Jarlath Burns was elected the 41st president of the GAA last Saturday at Congress. He will serve a year as the president-elect, and will assume office at Congress next year. The one recurring factor in the coverage about him across the run-up, and in the aftermath, was his northern identity.
He was asked about a United Ireland, and a border poll. He was asked about previous comments he’d made about the flag, and the national anthem. Were the tricolour and Amhrán na bhFiann a barrier to getting greater unionist participation in the association in Ulster? He felt they might be, and wanted to take part in the conversation.
These are all important discussions to be had. But in the rush to ask him about what his upbringing in Silverbridge in Armagh has taught him in preparation for his new role, there was another far more immediately impactful part of his make-up that was left relatively untouched. He was an Ulster championship-winning captain. He played at the highest level.
He is not the first president with a stellar playing career behind him – in the last 25 years alone, we’ve seen All-Ireland medal winners Joe McDonagh and Nickey Brennan assume the GAA’s highest office. What makes Burns different is the number of perspectives from which he’s able to approach the topics that matter most to intercounty players, like training loads, burnout and maximum contact hours per week.
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In 2000, only months after his retirement, he was appointed by then-president Seán McCague to the GAA Players’ Committee – an inside-the-tent riposte to the recently-formed GPA. In this newspaper, that piece of news was carried under the headline – ‘McCague pits Burns against the GPA’.
Burns’s involvement in that group might be seen in retrospect as little more than a footnote, given that the GPA are now themselves funded in large part by the GAA. But speaking to the Irish Independent in 2003 as his three-year term with that committee ended, he never saw his role as an attempt to undermine or even to fatally wound the nascent GPA.
“That frightened me, to be honest, because a lot of my closest friends were in the GPA,” he said at that time. “I never wanted to be trying to keep one step ahead of them, because by doing that, you were relying on the GPA tripping up all the time, and your success was going to be judged by their failure. That’s a ridiculous criteria for anybody to be set, so I always stayed away from it.”
Speaking of the successes he was able to achieve with that Players’ Committee, he was again eager to deflect. “It would be easy for me to say that this has been 100 per cent through the persistence of the Players’ Committee, but it has always helped us for the GPA to be lurking in the background.”
For a man supposedly hired expressly to butt up against the GPA, he did enough work across the aisle to ensure that the GPA’s chief executive Dessie Farrell thanked Burns for his contribution to player welfare in his speech at the 2002 GPA All Stars.
Even his status as a former player matters less than the fact that he has been engaging with the idea of improving conditions for players for the last quarter-century. And he is intimately acquainted with the challenges of the present-day GAA athlete, given his son Jarlath Óg is one of Armagh’s best footballers, and his son-in-law, Diarmuid O’Keeffe, plays hurling for Wexford.
When he speaks about issues like the flag and the national anthem, he seems intent on talking about the issue and why it might be uncomfortable, instead of retreating to one of the North’s two rhetorical corners.
He will bring that level of engagement to the idea of player welfare. He will without doubt say plenty of things that the GPA won’t agree with, but dialogue is something he appears to passionately believe in.
He spoke to the BBC’s GAA Social podcast a couple of weeks ago. “I have a serious curiosity and interest in British culture, and in unionist culture and in Orange culture. The Orange Order are in our school (St Paul’s Bessbrook, of which he is the principal) all the time talking to our young people, trying to get them to understand what that is about. What parading is about. What walking to give witness to their sincere belief in the reformed faith is about.”
That is interesting in and of itself, and got plenty of attention at the time, but again – it is instructive as to how he’ll approach problems in the GAA. He knows what it takes to be an intercounty footballer in 2023. He also knows what it’s like to be an administrator.
When county board chairpersons tell him they feel thoroughly defeated trying to balance the books as they weigh up massive infrastructural projects and ballooning team preparation costs, he’s sympathetic – but he’s also seen the other side.
He has in the past said that he will deem his tenure a failure if he doesn’t manage to get the cost of intercounty team preparation down to something approaching manageable levels. Something tells me Jarlath Burns isn’t going to die wondering if he could have done any more to make that a reality.
