The Larry McCarthy interview: ‘On that side of the Atlantic I’m the organ-grinder, but over here I’m the monkey’

Barbara went home last Monday.

Home. It can be a curious concept these days. South Orange or north Dublin, New Jersey or old Cork?

Either way, Barbara went back to America and Larry McCarthy is on his own again. Getting on with being GAA president this side of the water while his family are getting on with their lives on the other shore.

He has now completed 18 months as GAA president. A lot done, more to do – and all of that. On the day of his inauguration at the end of February in 2021 the grip of Covid-19 restrictions held the country in a state of inertia. McCarthy gave his address to GAA congress via a laptop screen from a bare room in an apartment in Malahide.

What has David Nucifora ever done for Irish rugby?

---

Nicky English: We could be in for a high-scoring free-for-all with Cork v Tipperary

---

Irish Olympian Jack Woolley: ‘We’ve sat in saunas and not drank water for two days’

---

It’s raining metaphors at Manchester United amid soggy aftermath of underinvestment

---

When the formalities were done, he turned off his camera, folded the laptop shut, strolled to the best chipper in town and picked up a couple of bags of fish and chips. Barbara was with him for the occasion but their two sons, Conor and Shane, were in New Jersey.

Back at the apartment they paired the greasy delights with a bottle of champagne and sat down to FaceTime the boys. The following morning Barbara returned to the US. And so began the 40th presidency of the GAA. Cheers, ad meliora.

“On March 1st I started as president and on the same day Barbara started a new job in New Jersey. That’s just how it was,” says McCarthy.

I’ve always said I had an easier job than John Horan before me in that sense. He had to close things down. I got to open them up

There have been tough periods but mostly the adjustment to bachelor-esque apartment dwelling hasn’t been too much of a drain. Truth be told, being GAA president is the best gig he has ever had. Plenty of mischievous friends have been quick to remind him: “And McCarthy, you’ve had plenty of sweet gigs”.

He is currently on a three-year sabbatical as associate professor of management at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, where he teaches in the sports management programme, specialising in sports marketing.

It’s a galaxy away from cutting ribbons at a pitch opening in Connemara, but McCarthy slips easily between both worlds.

“I describe my position as mad, mad in a good sense. When I am a professor at a university, in that job I know when classes are on, I know when seminars are on, I dictate that workload. On that side of the Atlantic I’m the organ-grinder, but over here I’m the monkey – ‘be here, be there, do this, do that’. There’s not really any pattern. Every week is different.”

No matter what happens during his term, it is already determined that history will recall a son of the independent republic of Cork as being the first ever overseas president of the GAA. Fittingly so, boy.

And he knows another inescapable part of his story will be that he was the president who took on the role during a global pandemic. McCarthy delayed his return at the time to avail of the faster vaccine roll-out in America, arriving in Ireland just two days before he addressed congress from the apartment that was to become his home for the next three years.

“The first thing that got me when I got to Dublin was the five kilometre restrictions. We never had that in New Jersey. I was in the apartment talking to the walls,” he remembers.

“Those first couple of months were tough on everybody. We were a sports organisation without a sport. Slowly but surely we started to open up. I’ve always said I had an easier job than John Horan before me in that sense. He had to close things down. I got to open them up.

“Looking back, and even with the Covid situation, I think I adjusted pretty well to living in Ireland again after 37 years. It wasn’t a huge ‘where the hell am I?’ kind of thing. You obviously missed your family, but in general I settled well. I fell in with some old friends again and fell in with the work in the GAA.

“September, October, November last year were sort of difficult on a personal level. Before that I had been going on adrenalin and Barbara had been over during the summer. I then went over to visit around Thanksgiving and they came here for Christmas. It has been much better this year, I have been over three or four times and they were here during the summer. But essentially we have been living two separate lives on either side of the Atlantic.”

McCarthy grew up in Cork, with the family settling in Bishopstown when he was a teenager. Third level studies at Thomond College became a fork in the road moment for him. He found himself secretary of the college GAA team, chief jersey organiser, certified ball pumper-upper, uncertified water-bottle filler-upper, maverick deep-heat dispensing medic, whatever needed to be done. In the mid-1970s he successfully made the case for Thomond College to be admitted to the Limerick SFC. In 1978 they won the All-Ireland club title.

He went on to teach at Malahide Community School, but good summers spent in New York being a bad carpenter kept drawing him back to the place. He had formed close friendships in the Sligo GAA club in New York – they were his home from home, and then, over time, the place became home.

He completed a master’s degree in physical education in New York University and then a PhD in Columbus Ohio, before a job came up working at a university in Statesboro, Georgia.

As Seán Moran noted in these pages in 2021, given his extensive background in the management, sponsorship and marketing of sport, McCarthy is probably “the most qualified holder of the office in history”.

