SHORTLY AFTER HE assumed office as GAA President last month, John Horan indicated his intention to bring a two-tiered structure into the All-Ireland senior football championship by the end of his tenure in 2021.

Speaking alongside Horan at a press briefing in Croke Park yesterday, new Director-General Tom Ryan said the current structure needs to be given time before further changes are made.

GAA Director-General Tom Ryan Source: Gary Carr/INPHO

“It’s interesting isn’t it?” said Ryan. “In hurling that (tiered championship) has kind of been accepted and people are happy with their place in the hurling pecking order, promotion, relegation and so on.

“Football-wise it just seems to be more problematic and I think that is probably borne out of any county however small might like to think that on a given day they can get a result against one of the big boys whereas perhaps in hurling that’s more unlikely.

“I think the shape that the championships eventually take, it mightn’t be where we are now. I see it very much as an evolution. We’re about to embark on three years of trial or experimentation or whatever you’d call it and I think at the end of that we’ll probably know where we need to go next in terms of the evolution.

“I don’t think it’s the finished article and I think it’s well worth having the debate around the things that have been mentioned.”

Players from Division 4 counties have long been opposed to the introduction of a second-tier championship, with a 2016 GPA statement indicating there was “serious opposition” from county squads to a ‘B’ competition coming in.

“I can remember my own county playing in the All-Ireland ‘B’ football and winning one a long time ago, and it was a big thing,” Ryan stated. “A few years after that, there was the Tommy Murphy [Cup] for whatever reason it didn’t really capture the imagination to the same extent.

“I’ve seen last summer the impact even a modest run in the championship in a small county can bring, so I wouldn’t dismiss those things for a second.

Carlow enjoyed a prolonged championship run last summer Source: Tommy Dickson/INPHO

“At the same time, if you look at the league that we have just gone through – leaving aside the weather – it has been really, really good. The attraction with a competition like the league is that every team is going out with more or less a 50-50 chance of beating every other team which is a structure we haven’t always had with the football championship.

“I think it’s worth considering, worth looking at.”

Ryan also spoke about some more long-term concerns for the GAA, including funding in Dublin and the impact urbanisation has had on the organisation as a whole.

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“Belfast is a good case in point. The first thing I’ve always said to people about Dublin is that the money is going into clubs in that county, not into the county set-up. Now clearly there’s a correlation and the fact that county teams are doing well is a function of what the clubs are doing.

“What we always set out to do was to try to augment the funding elsewhere – there was also a bit of rebalancing and we did adjust Dublin a little bit but the job was always to augment funding elsewhere. So Belfast is a case in point. There are similar ventures going into Meath, Kildare and a number of counties.

“There are more long-term and fundamental things I think and you’ll have seen what the outgoing Ard Stiurthoir referred to in his report, one particular theme in that which we do need to examine is urbanisation and the shift in population from the western seaboard over towards the eastern seaboard and the challenges that that presents for units both urban and rural.”

Ryan's predecessor Paraic Duffy Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO

Ryan continued: “I suppose my challenge will be just to get to grips with the role and the people around the country who can help and assist me in discharging my own duties and getting familiar with the things that perhaps I wouldn’t have had so much exposure to up to now.

“The pressures that I mentioned – population drift and so on – are things that we can react to and arm ourselves against but I’m not sure the extent to which we can influence and change those things.

“The best that we can do is to make sure that we have well-resourced clubs at both ends of the spectrum, in terms of numbers and geographically to be able to cater for the playing population in all parts of the country.”

Despite the population shift towards Dublin, Ryan doesn’t foresee a situation down the line where counties are forced to amalgamate.

“I can’t. Counties are one of the cornerstones of the association and personally, I don’t see the attraction for somebody from a small county looking at a team that they’re only a small constituent part of – your own county is your own county.

“If we ever got to that stage we’d have a very different GAA and it wouldn’t have the same appeal to anyone around the table or to me.”

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