quietly on their hands. Few could be bothered.

The ambition is that, with the support of county boards and ultimately the clubs they serve, a motion will be put before Annual Congress in 2022.

To break it down into the Queen’s plainest, it would see a rebalancing of coaching and development funding on “an equal basis”.

The funding would be apportioned based on the number of registered GAA members in the preceding year. Any county wishing to secure greater funding would need to bring a “transparent plan and business case”.

He can only sigh when the theory is pedalled his direction that in terms of finance within the GAA, the genie is out of the bottle when you consider Cork’s €2m deal with Sports Direct and Roscommon’s announcement of a near-€1m profit on their recent house draw.

Yet when he steadies, they represent two very different strands of the problem.

“I went to school with so many Rossies [Athlone is on the border between the two counties]. What they do in fundraising, with the house draws, it’s incredible.

“But it feeds into county boards outside Dublin being completely distracted by fundraising. It’s the day-to-day worry and burden on clubs and county boards down the country.

“It doesn’t necessarily rest easy because I look at that deal in Cork and know that Westmeath would never be able to attract anything close to that. You’re into the realm of pooling sponsorship but that’s a debate for another day.

“For me, the immediate disparity that can be resolved as soon as 2022 by allocating games development funding in a more equitable way.”