PRESIDENT-ELECT Jarlath Burns wouldn’t take much persuading to have the Tailteann Cup winners compete in the senior championship in the same season just as in hurling where the Joe McDonagh winners get a wild-card entry into the Liam MacCarthy Cup preliminary round stages.
The Silverbridge clubman also expressed slight concern with “little anomalies” that will arise through non-seeding of the Connacht Championship.
“Connacht decided not to seed their Championship this year which means that one of either Sligo or Leitrim will make a Connacht final and end up in the group stages of the senior Championship for Sam Maguire and I know that’ll not be good for them because of where they are in their development,” said Burns, who takes the Presidential reins from Larry McCarthy next year.
The inaugural Tailteann Cup was a slow burner last season but it picked up a degree of pace at the semi-final and final stages with Westmeath beating Cavan in the decider, which guarantees the Midlanders a place in this year’s Sam Maguire
Burns was initially agnostic towards the creation of a lower tier Championship but is prepared to give the competition a chance to flourish.
“At the time it came in I thought the reward for winning the Tailteann Cup would be getting back into the All-Ireland at some stage.
“The difficulty with that, and I’ve spoken to some people about it, who said: ‘The Tailteann Cup only becomes a means to an end and that it’s not a good competition to win in its own right.’
“And I take that point. But we already have the provincial Championships. You win Ulster, you celebrate it but you know you’ve bigger days coming. I think it was marketed well last year, but there are little anomalies.
“We can all make tweaks to our own provincial Championships, but I think we’re on the right road.”
Speaking at the Ulster Council’s charity sky dive event on March 12, which Burns has decided to be part of, Armagh’s 1999 Ulster winning captain wants to tidy up the GAA rulebook and is against the GAA increasing their £15m stake in the rebuilding of Casement Park and says the onus is on the government to deal with the spiralling costs.
But Burns made clear his desire to see Casement rebuilt.
“We have kept our side of the bargain but the stadium has to be built and I think given the leadership the GAA gives society - what we do for promoting health and mental health and all those things - I think it’s incumbent on the government to come up with the rest of the money.
“It’s not unreasonable that Belfast – Ireland’s second city – should have a stadium that would match Páirc Uí Chaoimh, which is our other second city. It’s not our fault that this delay has happened. It’s to do with planning and other issues, which is beyond our control, and obviously the Stormont Executive being in inertia for many of those years.
Burns added: “There has been good interim work done at Corrigan Park [near the Casement Park site]. It’s a really, really good ground and perhaps there could be further upgrades to that.
“We really need our stadiums to be future-proofed. Clones has served us really, really well and it’s a brilliant ground but if you go to Clones it’s starting to show its age. The technology of stadiums has moved on and we’ve a great opportunity to have world-class stadium in Belfast and we should take it.”
A major bugbear of Burns’ is the many loopholes in the rulebook and the Association’s disciplinary procedures that haven’t been fit for purpose for a long time.
“We need to move into plainer English as to how we write our rules,” he said.
“We need to maybe classify rules rather than have them, category one, category two… I’d like them to be changed into more general terms that makes them slightly vaguer but puts the power differential back to the referee…They need to be in language that makes it harder for a player to get off on a technicality.
“And we need to get referees to understand how to fill in a referee’s report to make sure that a player remains sent off and to make it harder for that player to get off.”
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