Football

Training twice-a-week, the GPA and what amateur status really means... Presidential nominee Jarlath Burns outlines his vision for the GAA

Jarlath Burns will stand as a candidate in the 2023 Annual Congress election that will vote in the next President of the GAA. Picture: Cliff Donaldson.
Jarlath Burns will stand as a candidate in the 2023 Annual Congress election that will vote in the next President of the GAA. Picture: Cliff Donaldson. Jarlath Burns will stand as a candidate in the 2023 Annual Congress election that will vote in the next President of the GAA. Picture: Cliff Donaldson.

Jarlath Burns will stand as a candidate in the 2023 Annual Congress election that will vote in the next President of the GAA.

The Silverbridge native, who narrowly missed out in the last election, hopes to become the 41st Uachtarain Cumman Luthcleas Gael and the first from the six counties since Peter Quinn was elected in 1990.

From what amateur status really means, to making county football accessible to all, the role of the Gaelic Players’ Association, the GAA’s untapped influence on nationwide policy at governmental level, reaching out to the Unionist community, limiting training to twice-a-week during the National League, the new broadcasting deal and more, Burns outlined his vision for the GAA’s future in conversation with Andy Watters.

AW: You lost the 2020 election by just 10 votes (142 to 132). If just six more delegates had voted for you, I’d be talking to the President of the GAA now. It must have taken time to process the disappointment of losing out to Larry McCarthy.

JB: Whenever you’re running for any office you have to deal with the reality that you mightn’t win. It’s all about dealing with that disappointment and being resilient and, as somebody who’s been involved in education all my life, we constantly tell young people: Develop resilience because life comes at you hard.

It was difficult the last time because Larry, an overseas candidate, was standing. We have been promoting the GAA overseas for many, many years because the GAA is a genuinely international organisation so for the overseas to produce somebody capable of becoming president of the GAA is something we should be very proud of.

So I knew I was up against a very formidable candidate and this isn’t like political parties where the person that loses wants the winner to do badly. The GAA is our Association and we need good leadership and we need our leadership to be robust and sound and to have integrity so I would always have wished Larry the best of luck.

Your credentials are excellent but, then again, they were excellent in 2020. If they weren’t good enough then, will they be good enough this time?

I topped the poll on the first count and normally when something like that happens the person who comes second is in a really good position to win if they go again. You can’t take anything for granted and I didn’t take anything for granted the last time even though I was favourite – the reason I was favourite is because a lot of people put money on me, not because of an understanding of the way GAA politics works.

I noted the last time that I was certainly not the choice of the people at the very top of the GAA and that disappointed me because I have been chair of many committees and I always thought I performed well. I’m very consistent in my views on the GAA, I’m very heavily involved at local level – I’m secretary of my club – and I played at the highest level.

So I thought I had a good CV to go for it but everybody is entitled to their opinion and the Electoral College at Congress is quite small – 225 votes – and 75 of those are overseas.

You have to work very hard within your own province and then beyond that to get enough votes to get you across the line.

If elected, what sort of President would you be?

There has to be more to the President than opening clubhouses and going to dinner dances, you have to have some sort of a vision for the future. I have a view of where the GAA should be and I don’t think we are there at the moment.

We can expect changes if you are elected then?

I think it’s wrong for a president to come in with a very strong agenda for change because that means that all you are doing is looking at a three-year legacy – you bring in a few changes and then people will look back and say: ‘He did this and this…’

That’s the worst way to run any organisation. The GAA needs a 10-year plan so a new President comes in and can ask: ‘At what stage are we in our strategic planning?’ and he or she knows what point they have come in at.

If a new GAA president comes in saying: ‘I have this plan’ and then the next one comes in with a different plan… That would mean we are running from one idea to the next and I think we have been a victim of that in recent years.

So where do you feel the GAA is now? What issues need to be addressed?

When the GPA (Gaelic Players’ Association) came along they scared us a bit and the GAA completely capitulated. Then the CPA (Club Players’ Association) came along and they had a particular view and we capitulated.

Now we’re left with a split season and an awful lot of games that we have to get in in a very short time and, for amateur players, that’s asking an awful lot.

It has meant now that county players don’t get a break at all. The GPA’s gift to all of us is a situation where the county player has to play with great intensity right up until they are out of the county season, then they’re straight into their club and that’s going against what we say should happen at underage in the GAA.

When we changed the age grades and we de-coupled U17 from adult level it was said we had to look after our most talented players and make sure they weren’t playing for too many teams.

So at underage level we are looking after our elite players to make sure they’re not suffering from burnout and then, at senior level, we’re saying: ‘Well, it’s alright for the senior county player to train with the county for six months and then train with the club team until November and then go straight back into county training’.

These things happen because we don’t have a proper vision or solid principals that we can base everything we have on.

