Joe Brolly believes the incoming Director General of the GAA has a duty to address a "leadership vacuum" and make the association a "stronger force for good".
Paraic Duffy will step down from the role at the end of this month after a decade in situ.
It's been a period of enormous change within the GAA, but Brolly has been critical of Duffy's reign before and, speaking to RTÉ Saturday Sport, he again stressed his desire to see deep-rooted change across the country.
"The North, as of last September, is the world's No 1 living donor country," said Brolly, a strong advocate for organ donation
"In the south this year we had our best ever organ donation figures. A huge part of that is the GAA community. It's an illustration of our connectedness, our social importance, and it's something that's been neglected at central level.
"Everywhere I travel I see the potential of the GAA to use our political clout, to use our social clout to be an even stronger force for good than we already are. It's something we really need to concentrate on over the next seven years of the new director general's tenure, whoever that may be.
"Leadership is the key now. We need to strategise. We've drifted now for the last 20 years. The last great leader of the GAA was Peter Quinn.
"We've had a leadership vacuum and we see the impact of that. We closed our eyes to player welfare and the vacuum that was caused by that, it was filled by a private company, the GPA.
"We see now there's a Club Players' Association formed in the vacuum in relation to club fixtures and the way that commercialisation is threatening clubs.
"Although revenue is good, revenue is very, very strong, there's no clear picture of how that revenue is being spent and we see the great inequality that's being caused all around the country. Places along the west of Ireland are really struggling to survive. "
"We need to make a principled decision to reduce our county season to four months"
Brolly laid out his own suggestions to make swift improvements: "We reduce the inter-county season to a four-month maximum. We can do everything we need to do in four months.
"We get rid of the subsidiary competitions, which no one's interested in anyway and all they do is needlessly prolong the season. We reduce the work load on players - that's real player welfare, to have a four-month county season. We have a tiered championship."
But above all he desires a better spread of resources to positively impact communities in every corner of the land.
"What we need now is leadership; we can't have more of the same," the Derryman added.
"I'm very conscious that a lot of the candidates who have been in for the director general job are insiders who've been part of a stagnant system.
"What I'm saying, and this cannot be contradicted, is that communitarianism has been set aside because we haven't got a strategy. And in that void, it's just been filled by commerce.
"Peter McKenna has done a very good job as the commercial director, but the commercial side has not been reigned in. What we need to do is find the balance.
"We can make as much money ethically, through our principles, and shore up the things we need to shore up all over Ireland.
"The bottom line is that we need to make a principled decision to reduce our county season to four months.
"That gives us a four or five-month club season and then a proper off-season. Once we do that, it will immediately change the entire landscape."
