Within the concrete bowels of the new stand in McHale Park last Saturday night the possible future direction of GAA in Mayo was launched. There were no bells and whistles to the launch, just a top table, a semi-circle of chairs and a selection of people who have the best interests of GAA in Mayo at heart. Liam Horan was the man tasked with pulling all the possible strands of the plan together, the Ballinrobe club-man had overseen the whole process since his appointment as chairperson of the project last October. A steering committee of 19 people was selected and 10 different areas selected to be examined. In total 86 people contributed to 67 meetings that were held over the past five months to get to last Saturday night and the launch of the document. The areas that were examined were finance and funding, coaching and games development, bridging the gap, bringing through high-potential players, urbanisation and rural depopulation, club-board relations and structures, public relations, harnessing support of Mayo people worldwide, Mayo GAA as a stimulator of economic activity, and hurling and secondary schools.
Seven key recommendations were earmarked in the plan that need to be implemented over the next five years. They are: Financial review and formulation of a five year financial plan, the establishment of a non-executive advisory group, the employment of a director of football coaching, the appointment of a paid commercial director, the promotion of the Mayo GAA brand, the establishment of a Mayo Gaelic football academy, and the establishment of the worldwide Mayo supporters’ club.
You can find a copy of the plan on the Mayo GAA website at this link www.box.net/shared/c620qpvvyt
Lack of financial clarity criticised by plan
The key issue of finances and the financial health of Mayo GAA was right at the top of the report. The first three points outlined in overview are:
1. The future success of Mayo GAA is dependent on the county’s finances being placed on a sound footing. This will involve proper financial planning taking place immediately. Many of the recommendations depend on this financial plan being put in place.
2. To put finances in context, it is estimated that Mayo GAA has to raise an additional €0.9 million this year, and €0.5 million for each of the subsequent nine years to meet its obligations on McHale Park. This is a dramatic increase, particularly when set alongside the fact that turnover in 2010 was €2 million. This is a major burden on an already hard pressed Mayo GAA.
3. The inadequacy of the information provided by the Mayo County Board made it very difficult for the finances and funding committee to carry out a proper review. Virtually all of the information received was already in the public domain and did not help the committee in a significant manner. Accordingly, its first key recommendation is to propose a full independent and professional review of the finances of Mayo GAA, and the creation of a five year financial and fund-raising plan.
When asked after the launch where the figure of €900,000 came from for 2011 to fund McHale Park, when at a county board meeting recently the figure given was €750,000, Horan said: “We have prefaced our financial information on the information we got. We estimate it's about that.”
The failure of the county board to provide all the financial information requested by the committee was spelt out very clearly in the overview and that is something that Horan felt hindered the committee in their work. “We felt that, as we said that the information we got was largely already in the public domain and that people might ask why did you want any more?” he said. “But we feel what needs to be ascertained is the amount of revenue that Mayo generates from various things, for example sponsorship deals, do they have two more years left to go, three more years left to go, so you can project finances down the line and say this year we made X amount in sponsorship and this year it's gone. Purely to find out what Mayo's revenue streams are, or what's projected to come in. As we said we felt that we didn't get the level that was needed to try and tease that out fully.”
When asked about the fact that the finance section of the plan concentrates on the McHale Park project and not clubs which themselves are cash strapped Horan said: “Our financial committee first, and our steering committee, see that particularly McHale Park is a major drain on finances of the county board and by extension the clubs. So we feel that this plan offers a chance to exactly ascertain what the exact story is and where we are going in the next few years. And that a fundraising plan is a key part of that. This is not just about finding out how much exactly we owe. It's probably all more or less available already but it's about what's the financial plan for the next five years. We would hope that out of this Mayo GAA will have a very sharp financial plan that will stand to it in the years ahead.”
Horan was asked if there was hostility from the officers of the board to the plan being launched. “There were a few wrinkles this week, the board felt that we should put back the launch and meet with the executive and go through all the things,” he said. “But we had outlined the process from the start of launching publicly, and some time shortly after there would be a county board meeting afterwards to discuss it. And we had given the county chairman a copy of the report and discussed it with him, we felt it would be important tonight that we would put it out there, our report, so that it could be digested. The county board accepted that and we were very appreciative that Paddy McNicholas was here and he made a special effort to be here, so with that in some way these things happen. We're bringing something new and fresh to the table I'm very confident that the county board, as Paddy said, want people to debate this.”
The plan will now go out to the clubs to be discussed and then come before the next meeting of the county board for ratification in the next few weeks. The plan is designed to pass or fall as an entity by itself, Horan explained. “It's going as one block, as a yes or no kind of thing. I did some research over the past few days, when Peter Quinn did his first strategic review of the GAA and it was brought before Congress, there was something like 300 individual motions, and it ended up getting broken up and knocked down and that kind of stuff. We discussed would we bring it bit by bit or in one block, and our feeling is that we bring it as one block, because if you break it down it becomes kind of unworkable at county board level and what gets picked and what doesn't get picked. That said it's hard to engineer this fully. If in a month’s time it comes up that this needs to be modified or improved, we expect people to come back with improvements and recommendations, there might be some facility to improve or to make changes at the end, we are not closed completely to that. This is not perfect, it can't be perfect but it can hopefully make changes that will be for the good of Mayo GAA. I hope that's how people read it, It would be very easy for clubs to go in and pick out one recommendation that upsets them and knock the whole lot down. You might say that we run that danger that one small thing could knock our report, but equally if we broke it down to 76 separate recommendations it might never get through, but it is a bit of a risk we take. We place it at the mercy of the clubs and the county board too. Our work is almost done, we got the report out and we do our bit with the clubs and the divisional boards on any level to educate people at what we are trying to do, then we walk away.
