All-Ireland B championship proposal officially dropped

The All-Ireland B championship proposal has officially been dropped. A meeting of Central Council at this year’s annual congress in Mount Wolseley, Carlow, decided to withdraw the motion that the council itself had proposed for a secondary championship confined to Division Four counties, who wouldn’t be allowed enter the All-Ireland qualifier series.

There had been strong indications that the motion wouldn’t have received anything like the support necessary to be adopted.

The players' body, the GPA, also re-iterated its opposition to the motion. The association repeated its call for the establishment of a sub-committee to look again at football championship reform.

The dropped motion was the last surviving proposal of an exhaustive trawl by Central Council through the counties seeking ideas to improve the football championship. Eighteen proposals were received, of which none now remain. Well-publicised disparity Eamon Barry, the former Meath manager, spoke in the debate on the director general Páraic Duffy's report and drew attention to the well-publicised disparity between what Dublin draw down in games development grants – 47 per cent of the global figure – and what the rest of the country receive.

At the launch of the GAA accounts finance director Tom Ryan had said: “We’re conscious of the discrepancies, we’re conscious of the challenges that it poses for counties,” said Ryan.

“I don’t think you can solely attribute playing success or otherwise down to purely financial reasons. Quite an amount of it depends on financial resources, I know that, but there are other factors at play as well.

“There is a small group that has been constituted to look specifically, not at Dublin – it would be unfair to characterise it as Dublin – but just to look at the total amount that we generate in a year and if you think in terms of discretionary spend.”

At congress Barry said that whereas Meath had just three full-time and three part-time coaches, Dublin had up to 60.

"Staffing levels are way, way behind Dublin and yet we're expected to compete on the same level. We can no longer cope and need at least 12 full-time coaches in the county." 'Dublin's resources' In his reply Duffy said that he wanted to look at the issues separately.

“I think we need to get to a situation where we get away from discussing games development and Dublin as the same issue.

“This has become too easy a point to make. Dublin’s resources become an excuse for everybody else.

“Twenty years ago the chief complaint in the association was that the GAA in Dublin were losing ground to soccer and rugby and that we were becoming the poor relations. That has been turned around and turned around by the hard work of the county board and focused development funding.

“In relation to Meath I have been in communication with the county board about coaching needs. We will be doing our best to help out both with Meath and any other counties.”

Frank Dillon, from Hertfordshire, raised the question of Sky Sports’ exclusive rights to broadcast All-Ireland matches in Britain. He praised GAAGO, the streaming service provided by the GAA and RTÉ but added that it wasn’t ideal.

“One Achilles’ heel in England is that we can’t access All-Ireland matches on the service. I would ask the Árd Stiúrthór to take this into consideration when next negotiating media rights.”

Duffy replied that the GAA would do its best to conclude the best media rights agreement possible on behalf of everyone in the association.