GAELIC GAMES:The Spring Series is all about family but TOM HUMPHRIESargues that the wider Dublin GAA family must seize the day to insulate itself against recession

IF WE have any sense, and the point is moot, we’ll pack up our troubles, get our old grins back and not worry about the IMF cavalry. We’ll head to Croke Park for the four-piece Spring Series – an astonishing mix of innovation and sheer good value.

Imagine a respite from the charmless bickering of the confederacy of dunces who comprise our political class.

Imagine four nights of the Dubs topping the bill on cracking double headers. And decent half-time entertainment.

If music be the food of love, play on Jedward, play on.

The good people of Parnell Park, whose excellent wheeze this series was, are reluctant to put a figure on what sort of attendance would constitute success or how many empty seats it will take for the nights to register as a failure.

They’ll just know, they reckon, by how the nights feel.

There is more at stake however than just a few good nights out.

A successful series will change a lot about the GAA in Dublin both short term and long term. These games are timely as the county board is concluding a strategic review as part of a process initiated under the GAA’s own Strategic Vision and Action Plan 2009-2015. The GAA required all county boards to have their own plan for the future. Dublin being unique, but in some ways predictable, is among the last to finish, but also probably the most radical.

The Spring Series breaks the unwritten rules of the GAA year by creating attractive double headers, by branding and marketing a series of games which would otherwise be pretty much private functions and by dipping the toe into a sea which the Dublin County Board has long believed would be worth fishing. The family market.

There was a long queue of top -name acts eager to play the series, but touring commitments altered the plans. Still, Dublin GAA is delighted with what they have been left with, having fulfilled an informal brief to entertain different parts of the family on different nights.

The line-ups are an intentional move away from the traditional GAA entertainment of the bespectacled nephew of a GAA official earnestly wrestling an accordion as his sister dances a clattery reel all around him. Jedward are there instead.

To test the family brand to see what is possible if you give extreme good value and target members of the family unit whose musical tastes may not coincide with hardcore GAA. (Jedward’s Dad, by the way, is a Croke Park steward.) What struck those involved in putting together the strategic review and the Spring Series was the missed opportunity within Dublin when it comes to the administration of three different sports.

Women’s football won’t be played as part of the four double headers purely because the only slot available was the weekend of the O’Connor Cup, the game’s equivalent of the Ashbourne.

Otherwise, all branches of the Dublin GAA family would have been showcased.

IN TERMS of arriving at a junction at just the right time the Spring Series leaves the broader GAA family in Dublin with a choice of directions to go. There are no pollyannas left who believe that all will be right with the economy any day now.

Times are going to be hard and the likelihood is that women’s football and camogie, who have their own separate bodies and administrations, will be the first to feel the sharp edge of recession.

The existence of women’s football and camogie as entities outside of the GAA itself will surprise many people. Naturally all three organisations rub delicate cheek by grizzled jowl at club level but beyond that the divisions begin.

Different methods of registrations, different insurance bodies, different disciplinary systems, different county boards to answer too.

For women’s football and camogie, the price of independence hasn’t been high.

Camogie, for instance, has five regional development officers each covering impossibly large swathes of the country as best they can (for instance one RDO’s territory includes 58 clubs, five local authorities, 450 primary schools, 165 secondary schools, three universities plus ITs and PLCs).

That’s before county board issue, child protection issues, refereeing issues etc. They are helped, though, to varying degrees by the GAA’s force of almost 50 Games Promotion Officers dispersed around the clubs of Dublin.

It’s not a game of perfect however. The GPO’s work to the direction of the clubs they are attached to. Thus they work to the ethos of the club. A club with a strong hurling tradition won’t be an ideal match with a more football-oriented GPO.

Clubs with very strong camogie or women’s football sections will tend to have a better claim on a GPO’s time and will sustain their position accordingly.

In other clubs, girls will suffer badly. Parnell Park says that it finds that GPO’s working lives are devoted about 60 per cent to boys and 40 per cent to girls, but concedes that within that overall figure the ratios will differ widely.

The camogie association caters for 545 nationally, but accumulates registration fees only on a club per club (just €300 per club) basis. Women’s football, which traditionally seem to be one step ahead, collect on a per player basis which means that they at least maximise the income from their own players.

For a large GAA club with a membership of camogie players stretching up to a couple of hundred that can mean a lot of the membership takings remaining in the club for the trouble of just sending a €300 cheque off to the camogie association.

