Leinster still targeting expanded participation says Pat Teehan

Leinster chair Pat Teehan says that the primary objective of increased games development investment is to expand participation within the province but that if successful, it should also impact on the quality of county teams.

Earlier this week, Teehan announced that Leinster would be appointing 30 further full-time Games Promotion Officers (GPOs) for Longford, Westmeath, Offaly, Laois, Kilkenny and Carlow.

"It's towards maximising your playing population," he told The Irish Times on Thursday, "to give everybody an opportunity to play Gaelic games at whatever level they're able to but as a consequence, the more people playing games the better the quality of the players."

He acknowledged that the performance of Leinster counties in the football league was a concern and had been over the past decade or so. Since the league became a hierarchical, four-division structure in 2008, Dublin have been the only team from the province in the top division for eight of the 15 years - and for six of the most recent eight seasons.

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Now, with Dublin verging on almost certain relegation there is a chance of no Leinster counties in next year’s Division One given that Kildare are also in danger.

“I accept that the league performance hasn’t been good and I see no reason why two out of Dublin, Meath and Kildare shouldn’t be in the top division all the time.”

The decline of Dublin is exciting hopes of a competitive Leinster championship - a title that they have won for the past 11 years and for 16 of the last 17.

In the early 2000s, the province had one of the most competitive championships of all with five different counties winning in successive years but All-Ireland success dried up.

“That decade,” said Teehan, “we had provincial wins for Kildare, Westmeath and Laois (as well as Dublin and Meath). Wexford got to an All-Ireland semi-final.”

In 2006 one of Teehan’s predecessors as provincial chair, Liam O’Neill, who would also become GAA president, suggested that for the more competitive and accessible the Leinster football championship had become, there had been a trade-off with the ability to contest the highest level of the game.

“If winning All-Irelands was our only focus we’d target Offaly, Meath, Dublin and Kildare,” he said. “As it is we spread the butter thinly and spend more per player in Longford and Laois than in the other counties. We have developmental responsibilities. That’s our brief - to maximise the playing potential in every county. Our success is our failure, if you want to call it that.”

As it turned out, that ‘failure’ was spectacularly resolved in the following decade when the competitiveness of the provincial championship atrophied and instead Leinster had the greatest run of All-Ireland success in history.

For Teehan, this presumed trade-off is a bit reductive.

“It’s not an either-or. Put it this way. Things haven’t been good at senior level for a number of years but yet both All-Ireland football champions at minor and under-20 are in Leinster and neither of them is Dublin - Meath and Offaly.

“Things can change quite quickly. If you’d told people at the start of 1991 that Ulster counties would win the next four All-Irelands, they’d be looking at you.

“There’s also a tendency to claim that the game’s in trouble if traditional counties aren’t winning. When they win too much it’s domination.”

Leinster football may be about to embark on a more open era but it will leave behind the opening decades of the century when in both football and hurling, that domination has been evident.

It’s all of 22 years since a county from the province, outside of Dublin, won the All-Ireland and 24 since one outside of Kilkenny (allowing that Galway compete in Leinster) won the hurling.