There was talk of a GPA strike over training schedules and expenses during last season. The GPA carries a lot of clout now and the new president has issues to sort out with them.

The chair of the GPA, Tom Parsons, is a man I have great respect for, but when he went on The Sunday Game and said that if a manager wanted to do 14 sessions-a-week that should be unquestioned and the GAA should pay the travelling expenses to allow that, a chill went down my spine.

The GAA has devolved player-welfare to the GPA. We have given it to them and now they look after all the player-welfare programmes and interview skills and all of that but the biggest part of player-welfare is training and over-training and the media circus that comes along if a player makes a mistake on the field.

The GPA hasn’t worked out that we are an amateur organisation. Amateur status is our second core value and we’ve also devolved that to the GPA – a private organisation.

The GPA do an awful lot of good work but Tom Parsons is saying: ‘A manager should be able to train a team 14 times-a-week’ when he should be saying: ‘We (the GPA) are in charge of amateur status and we are telling our players that they will be training twice-a-week and our representatives will make sure that happens because they (players) have to live a life outside of GAA’.

There is no template anywhere else in the world for the games which we have. We are the only country in the world with an amateur status where players act at elite level. So we have to think deeper about amateur status and how that relates to player welfare and if I was president that would be a massive part of what my agenda would be.

At skin-deep level amateur status means that our players don’t get paid to play, but there’s much more to it…

Pay-for-play is not why we have amateur status.

Why would the GAA, in 1884, in one of the poorest countries in Europe, post-famine, have made a rule on amateur status? The reason was to make the Games accessible to all.

That is a real problem in the GAA and again the issue boils down to: How prepared are we to go out on a limb to protect the amateur status? Amateur status is there to make the game accessible to all and we’re failing in that because not everybody can play the game and I know many lads who would love to play for their county but they know that their lifestyle – their work, their family situation – would not allow it.

If you want to play county football you have to make a big decision on your career and we have to meet people halfway. The compromise there is that we properly police training during the League.

Explain how our Games are not accessible to everyone

The people who are playing county now are students and teachers – that’s the largest demographic.

Gradually our amateur status is being eroded and we are congratulating ourselves for not paying players and we’re thinking everything is good. It’s not. We are the people in charge and we need to come up with a proper template for training that everybody can buy into so we can level the playing field.

It’s a lot of work, it requires a change of ethos but if I didn’t achieve that as President of the GAA I will say I have failed.

How will you achieve that? Is limiting the number of county training sessions central to that change of ethos?

I would be saying that during the League and before it, every team in Ireland trains on a Tuesday and Thursday night and has a match on a Sunday.

Every county will nominate a place where they will train and that’s the only place they’re allowed to train. There’ll be lights there and cameras and Croke Park will be able to tell if you’re training and, if you’re training somewhere else on any other night, you will have broken the principle of amateur status and broken player-welfare principles and therefore you are out of all competition. It is radical I know, but it has to be as stark as that.

And these measures you would bring in for the National League only? Would training restrictions change for the Championship?

Yes. When the League is over, the Championship is a higher-stakes competition and you have to train as much as you can.

But we should be adamant that it is only twice-a-week during the National Leagues because until we get to that understanding we’ll slip and slip until we hear that some team is training 14 times-a-week – once at 7am and once at 7pm.

At the moment we have nothing to stop that.

This is connected to the training issue: I’ve often heard officials in various county boards saying that the cost of running county teams is ‘unsustainable’. Will your plan address that?

The financing of county teams is running away. There’s a cottage industry around county set-ups, clubs are being levied at a ridiculous rate to create centres of excellence… There’s a runaway train that we cannot stop and if you go into any county and ask what is the biggest issue they’ll tell you it’s trying to finance the county team.

Do you think county players will welcome what you’re proposing?

I think they would because if any player steps up now and says: ‘We’re training too much’ he’ll be told he’s not committed enough and the team that won the All-Ireland the previous year did ‘X’ number of sessions.

I’m not talking about my own county here because I think we’ve a really good balance in Armagh and the players adore the management and would train nine nights-a-week.

The broadcast deal the GAA announced last week means Sky Sports are no longer in the mix but BBC NI will show much more GAA. What are your views on the deal?

People have a strange attitude towards pay-per-view. Counties charge for streaming and people are happy to pay for one camera, no replays as such, analysis by unpaid commentators…

Regardless of how you view Sky, it is an international giant of broadcasting and we belong there, the GAA belongs in there.

I’m a sports fanatic and I watch a lot of soccer and darts on Sky and when I see the ticker across the bottom of the screen including Laois v Offaly or hurling, I think: ‘Yes, our games are relevant’.

So do you believe the GAA’s profile has suffered?

It is making us insular again. GAAGO can be watched around the world and that’s great to whenever our Games are there on a sports broadcasting platform we are relevant on a global context.

