The GAA’s new head of hurling, William Maher, wants to grow the game outside its traditional heartlands and believes the establishment of hurling in 45 clubs over the last year demonstrates the potential for the small-ball code.
Maher, who captained Tipperary to All-Ireland minor success in 1996 and subsequently managed the Premier County to All-Ireland glory at that grade in 2012, started his new role earlier this month.
And he feels growing hurling above a much-referenced theoretical Dublin-to-Galway line on the map of Ireland is achievable.
“That’s the north star, that’s what we are working towards,” he said. “If that’s even in participation numbers that would be a major impact. Are we going to get [those] counties to win the Liam MacCarthy Cup in the next 10 or 20 years? Probably not. But how can we get more players playing the game? Then we can start thinking about things like that.
“That would be the dream. I think hurling hasn’t really moved outside its traditional boundaries in 100 years so I think it’s important to try to broaden that out but without trying to impose it on GAA clubs up the country. It’s to give kids the opportunity to play our national game.
“There was a colleague at work from Kildare and he said to me six months ago that he never got an opportunity to hold a hurl. That’s just crazy.
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“If someone had said to you 20 years ago that Cuala or Na Fianna would win club All-Irelands, you’d say, ‘you’re mad’. So this can be done. If you can build hurling in Dalkey, you can build it anywhere.”
The Hurling Development Committee, established last April, has had 45 successful applicants to avail of its starter pack toolkit to help existing or new clubs establish hurling.
Of those, 18 have been in Leinster, 17 in Ulster, five in Connacht and five in Munster – including three in Kerry.
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Maher is originally from Ballingarry in Tipperary and lives in Bennettsbridge in Kilkenny. He managed Cuala to Dublin senior hurling titles in 2019 and 2020. More recently he was in charge of the Laois senior hurlers between 2023-24.
There have been similar roles created by the GAA in the past, though with varying job titles – Paudie Butler was the national hurling co-ordinator between 2006-11 while Martin Fogarty was the national hurling development manager from 2016-21.
Maher feels Gaelic football and hurling can coexist.
“We’re all GAA people and we all have our challenges in the fixture calendar as regards where hurling or football is played, depending where you are.
“But I think it’s very much about talking with county boards, understanding the issues that are there with fixtures and working with the different committees.”
And he believes a strong Dublin senior hurling side is important.
“Dublin [challenging for major honours] would be brilliant and could revolutionise our sport. We’ve seen what their club teams have done now, so throw down the gauntlet, it’s up to the senior team now.”
Silverbridge, home club of GAA president Jarlath Burns, is one of the units to have set up a hurling section for the first time.
“We are not going to see more teams and counties participating in the Liam MacCarthy Cup, where we want them to be, unless we have more clubs in the counties,” stated the Armagh native.
And Burns agrees with sentiments of Camogie Association president Brian Molloy that more should be done to incorporate Gaelic games in the school curriculum.
“[Brian] is an extremely visionary person with some exceptional ideas, one of which is that because our national games are indigenous to us and part of our culture, they should be in every single curriculum in every national school in Ireland.
“That’s not an unreasonable thing, that’s something that we are going to work with camogie to try to achieve. I think that would be massive.”