The two associations catering for girls and women have fought, for reasons which often baffle GAA officials, to retain their autonomy. Thus far that has been justifiable (if not entirely sensible) in that both sports regularly point to their playing numbers with satisfaction and women’s football points out that it now has a team from each of the 32 counties playing in its National League structure.

The difference in service which members could be provided with is the difference between autonomy and integration at this point however. The Spring Series offers a jumping off point to explore the issue in Dublin in particular over the next few years (The Strategic Review being completed at the moment is to take the county up until 2015 and will be launched the Dublin County Board hopes to coincide with the final game of the series)

By the time 2015 comes around we will, hopefully, be coming out of one of the most bruising recessions ever seen.

It seems unlikely that the queue of yoiks and time servers looking to get their backsides back into the Dáil have one among them who would have the wisdom to ringfence sport as a national asset with associated benefits for health, education and social welfare. Too long term. Sport will be attacked viciously as we struggle to pay off the IMF.

Twenty eight per cent (or almost one in every three) of babies born in this state are born in Dublin. Which makes Dublin, distinctive, different and the petri dish upon which all things must be tested and the results inspected. Can the Dublin County Board retain 50 GPOs over the next half decade?

As well as an infrastructural programme and a commitment to success and excellence which is spelt out very specifically within the programme.

The answer is that it is possible.

AGAINST THE head Dublin negotiated a handsome deal with Vodafone last year. The challenge now as Parnell Park sees things is to enhance Dublin GAA as sports’ number one family brand within the city.

“Participation in women’s sports within the GAA is a lot more impressive than the numbers for many men’s sports,” says Kevin O’Shaughnessy, Steering Programme Manager of the Dublin County Board.

“The question we are coming up against is how do we incorporate that into a Dublin brand, how do we get to the family who drops the boys and the girls down to the club on a Saturday morning to see that local brand reflected in the Dublin brand.”

The answer seems to be beneficial to everybody. Treat girls better. Pay more attention. Staunch the drop-out rates from mid teens onwards. We’ll be left with a healthier population.

Sponsors will be offered a considerably stronger family brand, administration costs will be reduced, clubs will benefit from the participation both on the pitch and off it of bright enthusiastic new members.

And a larger chunk of the populace will remain healthy and positive through sport.

A simple example. A small thing. The disparity between how girls on county level teams (let alone clubs) are looked after as opposed to boys’ teams is immense. The most visible disparity is in terms of kit.

Taking money from a small budget to make a group of elite players feel good and proud about themselves goes against the grain in many places. And yet.

The reasons for dropping out of sport among teenage girls are both more plentiful and more varied than those given by male counterparts. When the retired English athlete Kelly Holmes came to take a look at the issue a couple of years ago she was astonished to find that the clothes which girls were required to wear when playing sport had a huge impact. The traditional schools’ sports outfit of white aertex top and skinny shorts filled many body conscious teenage girls with horror.

Pleated skirts caused massed nausea. In test schools where the uniform was changed to black hoodie and three quarter length tracksuit legs the tide of participation turned and numbers began increasing rather than declining.

Girls care about how they look.

Who knew?

(Holmes might swing into action on behalf of young Irish women if she was confronted with the garment beloved of camogie administrators the skort, a hybrid of a skirt and a pair of shorts).

Girls on camogie teams only utter the word skort at the end of a sentence that begins with the words “do I have to wear this bleedin’ -----”)

The issues here are significant.

Pointing to the fact that over 5,000 people turned up on Mobhi Road to welcome the successful Dublin Jackies back after their All-Ireland success last year, O’Shaughnessy points out that the challenge is “linking up all groups under the Dublin brand or banner, not just the three county boards but those large numbers of people who will only go to Dublin games in the summer. We have to draw them in.”

Girls who stick with sport are less likely to drop out of school and more likely to go on to graduate from college.

Studies show that they avoid many of the more self-destructive, self-esteem issues, are the least likely to smoke of any group within their age band, less likely to get pregnant, and more likely to delay their first sexual experience longer than their peers. Girls who stick with sport, tend to become more confident, more focused and happier human beings.

So that, in part, is what is at stake when Jedward bound out into Croker in a couple of weeks.

Can the three GAA bodies in Dublin take this act of co-operation further so that all three will benefit and thus insulate themselves further from recession?