He is certainly the only GAA president to have a textbook, Sports Promotion and Sales Management, published in Korean.

I think it is going very well. Clubs and players seem happy with it, the people who seem to be against it are the supporters who miss going to matches. But let us hold fire and see

“Don’t ask me why, but the second edition did well in Korea. Completely mad,” he laughs.

McCarthy was living in Georgia when the 1994 World Cup pitched its tent in the States. He travelled to Orlando to watch Jack Charlton’s Irish players melt in the sauna-like Citrus Bowl and also took in the draw against Norway at Giants Stadium. Walking up the steps before that game, he heard the lilt of a Waterford accent roar in his direction. “Oi, Larry, Cork won the minor match!”

And the road was always leading him back up the east coast, where he eventually moved and settled – serving at various times as PRO, secretary and chairman of the New York County Board.

Barbara is originally from Dublin, while Conor and Shane were both born and bred in America. They work as technical directors in New York’s theatre industry. Covid lockdowns nailed the stage doors shut for many months and some of the smaller ones struggled to reopen.

“If there is a project on they pick up work, but if there’s not then they don’t. They had a tough time during Covid, because all the theatres in New York were closed. They have done a lot of off-Broadway stuff, but their ambition is to hit Broadway.”

It is fair to say the GAA season has moved well off-Broadway in recent weeks. The decision to play the All-Ireland finals in July continues to divide opinion. The split season is the GAA’s marmite. The topic is largely a fence-sitting free zone. McCarthy prefers to call it the county-club season, and for now he would prefer to see people adopting a less definitive stance on the issue.

“It is unfair to make a judgment call on it now. Let us see how it plays out, we are only halfway there, let us wait until the end of the year when we can make an informed analysis of it.

“In general, and anecdotally, I think it is going very well. Clubs and players seem happy with it, the people who seem to be against it are the supporters who miss going to matches. But let us hold fire and see.

“There might be more tweaking, there might not, we have a new championship format next year as well, so we have to wait to see how it all plays out. It needs time before a judgment can be made.”

But he is unequivocal on his judgment when it comes to the “unacceptable” levels of verbal and physical abuse suffered by GAA referees.

A study last week revealed 94 per cent of 438 referees surveyed had experienced verbal abuse, while 23 per cent endured physical abuse.

The shocking footage circulating on social media this week, of a referee in Roscommon lying prone on the ground after an alleged attack during a minor football match, cast fresh light on an issue already firmly in focus.

Just two weeks ago McCarthy attended a junior football club match in Ulster. His arrival at the venue was noted by some, but not all.

“One of the lads was giving the referee dogs abuse, shouting and roaring at him. Your man didn’t recognise me. At one stage I said, “listen, there is no need to be shouting like that”. But he came back, “he can’t be f**king doing this to us”.

“But there’s still no need for you to be shouting at him,” I replied.”

The reasoning worked, but McCarthy knows it shouldn’t be necessary.

If I reflect on the last 18 months, knowing what I know now, that is something I would have started to push a little bit harder, recruiting and making sure there are young referees coming through

Without referees there would be no matches. And he says it is an area of his tenure he wished he had done more about earlier.

“We probably should have addressed referees more quickly, certainly in terms of boosting recruitment. Perhaps if I reflect on the last 18 months, knowing what I know now, that is something I would have started to push a little bit harder, recruiting and making sure there are young referees coming through and that they are getting opportunities.”

He is hopeful standoffs between the GAA and GPA are a relic of the past and says together they will “absolutely” work out an agreement on a charter.

“We are not going to be at loggerheads, it might take a couple of long nights, but I have no doubts that we will get there with a charter for the next couple of years. I would see it as a long-term thing, we don’t want to be going year to year to year.”

The challenges facing the GAA when he took over were stark. In his inauguration speech he said the “cupboard is bare”.

“And it was. I said at the time I wanted us to get back to 2019 levels and we seem to be in or around there at the moment, certainly in terms of crowds this summer, the gates and sponsorship money is back. Now, the hidden thing is that costs have gone up in the interim. So while the cupboard isn’t bare any longer and we are back to 2019 levels we are not flaithiúlach.

“But we can afford to do things like the Games Development Funding and open up again funding to clubs who want to do capital developments and things like that.”

Aside from bedding in the new championship format, one of the features of the next 18 months of his presidency will be the ongoing efforts to amalgamate the three Gaelic games organisations – the GAA, LGFA and Camogie. It will eventually happen, but the pace of change has been more sloth-moving-in-treacle than bar-of-soap-on-a-water-slide.

“How far are you away from uniting three huge cultural organisations in this country? I don’t know, I’d never try and put a timeline on it. But we have these memorandums of understanding where we are working together. The One Club model is happening continuously and growing and we are encouraging that.”

