ON GAELIC GAMES:The failure of the GAA campaign against VAT on hurleys showed the limit of its influence, writes SEAN MORAN

ALTHOUGH THE country faces into an election that takes place in a political context, which would be familiar to someone waking up after quarter of a century asleep, the interaction of the GAA with the world of politics has changed.

The characterisation of the GAA as Fianna Fáil at play was never wholly accurate, as apart from the much-caricatured south Dublin wing of Fine Gael there weren’t such huge cultural differences between the main parties in the rest of the country that sporting preference was ever that effective a diagnostic.

For instance in Conor McMorrow’s diverting Dáil Stars – From Croke Park to Leinster House, his team of Gaelic games-derived politicians features more Fine Gaelers than Fianna Fáilers in the final 15. But it is interesting to look at an issue that reached boiling point 25 years ago and note how the generalisation might have been sustained.

The government of Garret FitzGerald in the mid-1980s ended up in a long-running row with the GAA over the issue of VAT on hurleys. It was one of three gripes of concern to the association – the others being rates payable on association property (Croke Park got a bill for Ir£100,000 in 1985) and retention tax on deposit interest, which was argued to hit hard at voluntary organisations which frequently favoured that form of bank account.

For whatever reason, it was the VAT imposition that stoked the fieriest passions. The terms of the public debate are reminiscent of the case advanced for the 2008 player grants – the idea of Gaelic games and hurling, in particular, as culturally important and worthy of state support.

There was, however, a big difference between those days three years ago just before the unsettling discovery that the State coffers were not, in fact, awash with cash and the mid-1980s when the exchequer was necessarily run out of a biscuit tin.

The vehemence of the arguments on either side is striking even at this remove. At its climax the GAA campaign involved withdrawing ticket allocations from politicians of all parties, a move that quickly turned counter-productive when government TDs took the line that they couldn’t be seen to bow to such threats.

Cork Labour TD Toddy O’Sullivan, one of those affected in the run up to the 1986 Galway-Cork hurling final, was one of those to react.

“I hope they will abandon this course of action,” he said of the protest. “The merits of their case could well be ignored in a battle of wills for if politicians were to succumb to this sort of pressure they would not be fit to govern.”

The campaign had begun to rumble in the provinces when Munster Council initiated the same course of action before the provincial hurling final a year earlier even though then director general Liam Mulvihill opposed the idea. But inability to secure any concessions in respect of their various grievances prompted an escalation of the campaign.

It would be hard in the circumstances to attribute to the then government, caught up after all in – to contemporary eyes – an all too familiar public debt crisis, political hostility to the GAA but there was no doubting the greater affection in which Fianna Fáil was held in those days, just a few years after the retirement of the GAA’s most iconic politician, former taoiseach Jack Lynch.

On a more practical level North Tipperary TD Michael O’Kennedy had during his brief stint as minister for finance in 1980 organised a de facto rebate of the VAT, disbursed as a grant.

Yet VAT had been levied on hurleys – and, in a detail that further enraged the GAA, fixed at the rate for “luxury items” – since 1972 under the government of Jack Lynch.

(Interestingly one of the arguments marshalled against the state’s policy was that the GAA was for its principles losing a million pounds by not taking drink sponsorship, a point made during the presidency of Dr Mick Loftus, who has since campaigned indefatigably against Guinness’s sponsorship of the hurling championship since its inception 16 years ago.)

The terms of the debate became quite strident with some commentators not noted for their interest in Gaelic games taking pot shots at the GAA for wanting to avoid rightful taxes at a time of difficulty for the state finances.

Ultimately the campaign led nowhere in particular and VAT is still payable on sports equipment, including hurleys. Maybe the affluence of more recent times contributed to the loss of interest in the issue but it occurred to some that the return to office of Fianna Fáil a year later might have also had an impact.

This was strenuously denied at the time by the GAA, which did appear to have second thoughts about the effectiveness of warring with the political establishment but whatever the reason, the management committee dropped the campaign in 1987.

Under the leadership of former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Fianna Fáil and the GAA enjoyed an at times claustrophobically close relationship, something with which incoming association president Seán Kelly gently took issue in his 2002 acceptance speech, stressing that his presidency would be “non-political”.

Of course Kelly is now a Fine Gael politician and symptomatic of how the GAA’s political representation has shifted in recent times. In Dáil Stars, the author’s top 15 includes six from that party but more significantly three of whom – TDs John O’Mahony and Jimmy Deenihan and MEP Kelly – are active in politics. Only one other selection, Sinn Féin’s Martin Ferris, is a contemporary.

Despite such realignment, there’s not likely to be any huge advance on 25 years ago when it comes down to enhanced state support in the bleak days ahead