Denis Walsh: When it comes to money, the GAA must uphold distinction between need and greed

At its annual congress in 1991 the GAA entered a more brazen relationship with money. A Dublin motion to allow sponsor’s names and logos on GAA jerseys required a two-thirds majority, and, against expectation, the threshold was reached, without a vote to spare.

In the Cork Examiner Jim O’Sullivan reported that one delegate from a county opposed to the motion had mistakenly voted with his lunch voucher instead of his congress ballot, making it a spoiled vote, and swinging the verdict against the status quo. There was no account of how he fared at the buffet.

It was the kind of hot-button issue that comes up every so often in the GAA and divides the membership along ideological lines. The GAA needed money for housekeeping and self-improvement, just like every other sports organisation, but in the GAA a far greater value was put on money that was quarried from the community with bare hands.

Alongside hurling and football, fundraising was the third great team sport in the organisation. It brought people together, it allowed people to be invested, it injected a distinctive energy. Money has many stains, but money from local fund raising was spotless. As a subspecies, projects that were completed with voluntary labour enjoyed a revered status. In those cases, money was marginalised.

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At central level, the GAA’s relationship with money, by necessity, was far more complex. In the late 1980s the GAA agreed a sponsorship deal for the National Leagues, which at the time represented another leap in the GAA’s commercial thinking.

The championships, though, didn’t have any commercial partners yet, not because the GAA didn’t have suitors, but because “selling” the championships required an ideological leap too. The championships were seen as listed structures, aloof from the venality of the commercial world. That changed.

In an amateur sport, and a community-driven organisation, money had that duality: needed to have it; couldn’t be without it; wanted to be above it.

The transformative significance of allowing sponsors logos on jerseys was that it opened a bountiful new income stream for every unit of the organisation. In bringing the motion, Dublin said that “juvenile club teams” would be the biggest beneficiaries. Did they really believe that, or was it a marketing ploy in the soft sell?

In a comment piece on these pages a couple of days later the esteemed Paddy Downey voiced an impassioned objection and a trenchant warning. “The door is now wide open,” he wrote, “and a short way down the road players will be allowed accept payment for endorsing products and other undertakings off the field of play. The next step, not too far on, will be pay for play.

“Rugby Union football is moving along the same road. The last major amateur games in the world are running like lemmings towards the precipice.”

The GAA’s interaction with money has changed profoundly over the last 30 years, in terms of scale, and access, and impact: but there are still traces of Catholic guilt about the relationship. Managers and coaches are paid at every level, but those payments are never declared, and the GAA as an organisation chooses to live the lie rather than openly change the terms of engagement.

In the right hands it is clear that money can buy advantages, especially at club level, but candidly embracing that reality, and legislating for it would further undermine one of the GAA’s Old Testament beliefs. Instead, the illicit affairs continue, and the lurid gossip.

The most disparaging thing to say about anybody in the GAA is that they’re doing it for the money, and yet coaching on the club scene is a booming underground economy now, underwritten by GAA people. That dynamic captures the conflict. Up to what point is money a force for good?

The GAA has cultivated a myriad of commercial relationships in the modern era, and in that world finding desirable partners is not always straightforward. On these pages, for example, Malachy Clerkin has shone an unflattering light on the GAA’s ongoing relationship with banks that were found to have screwed their customers.

In other cases, though, the GAA has been guided by a social conscience. Six years ago sponsorship from betting companies was drummed out at a time when professional sport was up to its neck in partnerships with that sector. For the GAA, ultimately, that money was tainted.

The GAA’s history with alcohol sponsorship, though, captures the complexity of its position as the biggest community organisation in the country. They agonised for ages over drink.

In the early 1980s a sponsorship committee recommended in principle that sponsorship from drinks companies should be permitted and yet no deal was done until the mid-1990s. Everybody could see the commercial sense but entangled in this issue was a moral judgment.

When that position softened Guinness’s sponsorship of the hurling championship was imaginative and charismatic and it rhymed with a romantic period in the history of the game. But by the mid-2000s society was having a moment of reflection about problem drinking in Ireland and the GAA came under pressure to re-examine its relationship with Guinness.

In 2004 the GAA’s Alcohol and Substance Abuse Committee recommended that the organisation “ultimately phase out this form of sponsorship”. That process took years and it wasn’t until 2013 that the brewery’s 18-year sponsorship of the hurling championship finally came to an end. Now, Guinness’s only formal commercial relationship with the GAA is as a “pouring partner” in Croke Park.

Pubs can still sponsor local clubs, but the pub’s name cannot appear on the team jersey. Does that undermine the GAA’s position on high-profile branding from drinks’ companies? Yes. Is the money handy? Yes, of course. Can GAA people juggle one thing and the other? The money is handy. Conflicted?

In the uproar about the mooted rebranding of Páirc Uí Chaoimh last week, there were elements of all this at play. Want to be above the money; need the money.

[ Gordon Manning: Páirc Uí Chaoimh affair shows unsophisticated nature of stadium naming rights in Ireland ]

The names of grounds owned by professional sports teams have been swallowed whole by commercial partners in recent years, but in that sphere everyone lives under the thumb of wealth and greed.

In the GAA, the deal is different. Not everything is for sale. Or not all of everything. Or not at any price. That must always be the difference. At least that.