Still, resistance remains in some quarters. There are fears from some within camogie and the LGFA that their associations would be swallowed up in any amalgamation. But McCarthy insists it would be a partnership.

“It has to be co-operative, and it’s important to say it’s not a takeover, absolutely not a takeover. It’s about working together.”

However, one suggestion McCarthy does not see coming to fruition anytime soon is the dawn of Friday night senior intercounty matches. Friday night games have proven popular at club level in numerous counties. But the GAA president does not believe it will be extended to the intercounty scene.

“Purely for scheduling you could do it. But what’s the knock-on effect of it? You are going to have lads needing to take time off work on Friday. That is going to possibly open a dangerous path towards professionalism, and that is not something I’d be anxious to pursue at all.

“We are an organisation with an amateur ethos, that has been our calling card and I’d like to see that maintained. I don’t see us generally moving away from weekend games, Saturday and Sunday.”

The one person involved with the college who does understand at some level the role of the presidency in Irish society is the archbishop of Newark, who is my boss

When his time as GAA president ends, the plan is to return to America and his job at Seton Hall.

“The university thankfully gave me three years off. I have begun to say that if something else popped up I would certainly look at it, but the anticipation from my part and the university’s part is that I’m going to go back.”

One afternoon during a visit to New Jersey last February he used his old office for work and it felt as if time had stood still in the room.

“I walked in and my stuff was all still there, waiting, just as I had left it. So they haven’t cleaned me out of the office.”

But he accepts they don’t really grasp what the role of GAA president is, uncertain if it is some form of fanciful midlife crisis, like the boy who runs off with the circus, or something more profound and significant.

“The one person involved with the college who does understand at some level the role of the presidency in Irish society is the archbishop of Newark, who is my boss because we are a diocesan university. Joe Tobin, Cardinal Tobin.”

McCarthy wrote to him late last year, saying he had become GAA president and inviting him to attend the 2022 All-Ireland finals.

“He replied and said ‘Congratulations. I will reprimand the president of the university for not telling me this! Why are they not trumpeting from the rooftops?’ He added that the person in Rome who purports to be a sports fan had him doing other things this summer, but said he’d love to come in 2023, if possible.”

McCarthy was happy to extend the invite, and added that if the cardinal wanted to bring the sports fan from Rome too he was sure the GAA could find a seat for him somewhere in the Hogan Stand.

Last Saturday McCarthy was in the Aviva Stadium watching the Northwestern Wildcats face the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the College Football Series – an unusual American-themed afternoon for him in Dublin.

But if the rhythm of the presidency is unpredictable, almost by accident McCarthy has discovered himself stumbling into a Sunday routine – should his diary allow it. He will leave the apartment, walk to his favourite bar in Malahide and spend the night watching golf and arguing the toss on whatever the hot topics of the day tend to be.

“What I’ve found is that it appears to be what people of my age do, they will go to the pub on a Sunday, have a couple of pints, watch the golf and then afterwards go home and watch the end of it. I’ve sort of fallen into that little trap. Only I’m going home to an apartment on my own,” he smiles.

He was 31 years married last Tuesday. Barbara, who works in the public school system in the US, had been with him in Malahide most of the summer but she is back in New Jersey now, writing her dissertation for a doctorate in education – and her husband is under instruction to stay away.

So for the next few months he’s back on his own. Which is fine. Last Christmas, Conor put together a compendium of Christy Moore’s catalogue for him to listen to while driving around the country.

“I can’t clap my hands to music, I have no beat, no rhythm, I’m useless. So as a consequence I like ballads, I like songs with words. Christy is my man.”

This season has gone well, we played our two All-Ireland finals in July and plans are already under way for the new championship format next year. The wheels keep going and you go with it

The road sometimes leads him back towards the home of his youth. He is one of nine siblings. After his mother passed away, and with none of the family still living in Leeside, a decision was made to sell the house. A month after he was elected president, and 50 years almost to the week since the family had moved in there, the house in Bishopstown was sold.

“That’s just the way it is, you know, you sort of move on at some level, but I drive by the house every time I go to Bishopstown, just to have a look.”

For home is not only a physical place, it can also be a nostalgic window in the soul. It can as easily be Croke Park in Dublin as it can be Gaelic Park in the Bronx. It can be Malahide, north Dublin and it can be South Orange, New Jersey.

And so Larry McCarthy, in the gig of his life, is now 18 months down with another 18 to go.

“Over the years I have always said, whether it be with chairpersons or secretaries, you see people getting more comfortable in their role as they go along. I would hope that is the same with me,” he says.

“Institutionally I think we dealt with Covid very well. The couple of breaches early on were very disappointing, but they were dealt with effectively, I think. This season has gone well, we played our two All-Ireland finals in July and plans are already under way for the new championship format next year. The wheels keep going and you go with it.”

Or as Christy would put it, you Ride On.