Emmet Moloney writes for the 'The Irish Farmers Journal' and is a former sports columnist with 'The Kerryman'.

Another Congress has passed us by. Some spoke, some nodded their heads and some enjoyed the sound of their own voice, writes Emmet Moloney...

Congress should matter more to us. But it doesn’t. I would guess that 99% of GAA followers paid absolutely no attention to the fact that it was happening last weekend. What came out of it? Not a hell of a lot, as per usual. Instead of bustling debate and thoughtful, progressive voting, it passed us by. Considering the size and impact the GAA has on this country, it’s “party conference” should be a real event. The annual sojourn of the (generally mature in age) delegates is instead a snore-fest, punctuated now and again by a debate on the opening of Croke Park, the odd new playing rule, or the election of a new GAA president.

My first and only Congress was back in the mid-’90s in London. That year the Royal Lancaster Hotel, as posh as it sounds, hosted the delegates. A cup of tea was about five quid, in sterling! God help you if you wanted something to eat. Luckily there was an Irish pub around the corner that become the meedja’s headquarters. The election of Joe McDonagh as president and the sing song that night are all memorable. Some nights when I am trying to get to sleep I can always recall the hour or two I spent in the hall listening to proceedings. It always works.

A GAA Congress is the Carnegie Hall of the GAA stages. The “great club man” has been waiting all his life to get that microphone in his hand. A chance to mention the grassroots, Michael Cusack and his club back home. Not all delegates are like that, but there’s a fair smattering of them that like to hear their own voice. The same goes for your local county board meeting. Why is it nearly always the same men standing up to speak from the floor? It’s not a unique problem. A number of sporting organisations suffer from it. The games are played by the young, but administered by the not so young. The twain have no choice but to meet occasionally, but one could quite happily do without the other.

Players involved in the GAA have a conspiracy theorist’s view about county boards, Munster Council, Central Council, Croke Park. They think it’s a nod and a wink culture, where deals are done, no-one is told and people like Frank Murphy are bogeymen. On the other side of the electrified fence sits officialdom. Many are former players. Where once they viewed officialdom with suspicion, now they are part of it. They think players are too greedy, too spoilt, too soft and, most of all, cannot be trusted to be given any say whatsoever in the running of the games they play. Donal Óg Cusack is their bogeyman.

It’s a Mexican stand-off with an Irish twist. Officialdom usually wins the wars, the players win the odd battle. Last weekend the GPA was brought into officialdom’s tent. A win for both. Maybe now that’s done with we can get back to tending to our organisation and a bit of trust could break out. And not before time. Player power isn’t close to being top of the list of problems facing us right now.

The GAA is being threatened on all fronts. Off the field, the recession is naturally having an effect. Emigration will soon start to plunder our youth on a grand scale. The recovery we are being promised will be jobless. So clubs will struggle even more for finance. We know there are tough times ahead. We need to be ready for them. That means vision and the right people making the right decisions at the right time. That didn’t happen four years ago when we let the IRFU and FAI off on their own to build a stadium for matches that take place mostly when our stadium lies idle. The compromise worked out back then. The loss of the temporary arrangement will cost us about €12m a year in lost revenue in 2011. We cannot continue to make mistakes like that.

On the field, the GAA continues to lurch from debate to experiment, to stifling by managers to the death of most new playing rules. The tinkering that is being done to officiating of games is laughable. We all know the best timekeeping system. Ladies football has had it for years. We all know that a suspension should mean you actually miss games. We all know how slow the GAA are to change.

And that is what frustrates most. Solutions? We should have a commissioner of hurling and football. One person in ultimate charge of each senior code. His office will make decisions on a week-to-week basis, hand out suspensions, change the time of the league final, order replays, etc. They have one in baseball and it works quite well. Infallible and the last word on everything. Absolute power. Congress could elect him every seven years. I kid you not. It could work. He could start by saving the organisation some money. For every league game this year we have had a fourth official travel to a match in an outside county merely to stand up and wave a board that says we’ll have three or four minutes’ injury time. That’s after the ref tells a linesman and the linesman tells the fourth official. Every league game. Let’s cut out that ridiculous expense. Just one example of how we can save money. By the way, do we need two neutral linesmen to travel from Kerry to Derry, or Dublin to Donegal? Or a referees’ assessor to attend so many games?

That isn’t being penny wise and pound foolish. It is realising that we have to be proactive when it comes to saving money. On the field we should make certain rule changes today, not wait for a club delegate to propose them next winter at a sparsely attended AGM.

Stop dragging out the championships. Let’s start by finishing them in August or even July. Just start them earlier. We can always go back if that doesn’t work. We have been playing the All-Irelands on the same dates for the last 100 or so years. Changing the helmet rule didn’t mean the end of the world, did it? So let’s see if we can help the clubs by finishing with some summer left. That’s protecting our games.

If something is broken then let’s fix it, not talk about it for three years.

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