Playing by their rules - How to pass at GAA Congress

Special congresses have been a regular enough occurrence in recent years that they're surely in danger of losing the 'special' designation.

These days, a year without a Special Congress to report upon is an aberration. Saturday's meeting in Croke Park will be the sixth such gathering in the last eight years, a sign, in itself, of how much reform has taken place in the past decade.

Back in 2017, the big-ticket item on the slate at September's Special Congress was the hurling championship re-structure, devised and proposed by Liam Sheedy's committee over the summer amid fears that hurling was set to be swamped, following football's adoption of the Super 8s formula at the annual Congress earlier that year.

In late 2019, a Special Congress finally ushered in the second-tier championship by a reasonably comfortable margin, despite the reservations of the GPA and the opposition of several counties, notably in Ulster. Opposing the motion, Antrim chairman Ciarán McCavana said: "On the day when the lunatics in Westminster are talking about Brexit, we're talking about Sam-exit."

The 2020 Special Congress, held remotely in mid-April, was more of a procedural necessity, arranged purely for the purpose of allowing the GAA to adapt its rules to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In late 2021, it was back to structures, and the ill-fated Proposal B, the league-based championship format which was loudly endorsed by most of the playing community and opposed with every fibre of their being by the provincial councils. Ulster, again, said no in big numbers, as did Mayo and Galway and the motion fell well short of the 60% threshold despite having the support of then president Larry McCarthy.

The 2023 Special Congress was comparatively humdrum, the main impetus behind the gathering being to ratify a new gender quota on Central Council's Management Committee, amid government threats to withhold funding to sporting bodies that didn't meet the targets.

GAA correspondents and veterans of the beat do not, on the whole, appear enamoured by Congress becoming a biannual event. Those who have reported on it don't seem to regard it as one of the joys of their existence.

This year, the only topic of interest to the media, is the fate of the Football Review Committee's 'enhanced rules', which were unveiled with great hoopla by the most high-powered brains trust ever assembled in Gaelic Games, the GAA's answer to the Manhattan Project, and possibly the first committee of the association to come with its own line of branded clothing. They even resurrected the Railway Cup for the sake of trialling the rules for a televised audience.

Their set of reforms are now in the hands of the delegates, who, voting zapper in hand, will determine their fate on the day.

The mood for change among the wider public appears strong, though already the old familiar hesitancy is beginning to bubble up, with calls in some quarters for the new rules, if they are passed, to apply to the inter-county game only in 2025. This type of hedging or caveating or phased implementation is par for the course.

These days, fewer delegates arrive at Congress mandated to vote a certain way by their county boards.

Former GAA President Sean Kelly says that the "conviction" of those pushing for change is often decisive - though he adds that an escape clause is no harm either.

"A lot of it comes down to conviction," Kelly tells RTÉ Sport. "Often when ideas come from Central Council, I've noticed, all that happens is, some guy from Central Council management stands up and says 'I propose a motion', and then another fella says 'I second it', without actually worth elaborating why they're in favour of it.

"I think that's something that won't happen on Saturday because I'm quite convinced that given the calibre of people behind it - the likes of Jim Gavin, James Horan, Éamonn Fitzmaurice, etc - they'll have their homework done. They'll make a very strong case and I'm very confident that it'll be passed.

"Especially - as happened for the opening of Croke Park - as they very cleverly said, it'll only be for one year and then it will be reviewed. So, I think they'll pass, very easily, because of that."

There are pitfalls to watch out for there.

Given the sheer volume of changes proposed, a couple of them lower down the running order could yet fall prey to what former president Liam O'Neill alludes to as 'reform fatigue'.

Frequently, at Congress, an unmistakable spirit of 'we've enough done' begins to overtake the hall as the afternoon wears on.

"The danger is that if you try to do too much, voter fatigue sets in," O'Neill tells RTÉ Sport. "People sometimes just say, 'we've passed the first six, we mightn't pass the last two'. Or whatever. That's the human condition, that's nothing got to do with the actual motions.

"I think the fact that two (of the enhanced rules) have been taken off the clár makes people focus more earnestly on the ones that are left.

"I'm not sure that the committee (FRC) wanted the two rules (four points for a goal and two for a 45) taken off. But they weren't going to be supported.

"If you're not sure something is going to be passed, sometimes it's better to pull it rather than have it beaten. Because a kind of contagion can set in where people will also decide not to support something that's of real merit."

"Change isn't something that's going to come too handy here"

Congress has delivered many shocks, seismic changes and unbearably close calls down the years.

There has been the occasional burst of stirring oratory, none more so than in 1919 - admittedly some time ago - when a speech from senior IRB man Harry Boland swung the day on the motion of banning civil servants who had taken an oath of allegiance to the British monarch, in which he said the GAA's power had derived from the fact they'd always "drawn a line between the garrison and the Gael".

At Congress in 1971, Rule 27, the infamous ban on GAA members playing rival sports (aka, 'The Ban'), simply "passed into history", as Mark Duncan put it, being deleted without even the requirement of a vote. This, despite the fact that the president of the time, Waterford's Pat Fanning, was among the staunchest supporters of the ban. Following the decision, Fanning delivered an almost touching oration where he famously said the rule had been a "rule of life" for many and asked plaintively if the GAA was now to become a mere sporting organisation.

