Joe O'Reilly: GAA's global growth, emigration and club survival

Thank you Chair. First of all welcome to our guests and you will pick up from the tone of the questioning that we all have great regard for what the GAA do for people. I would like to join with the last Comhairleach in welcoming specifically my good friend Senator Emeritus Shane Cassels with whom I worked on the gambling legislation and specifically the gambling regulator and the whole apparatus of anti-gambling apparatus and I worked with him and Senator Wall closely on that, the then Senator Wall closely on that for a few years and I can assure you his advocacy is excellent so I'm sure you realize that. I'll ask you the first question, it's kind of a contrarian question if you like, at a time when we need all our skilled people back home and we need our medical people, we need our construction people very specifically home, could you argue that what you're doing internationally is a disincentive to coming home? Well I suppose what we're trying to do is provide an out for people that are away from home and that connection and that identity piece so they're not moving away from home to play GAA worldwide that's for sure but we're trying to provide that kind of safe, solace, community base for people around the world and it's not just for Irish people, like our growth is starting to see, we're starting to see a huge expansion but just to your point, in our big events around the world the HSE have engaged with us, particular universities have engaged with us to get that message out there to return, so we're very much there for people who are moving away and we're also there for bigger bodies to be able to engage with us to be able to get notification out there. I think the other point I'd make on that Senator is like what we find is you have a lot of Irish people emigrating who may not have played the game for any long period of time here but they end up getting very much embedded in the games wherever they're living in Europe or America and that's creating that connection back to Ireland. I think the other point I'd make is that we talked earlier about Spain and Brittany and Calais and places like that, that's where we see the game becoming sustainable across the world and including places like Asia and so that's really important also and it's a key strategy of ours to grow the game with indigenous people. So I suppose to go back to your point there there's less people going to be emigrating, we know that, but we need to sustain our games and that's why engaging with the indigenous population is so so important. Yeah I get that and I thank you and I welcome the fact that you're working with agencies to encourage migration back. Could the return of the international rule series improve the viewership of the GEA internationally given that it's such an attractive series that attracts a lot, could that be the case? It could Senator and we have very good relations with our colleagues in Australia, notwithstanding the fact that the international rules hasn't been played for a few years and I suppose that the COVID and so on intervening made that a practical difficulty. I think since we had the last series you'll know the shape of our playing season has changed somewhat and we now have the predominance of the first half of the year dedicated to inter-county games and the latter part of the year dedicated to club championship. So there is a practical challenge for us in terms of finding a place in what is already a crowded playing calendar to make sure that we have a responsibility to make sure that our top players get a rest and have a viable offseason and traditionally the international rules have been played September, October, November time. At the moment if we were to resurrect the series and to play at that time that would present a practical challenge for us. So it's a question for us to try and find some way that that can work. But to your broader point, there are three or four landmark things that actually are pivotal in the profile of Gaelic games, whether domestically or internationally, that is very much one of them but I would say the last two or three years we have had more and more international viewership for the two senior All-Ireland finals than has ever been the case before. So there are other means to achieving that profile. Are declining player numbers and shifts in demographic profile significant in the international GAA? I know you're generating young people but it's a big issue at home and in say my own constituency or my own area, Cavan Monaghan, but specifically say in County Cavan I'm aware I attended a session with Cavan GAA recently, the executive, on how we could possibly augment and support the small clubs that don't have the critical mass to continue to survive even. Is this an international question as well? Internationally, for us, no. The challenge internationally is geography and it's the distance between clubs and the challenge that poses particularly for the growth of the youth game. If you have, you know, if you take, there's a concentration of clubs say in Galicia but then you have maybe a club in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, there's huge distance between them and so that's a significant challenge for us. I'm glad that you've mentioned Cavan and in fairness to the Cavan County Board have engaged heavily with our National Demographic Committee and to be fair the club escapes my mind now but that club in West Cavan would have been probably the catalyst for some of the motions brought forward to our Congress this year where we're giving greater recognition to the status of clubs and indeed we're trying to keep clubs alive and more viable even if they cannot play in maybe a formal local championship so that's something that has emanated from the work. Yeah and I attended that meeting with other colleagues. World GA's actually can help our demographics issue within the island of Ireland due to predominantly being a nine-a-side game so we're currently looking at modified games that might be able to help out clubs that aren't able to field 15-a-side so traditionally World GA is basically a modified game there's nines there's 11s it's not always a 15-a-side game.