ON GAELIC GAMES:The GPA, as an arm of the GAA, can play a useful role in minimising friction, writes SEAN MORAN

AT ONE point during Saturday’s press briefing to announce the GAA-GPA interim agreement Dessie Farrell, chief executive of the players’ body, was asked what it meant to the GPA to conclude the tortuous process of securing recognition.

“For a long time there was that suspicion and hostility,” he replied, “particularly in the earlier years. Over time I think that’s dissipated somewhat but there would still be some concerns out there in the wider GAA community. I’m optimistic that this agreement will do away with that for once and for all because our intentions are very, very clear.

“We’re a players’ representative body, a vehicle for player welfare and an initiator of important player welfare programmes. I think it’s acknowledged within the document that the amount of time, effort and commitment of players – and with that the enormous commercial success of the association – needed to be recognised.

“We feel the best way to assist that is through player welfare programmes. That was always the intention. That was always our vision for the association and thankfully with this agreement and the funding put in place we’ll be able to do that.”

Farrell has been accused of many things during the course of his tenure as head of the GPA but naivety wouldn’t be amongst them.

Yet his optimism that the hostility reserved in some quarters for his organisation might abate sounded almost touching. The players’ representative group has stirred strong opinions from its inception just over 10 years ago – so much so that a visceral dislike for the body and its activists has generally distorted debates on any issue in which the GPA has an interest. Two years ago the sound and fury surrounding proposed players’ grants proved misleading, as the scheme waltzed through the 2008 annual congress. But there was little doubt that attitudes to the initiative were influenced by how individuals reacted to the GPA, whose idea it had largely been.

Consequently there was always going to be an angry reaction to the notion of bringing the GPA inside the GAA tent, rather than allowing it to continue as some sort of occasionally hostile encampment nearby.

Intercounty players are important to the GAA. This mightn’t be true of them as individuals but as essential cogs in the staging of elite competitive events that people want to attend and generally watch. Not all of the counties are box office but the ones that are maintain a pretty severe regime for their amateur players.

No one’s forcing them to play and they do it for the honour and satisfaction rather than for whatever welfare schemes the GPA might manage to get past Croke Park’s vetting systems but they are still deserving of recognition. Occasionally it is said that many club players train as hard as their intercounty colleagues. In some cases that may be true if the comparison is between elite club sides and the lowlier county teams, but in the case of the sides that draw big crowds to Croke Park the argument is spurious.

By far the largest entries on Central Council’s revenue account for last year was that of gate receipts (just over €26,000,000), followed by commercial earnings (just below €17,000,000). Gate receipts speak for themselves and of the commercial income the vast bulk, from media rights and sponsorship, also pertained to intercounty activity.

[The total income of just over €64,000,000 includes just one other entry of importance – the €15,000,000 transfer from Croke Park’s stadium business, a large chunk of which is also derived from intercounty fixtures.] During the summer players decided not to co-operate with broadcast coverage, causing inconvenience to both broadcasters and sponsors. The protest was brief but even in that short space of time Croke Park had to deal with agitated rights holders, unimpressed with the impact on their activities.

Yet this is not simply a question of one pressure group with outsized bargaining power barging its way to a good deal. The main benefit for the GAA in this agreement is that it provides a structure for dealing with elite players’ issues in the future.

Whereas those who see the malign hand of the GPA in just about anything that afflicts the GAA mightn’t accept it, the recurrent outbreaks of disharmony between county teams and managers or officials arise from dissatisfaction with local administration, which doesn’t always understand the constantly evolving demands of state-of-the art preparation.

The GPA, as an arm of the GAA, can play a useful role in minimising friction through the agreement of universal structures and communication channels. It is also argued by opponents of the weekend’s agreement that the cost of preparing intercounty teams (estimated recently as around €20,000,000) and the disruption they cause the local club schedules means that the intercounty game is as much a burden as a resource.

But it is not national policy to spend any amount on county teams. That is something that counties do themselves and for their own reasons. Obviously any ambitious county wants to do as well as it can and is prepared to invest accordingly. It is also accepted that a high-profile county team is the best promotional tool the games can have.

That sort of success comes at a price not just to the administrators but also to the players who adopt a level of self-denial in their personal lives that goes far beyond the recreational. Two Kerry footballers, Tomás Ó Sé and Colm Cooper, went for unauthorised post-match drinks during the summer and were not alone dropped for the next match but saw their socialising plastered all over the media. Would that happen to club players? The poor relations between the GAA and its top players have been a drain on the association’s energies and resources.

Commercial possibilities have not been optimised because of the lack of co-operation. For instance the video games’ packages of recent years were deprived of impact by the inability to secure image rights so that well-known players could be depicted on screen. The central considerations are: have the GPA’s members an arguable case for special recognition and does addressing it make sense for the GAA? Hard to see beyond the affirmative on both points.

Yesterday’s coverage of the statement by the group Of One Belief, which was critical of the GAA-GPA agreement, included the statement’s questioning why the role of facilitating the talks between the organisations had been “handed over to an outside barrister”. The GAA wish to make it clear that Turlough O’Donnell SC, a former chair of the Bar Council, gave of his time voluntarily during the talks’ process.