Money talks: An interview with Michael Moynihan

Niall Gartland speaks to journalist Michael Moynihan about his insightful new book

IRISH Examiner journalist Michael Moynihan has published a book tackling the thorniest of thorny issues facing the GAA today. In particular, the – should we say alleged? – payment of managers. The book is entitled ‘More than a Game: The GAA and Where It’s Going’ and reveals an organisation grappling with its identity and why the outcome matters to every parish, player and supporter in Ireland.

Niall Gartland: This is your second book on this theme so it seems like a real bug-bear of yours?

Michael Moynihan: In 2013, I released GAAconomics about money in the GAA. It’s not really a follow up as such, but it’s along the same lines.

NG: You’ve tackled the issue head-on. It’s something we GAA journalists tend to skirt around!

MM: The publishers mooted a follow up, and I thought it might be interesting to do something slightly different. So it’s about where the GAA is going. Management payments is part of it; facilities; intercounty versus club – it’s the type of thing we end up writing features about in the off-season! It’s a global overview I suppose.

NG: Do you take a pessimistic view about where the Association is going? I feel personally the Association stands at something of a crossroads.

MM: One thing I tease out is the people who are wholly invested in the club scene. For them, it’s about keeping the club going. Then there’s people who are casual fans, going to intercounty games. You’ve a range of seriousness in terms of how people view the GAA. You’re right, the GAA is at a crossroads, but the GAA is always at a crossroads. There’s always challenging issues.

Any big social or cultural or political issues that affect the whole country, tend to filter through to the GAA. When clubs are under pressure to field teams up and down the western seaboard in particular, that relates to housing policy across the country manifesting itself in GAA clubs not being able to field. There are specific issues in larger urban areas as well, so the variety of challenges is never-ending. That’s a big one.

NG: You spoke to the GAA’s Director General Tom Ryan in the book, how did that go?

MM: He was very open. There are four basic questions in the book – is the GAA about clubs and participation, is it about the intercounty scene, is it now a content provider in terms of GAA Go and probably inevitably GAA TV. Or is the GAA a bit like McDonald’s – is it not really about sport at all, but about the maintenance and management of thousands of facilities. In fairness to Tom, he said it’s all about participation as everything flows from that. If we don’t get kids through to the gates to play the game and becoming adult members, we’ll be in trouble. He made a strong case for it in the sense everything else feeds from that, and he also advocated going to 13-a-side in football and hurling. I would’ve been dubious about it until I saw the way the Football Reviews Committee’s recommendations were made into Canon Law fairly fast. I found with GAAconomics as well, that the GAA hierarchy was quite open about talking. Tom said in that book, if they couldn’t defend their positions or make their case, then they’re really at nothing.

NG: Do you see the club and county game becoming increasingly separated to the point that they’re completely at odds with each other? Do you see the elite footballers on the intercounty scene getting paid in future?

MM: We see the All-Ireland finals, the David Cliffords, but you have to remember their intercounty experience isn’t replicated by every county team either. There are plenty of intercounty teams which are far modest in their aims and have far fewer resources. Something I tried to convey in the book, and the demographics committee touch on this, is that in some places, clubs have to amalgamate and have to fold because there really isn’t a community that they’re representing any more.

There are swathes of South Kerry, where geographically it’s the size of county Louth, and all of the clubs have to combine to field one minor team. You’re talking about holiday homes and summer homes but there’s no community full stop. There’s no community in terms of the local church, tidy towns, the national schools. The GAA is a canary in the coalmine in that sense. The clubcounty tension exists and always has, but there are more pressing questions coming down the line in my view.

NG: What do you think those pressing issues are?

MM: Well one obvious one is the ongoing nonsense with the payment of managers under the counter. That to me is just unfathomable, the way it’s rationalised, and it’s often by ourselves in the media. When we talk about managers getting an extra year’s “deal”. We’re guilty of normalising it, but really and truly, I gave a talk a couple of years ago, and this club guy was very honest in saying, in relation to paying outside managers, that the club and players want to win something. I said it is illegal, you do realise that, you are breaking the law of the land. I’m not even getting into the ethos of the GAA in saying this. It’s happening all over the country, where a guy comes into coach a top team getting 20 or 30 thousand euro, then he leaves, and then at the AGM, someone stands up and said “I’m doing the job that he’s done for the last couple of years, and I’ve been a member of this club all my life, and I just want the same amount of money that he got.” That’s a very difficult conversation. It’s very difficult for a quote unquote ambitious chairman to come back with a retort to that.

