Former Kerry footballer Dara Ó Cinnéide believes that payments to managers within the GAA has a corrosive effect on the association's spirit of volunteerism.
"I'm fundamentally opposed to payments to managers," Ó Cinnéide told Tim Moynihan on Radio Kerry's Terrace Talk.
"I'm not stupid enough, I'm not romantic enough to think that it's not happening left, right and centre in this county and every other county; that there is money changing hands. To me, that's corrosive to any club.
"If you give a person, €80, €90, €100, €110, €120 per session… A club is about more than your senior team; it's about more than their senior team winning games. It's about how their community interacts with their club. If you are to pay a coach to come in and then ask other club members to sell lotto tickets to keep the club [afloat]."
The three-time All-Ireland winner said that he would hate to see his club An Ghaeltacht ever bring in an outside manager.
I'd be disgusted, I'd resent it. It's not what I'm about, what we're about.
I wouldn't want the message to get out there that we're not welcoming in any way to strangers, to outsiders. That's the essence of any good club: how you embrace a person who's moved into your area and how you impress upon them the values which you bring to the game.
Every club is different. There was a time when we were kids and you'd look at a team and say, 'That's a Lispole footballer. That's a Moyvane footballer.’ You'd know from the get-up of them. I'd like to think that we've carried that as well in the Ghaeltacht.
The bedrocks of our team here are Sprid, Croi, Caid, Teanga. The four are very important. Teanga (language), the fourth one, is very important to us.
In the Ghaeltacht here, we’re probably slightly different in that there's a cultural requirement for anyone that's being hired in that you do have to speak our language.
We've always had a boot room policy, management has always come from within the club. It's a very sad day for us if we come to the point where we can't recruit a coach, a manager and a couple of selectors for our senior team and right down. Thankfully, every year we've always come up trumps from within the club.
The 43-year-old also said that he's in doubt that money is changing hands when some players transfer clubs.
"Look at the history of all the great political movements or social movements, you never go back. When money gets introduced in a capitalist society, you don’t go back.
"If Cuba becomes capitalist, it doesn’t go back. You see what’s happening in China at the moment, it’s not going to go back. It’s the same with the GAA. It’s been long acknowledged, it was 1991 that the [sponsor’s] names appeared on the jerseys and there was a tacit acknowledgement that maybe something was changing in the GAA. It moved on then to player endorsements.
"I don’t have an issue with players at a county level being rewarded. If companies want to flake money at them, more power to them. What I would worry about is that all this is happening and parallel to that, there is another universe where the club volunteer spirit is in danger. The two worlds find it hard to co-exist. Certain resentments creep in and it’s very hard for any club to maintain that.
"If payments are happening at inter-county level. If payments are happening at the peak of the pyramid, at the base of the pyramid, there’s bound to be somebody saying, ‘Well, if he or she is getting paid, what the hell am I doing selling lotto tickets? What’s it all about?’
"It’s something the GAA have tried to address seven or eight years ago and rowed back on because they recognised the magnitude of the problem. It isn't an easy one to solve. The genie is out of the bottle."
Picture credit; Matt Browne / SPORTSFILE
