GAA no amateurs on 'secret' payments

DISASTERS CHANGE cultures. When assumptions and modes of behaviour result in large-scale pain, societies change their assumptions and begin to behave differently.

Or rather, most societies do. Ireland is not among them. We know that certain kinds of carry-on – evasion, denial, wilful ignorance – have done us woeful harm, both economically and in relation to practices such as the institutionalised abuse of children.

There’s an ingrained habit of what I’ve previously called the “unknown known” – the stuff we know but choose not to really know. We knew that Charles Haughey was a kleptocrat but chose to pretend otherwise. We knew that industrial schools were intended to be places of horror for children but acted as if they did not exist. We knew that our banks were riddled with fraud and that suburban houses couldn’t be worth a million euro. But we carried on as if such things were impossible.

In the wake of an economic and social implosion, we should be done at last with this culture of evasion. But it lingers. We find it comforting and congenial. When TS Eliot wrote that “human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality”, he must have had the Irish especially in mind.

Consider a concrete problem in ordinary Irish life. You don’t have to be interested in sport to be fascinated by the current attempts by the Gaelic Athletic Association to grapple with the question of under-the-counter payments to the managers of club and county hurling and football teams.

The GAA is arguably closer than any other body to being, for both good and ill, the archetypal Irish organisation. It’s no great stretch to suggest that what’s happening there is a good test of how Irish culture is changing. Or, as the case may be, remaining utterly unaltered.

The problem is simple enough: the GAA is supposed to be an amateur organisation. But everybody knows that some managers are being paid.

This is not in dispute: a report last month by the GAA’s director general Páraic Duffy is admirably blunt: “the clear spirit and understanding of the association’s rules are that managers and coaches cannot be paid; the clear reality is that many, contrary to the rules, are being paid.”

So here we have a familiar situation: there are rules but a significant number of people are conspiring to break them. There is “a hidden semi-professional culture” behind the facade of amateurism. And this culture is damaging to the GAA. It hurts its image by making it look hypocritical. It hurts its democracy by generating secrets and lies. It hurts its ethic of fair competition by giving those who break the rules a potential advantage over those who keep them.

It even potentially involves the GAA in criminality – it is not at all clear that these hidden payments are declared for tax.

The whole thing epitomises, in other words, a much wider culture of soft and insidious corruption. It’s not just that some people are breaking the rules but that others respond by pretending that they don’t know this, drawing them into a toxic complicity.

Páraic Duffy expresses this brilliantly and bravely in his report: “In essence, the association has let itself drift into an attitude of knowingly ignoring the problem, either hoping it will go away, or that no one will mention it.”

He writes of “the old ways of complicity and wilful ignorance” – phrases that resonate far beyond the GAA.

So what do you do about this problem? Duffy, with unimpeachable logic, says there are three possibilities.

You can continue with the current culture of denial, inertia and tacit complicity.

You can enforce the rules by clamping down hard on the payments. Or you can find a way to legalise and regulate payments to managers.

And here’s where it gets really interesting: the overwhelming preference throughout the GAA is for a blend of the first two options.

On the one hand, everyone will vote for the second position: enforce the existing rules. On the other, everyone will assume that this won’t actually happen and that the effect will be the survival of the status quo of silent complicity.

Really enforcing the rules would mean exposing and taking on a whole system of private funders, quiet words, envelopes stuffed with cash. It would be, for a while at least, extremely unpleasant, perhaps tarnishing the reputations of some local heroes.

Changing the rules, on the other hand, means acknowledging that realities don’t quite match your ideals, that a certain amount of grubby pragmatism has to be let in to the clean, bright room of GAA idealism.

And we don’t like these hard choices between A and B – as the lager ads put it, there’s always C. And option C in Ireland is almost always wilful ignorance, the unknown known.

In this case, it’s the option of loudly declaring that the rules must be upheld while pretending not to notice when they’re broken. And this isn’t a GAA problem, it’s an Irish problem. When the blind eye is the best way to evade an awkward choice, we reach for the pirate patch.