At the same time, I’m glad the BBC is back. I worked for BBC and I know Neil Brittain at BBC NI has a genuine interest in sport and wanted to see the GAA back where it belonged. It’s the biggest sport in the six counties and he wanted to see it back.

I also have to say that Declan McBennett, the head of RTE Sport, is a GAA man through-and-through and I would trust him to deliver because he really cares about the GAA. We’re very lucky that he’s head of RTE Sport.

That GAA clubs are towers of strength in their communities was plain for all to see during the Covid lockdown. The modern GAA club is about so much more than the Games. Is that properly recognised at Government level?

We are the number one community organisation in Ireland. Governments come and go but the GAA is always there and we have enormous influence which we don’t use.

The GAA needs to be thinking five levels higher than we are at the minute in order for us to create the type of Association and society that we want. We are the most important and significant community organisation in Ireland and we are constantly used for that by government but we don’t use our influence enough to say to government ministers: ‘Listen, we are seriously affected by the population of rural areas, they are the fabric of our society and you need to come up with some realistic plans’.

At the minute we are trying to deal with the problems that exist on a superficial level. It’s not what Association we want, it’s what sort of country we want and, in an organisation like the GAA, that’s the level at which we should be thinking.

The GAA has created a community structure and a sporting structure in every single village and parish. I’m chairman of the Ulster Club Planning and Infrastructure committee and every month we have clubs in that are spending thousands on things that are nothing to do with the us like community halls and walkways – they cost about £120K – and they’re doing all that because of the well-being agenda that we are hardwired to believe is part of our remit and it’s not and they’re getting nothing really in return.

Mine would be a very robust voice with government – telling them: ‘Step up and listen to our voice properly, not just when you want us but when we want you’.

A United Ireland is an increasingly realistic prospect. Can the GAA reach out to the Protestant/Unionist population as we look toward a New Ireland?

The GAA has been compared to the Orange Order and that couldn’t be further from the truth. The GAA would never issue a political statement about anything.

We are totally inclusive, we want everybody to play our games, we are unthreatening… Unionism needs to realise the role the GAA played in giving young men an outlet during a difficult period to demonstrate their lofR??&V???F?V?"??F??F?F?R?7WF??'????"v?2?F?W?( ?fR?fW"v?fV?W27&VF?Bf?F?B?F?B?2F?6?F???F?Rt?2??2?v?&VB'F?F???vR??2W6R?"f?r??&W7V7FgV?v??F?R6?v?F??"?V?WfW'?F??vRF?vRF?B??"??&?W'G?F?BvR?fRW&6?6VB?'6V?W2?'WB?BF?6? ?B?GFW"v?B?6??( ???fW"v?rF??RF?Rt66WF&?F?F?R6??w&??V??G2v?F?F?R?VFW7Bf?W2v??F??B&W&W6V?F?Rf7B??G??F?R&?W7F?6??????v??&W7V7B?"76?F???v???fR?bF?W??B6?WF????R?B??fWr?V'2v??6?B??v???fR??77VRv?F?&V?f??F?Rf?r?F?R?V?g&?t?F6?W2?F?BF?B?fR??7B?F?RV??B6?????Bv2?W??&F????'WBF?W&RvW&R?&V6?&??&V?&?2&6?g&?V????F???F?W??fW"6??v?FvVBF?B??B6?B?B?WfV?bvRF?B?&V?fRF?Rf?r?F?R?V??B7F??v??? ?BvWBF?B'&??V???F?V?&6R?"v?2?F?B?2F?6?F???V??6?F?&?BF?R?7F??F?Rt??&V6W6RvR&R6????v?F???F?R?7F??F?Rt?2?'&?VB??F?R?7F???"?6??v?6??2f??V??R?vR?fR&VV?F?R?F???( 2?fW"?W"??( 2F?Rf&??2&Wf?WF??2?v^( ?fR??2?W7Bv?VBF?&R??v?F??F?B?2?"v?2??fW2?"v?2???fR??W&???7FFR?F?6?F??v?F???V???f?Ww2F?Rt?W7BF?6?F??F?BF?W?F?( ?Bv?F?V?W'7F?v??vR&R??6?'6R?b?B6?F?FV&FR&?B?r?&V??F?Rtv???fRF?fR?F???V?VB?&V???2?B7V'fW'6?fRF???fWr?V'2v?&Vf?R'&W?B?B?v?B?fR&VV?6VV?2f?gV??G&??2F?F?&?BV?VB?&V????B'&W?B?N( ?2?B( 2?N( ?2&F?????v?6??6V?&?F?&RF???&?B?B?N( ?26V?&?F?BF?Rtv??&R??BG&?f??F?RFV&FR?'WB6W'F?????fVB??B2F?R?v?F??vR&R??