Kelly holds firm on opening of Croke Park

GAELIC GAMES / News: With the issue of opening to Croke Park to other sports refusing to go away, there is now little hope of Seán Kelly enjoying his last month as GAA president.

While Kelly continues to guarantee that Croke Park will be staging international rugby and soccer in 2007, certain members of the association are still questioning the validity of suspending Rule 42 if planning permission is not granted for Lansdowne Road.

Kelly's most recent comments on the matter came at the weekend, when he said: "The question of planning permission wasn't tied into the decision."

On opening Croke Park he said: "The decision was that while Lansdowne Road was closed for the redevelopment that games would be allowed to be played in Croke Park. Lansdowne Road is going to be closed next year. They announced last Saturday that it was the last Six Nations game played there until after the redevelopment takes place."

Cork Central Council delegate Bob Honohan is leading the questioning of that viewpoint, having originally supported the view expressed by Ulster Council chairman Michael Greenan in his address to the Ulster convention. Yesterday, Honohan told RTÉ radio that Kelly's insistence Croke Park would be staging soccer and rugby next year contradicted his previous understanding of the issue.

"How can you start redevelopment work if you haven't got planning permission? If what Seán Kelly is saying was to be taken then Lansdowne Road could be closed for any length of time before work commenced. It could conceivably be five years before work would commence.

"That was never envisaged in the motion that was successful at Congress last year, and certainly wasn't what was agreed at the Central Council meeting of December last. In fact, I asked Seán Kelly at last month's meeting if opening Croke Park was dependent on planning permission being obtained for Lansdowne Road, and the answer I got was in the affirmative."

For now, however, Kelly is standing by his position, and also maintains that experts hired by the FAI and IRFU had given assurances that planning permission would be granted for Lansdowne Road by January, 2007.

Yesterday, his mind had turned to other matters, as he announced his intention to seek legal advice on the recent decision of the Central Appeals Committee (CAC) to lift the suspensions handed down to the Tyrone and Dublin players after the opening game in the Allianz Football League.

"If we are to make sure that the same mistakes aren't made again then we have to have a definitive answer as to what went wrong," said Kelly. "I don't believe you can have two committees at national level taking different points of view.

"So what I'm looking for on this is the best legal advice available to us, at national level. There's no point in us bringing something to Congress or even Central Council and then find another committee to come along and find fault with it again."

The GAA has yet to disclose the exact reason why the players had their bans overturned, but Kelly believes that is only part of the issue.

"The report has been submitted on that now, but the problem is it's not 100 per cent clear on what should be done in the future. So that's why it's so important we seek clarification on this now."

Kelly stopped short of saying he was personally uneasy about the CAC's reasonings for making the decision: "Well, there are differences of opinion, let's put it that way. I mean the CDC, which have their own legal advice, believed everything they did was correct. And they're still adamant about that. Whereas the CAC say they didn't. So how can we bring the thing forward at national level if we have two committees with two different viewpoints?

"We also need to identify for future reference exactly what the upholding of an appeal means. Does it always need to mean that everything is lost? Or could they go back and do it again correctly?

"They're the points I'm looking to clarify. So it's my intention to have this clarified before the next management meeting in a fortnight's time."

Another issue facing Kelly in his closing weeks as president is that of grants to intercounty players, and that took a further twist yesterday when the women's football association said that any funding exclusively for male GAA players would be discrimination against women.

Speaking during the women's All Stars tour in Singapore, women's football president Geraldine Giles said she believed both men and women would have to be treated equally on the grants issue.

"It would be seen to be discrimination if the grants were solely for men," she said. "If it ever happened, then I don't see a situation whereby grants could be given just to men and not women."

The Gaelic Players Association (GPA) have called an egm for April 1st where they will vote on what their next step will be, and have not ruled out the possibility of going on strike in their search for Government and Irish Sports Council grants for GAA players.

While the women's football association have no links with the GPA, Giles believes that, should the grants initiative ever get the go ahead, it would need to have women footballers, camogie players and other female amateur sports athletes incorporated.