The range of concerns highlighted by last week’s report of the GAA’s demographics committee was extensive. Chair Benny Hurl outlined the challenges of population drift to the east and rural depopulation in dramatic terms but, for committee member Brendan Waters, one area stood out.
“The birth statistics of the under-fives,” he says unhesitatingly when asked what for him was the most pressing issue.
Waters, a member of St Brigid’s club in Dublin, has been a mainstay of the GAA’s most important committees in recent decades. Secretary to the committee which produced the 2002 Strategic Review Committee (SRC) report, he also chaired the body that drew up Dublin’s 2011 strategy document Unleashing the Blue Wave.
Demographics have long interested him and although he has been partially frustrated by a lack of parallel or precisely comparable data in Northern Ireland, he hasn’t been deterred.
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“I went back and I compared the movement in the births between census 2011 and census 2022, and you see the reduction in numbers in the zero- to four-year-old cohort. I also looked at the actual births for 2024, and that was very worrying.
“There were nine counties – and actually, four of them in Leinster [Carlow, Laois, Longford and Offaly], which really surprised me – had births of less than a thousand.
“What it really told me was that rural clubs were making a great effort to stay in existence by forming independent or amalgamated teams but with the drop in the birth rate since 2010, that won’t work going forward.”
The precipitous nature of the decline means that not even careful husbandry of resources can paper the cracks.
“It’s gone beyond that. It’s the tipping point. Like Liam Lynch [committee member and current Kerry vice chair] was saying to me, even though they were getting 70 per cent retention of maybe 70 kids, but if you’ve only 30 kids, 70 per cent isn’t going to do it. And that, to me, was probably the key issue that came out of it.
“I kept saying the rural clubs were squeezing the last out of the tea bags, in terms of trying to stay relevant and in existence.”
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The other impact in urban areas is that the great surpluses, which for instance Dublin clubs could depend on to thin their adult playing numbers, may not be sustainable.
“When you look at the fall-off in the numbers as you go through the teenage years, the one thing I learned years ago was when someone at another council told me, ‘that’s not a haemorrhage; that’s a safety valve’, because the clubs can’t keep managing all the kids that they originally had, from nursery all the way up.
But I don’t think the association is going to have that comfort going forward.”
Waters sees a role for the smaller clubs in Dublin, as they already have facilities and could play a role in reducing the dependence on the city’s huge-catchment units.
He dislikes the commonly used term ‘superclubs’, and argued against its inclusion in the report.
“I know ‘superclubs’ have a lot of connotations when you get into championships but to me, they’re more ‘overstretched’ clubs.”
The issue for Dublin is that clubs dealing with enormous catchments are obviously less efficient than a greater number of smaller units, which can cultivate their areas more intensively.
“It’s not a criticism of the big clubs, which are more a symptom or product of lack of action by the GAA all over the country, but I think the paradigm will have to change as to how we do things.”
The demographics committee has initiated a pilot project in Kildare and Kerry – chosen because the counties have challenges both of urban and rural clubs within their counties.
“You would have seen in the documents that we’re talking about Kildare and Kerry, and they both have a mix of urban and rural, and I did a report back in 2014 on Kildare, and that’s why I still have an interest in this.
“Based on the figures that Syl Merrins [Kildare demographics officer] gave us the last day, projections are that Naas’s population will increase by 93%, Maynooth by 167%, and Celbridge 61%.
“In a sense, that was one of the reasons why we took Kildare, because we don’t really want it turning into another Dublin, from the point of view of lack of facilities and lack of clubs.”
Waters also believes that county demographics officers – he occupies that role in Dublin – should be included in the county executive.
“We’ve got 5,500 teams in Dublin. The most interesting fact that people may not be aware of is that about 45% of those teams are female and I’m not including nurseries.
“At the same time, we have only 412 pitches – 30% of them were owned by clubs.”
Dublin are engaging with local authorities, especially in the new districts outside the M50 with a view to providing playing pitches.
The Blue Wave strategy divided the county into 10 areas and now that has been expanded to 20 in order to analyse all issues in as much detail as possible.
Waters says that it is not a matter of games development and coaching but “it is going to be change management. That’s the priority issue. If you were the chief operating officer of Dunnes or Tesco or Lidl, how would you approach this? Is one supermarket enough in this area? I think we’re going to have to start thinking like that as well.”
