A motion will go before GAA Congress next February requiring counties to attain a new high-performance licence to run their county teams. The move is part of efforts by Croke Park to tackle the “unsustainable” costs associated with team preparation.
The finer details of the proposal, which will be put forward by the GAA’s Amateur Status Review Committee, are still being finalised. It will mark the first significant regulatory step towards creating a certification model under which all counties would have to operate.
The total spend on preparing county teams reached €43.35 million in 2024. Already this year, several counties have reported team costs in excess of €2 million – including Tipperary, Cork, Limerick, Kerry, Donegal and Galway.
Speaking about the matter when appearing at the Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport on Wednesday, GAA president Jarlath Burns said the spiralling costs are a significant concern for the association.
RM Block
The committee was convened to discuss the integration process with regard to the GAA, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association and the Camogie Association. However, Burns responded to the team-costs issue when the matter was raised by committee chairman Alan Kelly.
“Up until now, the GAA is a governance organisation when we didn’t have a regulatory power,” said Burns. “So, at Congress we have a new proposal that will redefine what it means to be an amateur athlete at elite level.
“But it is also going to obligate counties to apply for a high-performance licence to run their county teams.
“Under which is going to be populated with lots of things, which is going to have a greater framework around the close season, around the amount of money being spent, particularly given the interest the Revenue have shown in matters around the payment of people who are around county teams. We hope by that evolutionary process, we will start to get costs down.”
Burns added that the issue must be addressed in order to facilitate the integration of the three organisations.
“We have to make ourselves integration-ready as well and that is one of the major areas where we are going to have to do it,” he said. “We simply won’t be able to sustain an organisation that is spending €120 million every year on preparing county teams. That won’t work for any of us.”
Mary McAleese, chair of the Steering Group on Integration (SGI), told the committee that the target of integration taking place in 2027 remained the ambition.
“If we were starting today, 2027 would be a very ambitious target,” she stated. “We started in 2023. We set that target date back then. It was and remains a very relaxed target date. It is our target date for integration for one organisation representing all codes in 2027.
“That date was gathered from looking at the work that needed to be done to achieve integration and to achieve it well. We’ve been doing that work consistently and overwhelmingly at times.
“If we were starting today, yes of course it would be ambitious, but in 2023 it was not ambitious and it is not ambitious, it is a realisable target. That is the plan we’ve been working towards, that’s what we’ve been scheduling everything towards and we believe firmly that it is achievable.”
The chair of the SGI added that there were “pockets of resistance” but insisted the vast majority of respondents are in favour of integration.
“We’re not going to get 100 per cent, but here’s the thing, integration is the future. We were asked by each of the three congresses, as a group, to prioritise integration because from the ground up that is what people wanted.”