NG: The impression is that non-paid managers are very much in a minority these days.

MM: You know yourself, if you’re on the beat for any length of time, there are certain counties who don’t pay. There’s a tradition maybe, or an economic thing, or the individual personalities involved. But by a process of elimination, there are other counties who are notorious for it, and that’s been acknowledged by Croke Park time and time again. It was interesting to me that nobody pushed back when I was writing the book and said “ah no, you’re exaggerating, it’s not that much of an issue and you’re overstating it for a headline.” If anything, they all acknowledged that I was understating it.

There’s another issue too – we talk about whether the GAA will ever become professional and will the players get paid etc. When I wrote GAAconomics, banks were actually going broke in the country. The obvious retort now, is that if the money can be found now to pay managers under the counter, couldn’t the money be found over the counter, legitimately, to pay these players? The GAA has made a rod for its own back in the nod nod wink wink culture.

NG: Where do you see it all going?

MM: What wouldn’t surprise me, is that somebody is made an example of by the Revenue Commissioners – an implicit warning to counties to get their act together. They could make an example of Joe Bloggs who ends up forking up 40 thousand euro in unpaid taxes and penalties, and that would be a warning for counties to get rid of the manager that they’re paying for under the counter, or arranging a formal stipend.

To be fair to Jarlath Burns, he is trying to tackle it, and I don’t think you can go on ignoring it really. The only issue is that once you start paying a manager – in spite of calling it a stipend to try and side-step it – you are entering into Employment Law. What could happen is you’re managing a certain county and doing well, and another county tries to bring him in, and then what happens? We make an offer of the stipend plus five thousand euro to get you on board, and then the county board says ‘hang on a second, you have a contract with us.’ You could end up going to Europe in relation to a restraint of trade. A genuine effort to resolve the problem could become a nightmare.

NG: There’s often figures bandied about in relation to how much these managers particularly at county level are earning.

MM: The figures you’re hearing are frightening. My thinking is that county boards really should know better, but if they don’t know better, I’m not sure you can teach them. For some county boards, a unit of the GAA which should be enforcing the rules of the GAA is actively breaking them. The problems go deeper than just money.

The issue with clubs is even scarier. Clubs are giving guys money, who will be gone in three years. He leaves nothing after him. It’s money that could’ve been put into facilities, even paying some guy to go into local schools on a part-time basis to upskill the kids. There’s so many things clubs could do. Then you hear so many clubs giving it the poor-mouth, and you’re thinking ‘how can you square this circle?’

Eamon O’Shea, he’s said that GAA clubs lose all rationality when it comes to appointing a coach. If you’re going outside for a manager, parking money for a second, he said clubs never look at what they have – do they have an ageing team that might get one more senior team, or a really young team, a lot of them very inexperienced etc. They don’t think about what type of manager would suit them – is it a former county minor boss, a guy with colleges experience? Or with an older team, should you look around and think ‘this guy won a title with a team with an ageing team so he knows how to deal with more mature players?’ He was talking about Tipperary, and he said he saw no effort to join the age profile of the team with the coach. He said all you have to do is dangle a couple of All-Ireland medals, and clubs just fall over for you.

NG: So what conclusion did you reach in the book?

MM: GAAcomnics ended on a bit of a downer so I tried to end on an upbeat note. There’s a small club down here in west Cork, St James. A tiny rural club with a beautiful pitch overlooking the Atlantic, but under desperate pressure with numbers. There’s poor employment, and Cork City is too far away. They won their first ever Junior title five years ago and I spoke to the chairman. He said they’d struggled for years, but that they looked at things purely internally. They brought in their own managers because they couldn’t afford to bring in people. He said all the underage kids were at that Junior final because they know all the players, the club is so small.

They co-operated with other sports organisations in the area because the pick is so small, and they were all in attendance too – the soccer and athletics clubs. I asked him was he positive, and he said, “we will always put a team on the field, and that spirit will never be beaten.” It didn’t coincide with the book, but it stuck with me and I ended with that. The whole thing is about replicating the positive experience you had as a kid, and that’s an emotional thing. I just wanted people to take that away – that it doesn’t really make sense what we’re doing, but it’s one of the most important things that we’re doing as well. So that’s another tension I’m trying to resolve.

STIPEND…GAA President Jarlath Burns has floated the idea of discussions around paying a stipend to interounty managers

BIG ISSUE…Jason Sherlock recently said that the issue of paying managers needs to be seriously looked at

A NO FROM ME…Kerry boss Jack O’Connor says he’s staunchly opposed to the idea of paying managers