Laois hope row can be resolved

The Laois County Board are confident they can resolve the row with Portlaoise club officials at tonight's meeting of the county executive.

The club has withdrawn all their players from the county football and hurling panels, while also making unavailable their club officials and facilities, after the county board refused to postpone a club championship match last Friday week.

Such a stand-off is nothing new to Laois GAA, and follows a similar fixture dispute last year with the Rathdowney club, but it touches on the national issue of player availability when it comes to club and county championships. It also follows their recent crisis where under-21 footballers were removed from the county panel because of their involvement with the senior team.

This latest row is certainly bad timing, with the Laois senior hurling team out in the Leinster championship this Sunday against Offaly, while the footballers are finalising their preparations for the meeting with either Wicklow or Carlow on June 4th. As one of the strongest duel clubs in the county, Portlaoise has several representatives on both panels - including hurlers Joe Phelan and Cahir Healy, and footballers Aidan Fennelly, Brian McCormack, Colm Parkinson and Ian Fitzgerald.

Portlaoise's John Taylor is also a hurling selector with manager Dinny Cahill, and Martin Parkinson, father of Colm, a football selector with manager Mick O'Dwyer. While the stand-off won't affect the staging of the two Leinster hurling quarter-finals set for O'Moore Park in Portlaoise on Sunday, as that's under the control of the county board, the adjacent warm-up pitch and parking facilities owned by the club won't be made available.

The row reached a head on Monday night when a letter from club explaining their stance on the issue was not discussed at the county board meeting. The county chairman, Dick Miller, was out of the country, and the stand-in chairman, Brian Allen, would not allow it to be discussed until the county executive had first seen it.

Miller was due back last night and is scheduled to attend tonight's meeting, and yesterday county secretary Niall Handy was predicting a positive outcome: "I'd be hopeful we can resolve this after the meeting for the good of Laois football. I can't comment beyond that at the moment, but it is something we want to get sorted as soon as possible. But it won't affect the staging of the games in O'Moore Park on Sunday. Right now it just means the car park facilities and club pitch usually made available to us won't be."

Yet there is no obvious solution to the row. Portlaoise were set to play St Joseph's last Friday week in the first round of the county championship, but they refused to fulfil that fixture after claiming their county players weren't made available to them in the two weeks advance of the game, as was their request. The county board subsequently dropped Portlaoise the two points.

Portlaoise have reportedly made similar demands in the past, with a resolution eventually agreed upon. Part of the problem is that it was agreed at convention last January that all clubs must meet their competitive commitments once the fixtures have gone to their local papers and are published. With the county players only released the week before the game, Portlaoise were then claiming they didn't have sufficient time to prepare, and therefore wouldn't be fulfilling the fixture.

Club secretary Peter O'Neill has also been stressing that the problem is more about how games are being run at national level, rather than faulting the county board, and has called on the GAA to address the ongoing problem of club versus county commitments.

In his letter to the county board, O'Neill stated that the decision wasn't taken lightly, but that "over the past couple of years we have been more than accommodating to the county GAC in respect to fixtures . . . unfortunately none of this has been reciprocated. We are not looking to be treated any better than a county team, but we are looking to be treated the same".

Coincidentally, new GAA president Nickey Brennan touched on that very issue during his opening press briefing in Croke Park last month: "I've thrown out a number of ideas on that," said Brennan, "because I definitely believe we need to have a bigger window relating to the playing of club games. We can achieve that in two ways, first of all by tightening our intercounty programme. There's a clear view coming across now that the All-Ireland finals should be brought forward a bit. We've done that this year because of the Ryder Cup, and there's no reason we couldn't go further next year. That's one of the challenges I've given to the new Central Competitions Committee (CCC)."