The Galway county board have been politicking hard for a good while now to try and persuade the Leinster council to offer them at least the crumb of one home game in the Leinster championship.
Last year, Galway offered Offaly home advantage for the Leinster semi-final on the condition that the next time they met it would be played in Salthill. A similar offer had been made to Westmeath before the quarter-final. Both were turned down.
Not only that but there is continued frustration that the Leinster counties are holding firm against admitting Galway underage sides to the Leinster championship at minor and U21 level.
Galway hurling people have appeared to alternate between a hardline position and a softer position on this. Mattie Murphy, who guided Galway to a glut of minor All-Ireland's in three different decades, attacked the decision to enter the Leinster championship after he stepped down in 2014.
We made it easy for the GAA by acceding to their request to go into Leinster. They were going to have to do something and we gave them the easy option.
All was have done for Leinster is we have gone into Leinster and we have fattened their coffers and given our opposition extra finance to turn around and whip us. You tell me how much we have got out of Leinster since we joined and what have the other counties got?
Speaking to Balls.ie about the dispute, Galway county board chairman Noel Treacy struck a diplomatic note, though he did insist that Galway will be lobbying central council to assert their will here.
He is slightly mystified by the refusal to admit underage counties to the province. When Leinster Council chairman John Horan was pressed about this last week, he simply responded that Galway had won plenty at underage level since the 1980s. Why does Treacy think the Leinster counties are so hostile?
When we went in (in 2009) we went in blindly and we only went in with our senior team. I suppose they (Leinster counties) probably see it as a challenge and an excessive challenge to them. We don't see it like that. We're looking at the wider picture. We feel that it would be more equitable and more fair if every county entered an underage side in provincial competition.
Put in the slightly difficult decision of having to defend the Leinster counties refusal to countenance Galway home games, the Leinster Council chairman hit upon a strategy of bigging up the €20,000 grant that the Leinster Council had offered Galway as a consolation for steering clear of Salthill. This, Horan asserted, was the "story that wasn't told."
Treacy said that this was offered as a recognition of the expense Galway incurred travelling to away games all the time. He described it as a "small grant".
We are at a serious loss, we have to play all our games away, losing rent from the lack of home games, and in recognition of that the Leinster Council gave us a small grant of €20,000.
One of the more eyebrow-raising comments from Horan was his suggestion that Leinster counties might be more amenable to the 'home games for Galway' cause if they only had go as far as Ballinsloe.
The inference was that the Leinster counties would be willing to hold their nose and play a hurling match in Galway, provided they only had to travel a few hundred yards inside the county border. Given this, we can only marvel at their past willingness to travel to both Tralee and Ballycastle (in the north of bloody Antrim!) for Leinster championship games in the past.
Treacy tells us that Galway had, in fact, thought of this and that they put a proposition to the Leinster Council that they'd be willing to upgrade Duggan Park to inter-county standard if they received financial backing from the Leinster Council. This proposal was shot down.
We have invested a quarter of a million in Ballinasloe in the past few years. It is the only floodlit GAA ground in the county. It even held But we are a dual county pushed to the pin of our collar. A couple of years ago, we offered a proposal with regard to Ballinasloe to the Leinster Council. Whereby we would receive some financial assistance to redevelop the ground. But we weren't able to persuade them of the merits of the proposal.
So, what of the stance that Mattie Murphy hinted at? If Galway threatened to pull out of Leinster, it would force a redesign of the championship structure. This would cause an enormous headache for the central authorities.
With the broad majority of neutrals sympathetic to Galway's argument here, surely this would prompt the central authorities to force the Leinster counties to admit Galway into the province on an equal footing? Treacy pulls back from the suggestion.
We are not in the business of getting into an adversarial situation with the Leinster Council. We have a good relationship with the Leinster Council. But we will be asking central management to deal with this in the year ahead.
Treacy to keen to add that this is not tantamount to "going over the heads" of the Leinster Council as representatives from the Leinster Council sit on the central authority bodies to which Galway will appeal.
As I said, we are looking at a wider picture here. All were looking for is a level playing field. We're optimistic that common sense will prevail.