There was a burst of reforming legislative activity around the turn of the century. Rule 21, the ban on members of British security forces or police (first, the RIC, then RUC), was lifted in 2001 after 104 years on the statute books.

Congress 2002 would be a particularly bruising one for the modernisers. The recommendations of Peter Quinn's Strategic Review Committee were almost all rebuffed with extreme prejudice. This was famously the report which first raised the possibility of splitting Dublin in two - a suggestion which was to come back into vogue in later years - but its main thrust was in the area of administrative reform.

As motion after motion was dumped, modernising Laois delegate Anthony Delaney observed ruefully: "Change isn't something that's going to come too handy here."

When the weekend was over, Quinn was asked whether it was easier to deal with Congress or the belligerents in Drumcree that he was meeting while on the board of the Northern Ireland Parades Commission - "I'd probably toss a coin," came the response, after a pause.

"It got savaged," Kelly recalls. "Peter was very upset over it, which was understandable. It was nearly all rejected. One of the major proposals there which never came to pass was to have two Dublins - which is occasionally mentioned now and then.

"But some of it (SRC proposed reforms) came back again. Particularly the five-year-rule (term limits for GAA officers). Often people were there for 40 years plus, so bringing it down to five was a big change. That took a bit of persuasion and Sean McCague and myself worked very closely to get that over the line."

Kelly's presidency is best remembered for the opening up of Croke Park to rugby and soccer, while Lansdowne Road was under development.

Unlike most reform proposals or rule changes now, this wasn't initiated by a Central Council sub-committee, but by a county board delegate, specifically Tommy Kenoy in Roscommon, and was then backed by the president.

The vote was one of the most dramatic and highly anticipated in the history of Congress, with the wider public appalled at the prospect of the soccer and rugby teams playing their matches in London for a few years if Croke Park opted against change.

In the end, it was 227-97 in favour of opening up Croke Park, just above the two-thirds threshold required. Had either one of Galway or Dublin switched sides, the motion would have failed. Kenoy told The Irish Daily Mail's Micheál Clifford in 2020 that some on the conservative side still refuse to speak to him.

"I really was depressed the night before Congress because there was a vote at Central Council on whether it would be a secret ballot or a show of hands," Kelly remembers.

"I wanted a show of hands because I said to myself, that those who are mandated to vote (by their county board) to open Croke Park would have no choice but to put up their hands and people would see. And if they didn't have to put up their hands, they might not.

"But, in fairness to delegates, what happened was people who would like to vote for it but might have been afraid to be seen to do so politically, got an opportunity in a secret ballot without actually being associated with it. The secret ballot helped us."

"When we got the result, I was over the moon. It was one of the happiest moments of my life"

"When we got the result, I was over the moon. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. Because I knew it was pivotal for the GAA but, more importantly, pivotal for the country."

One reservation of Kelly's is the fact that such a disporportionate amount of motions are driven by GAA management rather than the clubs and counties themselves.

Central Council certainly flexed their muscles in 2017's Special Congress, when the provincial round-robin format in the hurling championship was adopted, despite the opposition of most top-tier hurling counties.

Tipperary secretary Tim Floyd, opposed to the new structure, told RTÉ Sport on the eve of the vote that "we wouldn't have a clue about (the intentions of) Ulster counties, who wouldn't have a lot of interest in it. We wouldn't know what way they would go."

Most football-heavy counties wound up backing the new hurling format, the suspicion being they had done so without much consideration after being prevailed upon by Central Council.

Hurling's enduring love affair with the status quo and its traditional wariness of football-centric counties making decisions over their heads resulted in some bitterness in the immediate aftermath. Given the wild popularity of the current format, it's tempting to conclude that management had simply saved hurling from itself.

As regards Central Council motions increasingly dominating the clár, O'Neill says it's partly a function of "fewer people attending the AGMs" and the fact that a certain expertise and influence is required when pushing forward with large scale reforms.

"The ordinary person wouldn't have thought of a lot of these things, you have to have someone who's thinking towards the long-term really," O'Neill says. "That's how these things work."

However, Kelly is keen that clubs shouldn't be discouraged from putting forward their own motions.

"When I was going to Congress over the years, the motions, initially, nearly all came from clubs and committee boards. But in recent times, they're nearly all coming from sub-committees or Central Council who come forward with proposals.

"And while that has a certain logic to it, I'd be disappointed if the clubs didn't avail of the opportunity to put forward motions as well.

"The vast majority now come from sub-committees, like the ones on Saturday, which had to, in the sense that it (FRC reforms) was a big undertaking.

"But at the same time, I would hope when it comes to the future, county boards and clubs would be encouraged to put forward motions. Because sometimes a motion comes from a club that sparks something that mightn't have been thought of.

"That's how the motion to open Croke Park came about. Tommy Kenoy, in Roscommon, sitting around the kitchen table, said we'd put forward a motion. It got through the county board, which people didn't expect, and got all the way up to Congress. And it was passed."