The Dominance of Dublin GAA *Mod warning post#1*

Festive Life wrote: »

When all your home league games have all been played In Croke Park since 2011 its clear its your home ground

I was thinking it would be like Kerry football supporters saying that their home ground is in Tralee. Championship games played in Killarney are neutral games. Tipperary never play a home game in Thurles. Monaghan play at a neutral venue in Clones.....................................

Quick question, if ballymun play kilmacud in the Dublin championship in Parnell park who is the home team?

Tombo2001 wrote: »

As mentioned, there are 300 games development officers of which 54 are in Dublin. Thats 18% in Dublin.

The population of all Ireland is 6.8mn, of which county Dublin is 1.23mn, or 18%.

Cant get much fairer than that.

This post sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole over the last week or so because I distinctly recalled hearing a reference recently that Dublin had 76 coaching staff. I think it was on radio or on one of the GAA podcasts but I couldn't track it down. I did manage to find the article in the paper from 2018 where the Dublin GAA chairman had said that Dublin had 70 coaches. The fact that there was 70 coaches 3 years ago leads me to believe that the figure of 76 is good odds to be fairly accurate.

https://www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-games/dublin-express-concern-at-cut-in-funding-for-coaching-36558793.html

I was also curious to see whether the 300 games development officers figure was accurate because this seemed a bit higher than what I would have guessed.

This page linked below say " the Association employs over 300 Games Development Personnel nationwide" and based on what I've found that looks to be a bit of an over-estimate, especially when looking at the number of actual coaches who work with a ball or a hurl in a field.

Games Development Personnel are deployed at National, Provincial and County level. Since 2009 Games Development Managers (GDMs) have been deployed in all Counties. Each County has introduced a variable structure of Games Development Administrators (GDA) and Games Promotion Officers (GPO), depending on the county’s requirements.

Basically there are 32 GDMs (one in every county) and then GDAs and GPOs under the GDMs who work at the coaching coal-face [going into schools/going into clubs/arranging Cul Camp/arrranging coaching courses/arranging blitzes/doing bits with development squads] The GDM role from what I could figure is pretty much an office based adminstration role and doesn't go any actual coaching but is the boss of all the GDAs/GPOs in a county. The GDA title and the GPO title is pretty much interchangeable as some counties seem to call them one thing and some the other and some have both, but in all of them it's pretty much all about coaching at the coal-face.

https://www.gaa.ie/my-gaa/administrators/games-development-personnel

Things are also complicated a bit by the fact that there are some provincial coaching roles and this seems to vary a bit between the 4 provinces. For Munster there was 2 Provincial Games Managers (one for football and one for hurling) Connacht seem to have one Provincial Games Manager [Cathal Cregg] For Leinster there seems to be 2 Provincial Games Managers (north and south)
However Ulster GAA seem to have 25 coaches employed at provincial level. Some of these seem to be involved in the administration side of things, but most of these 25 seem to be on the ground coaches, that are basically seconded to work with/for various county boards. It looks like some of these 25 are funded from a Stormont scheme and are more school based as opposed to club based but I'd say a good 20 of these are coaching youngsters. There's also some number of coaches involved in Gaelfast but from what I saw these extra coaches are employed by Antrim GAA [I did find a thing that said before Gaelfast there was 3 coaches for the entire county, so I think the figure of 10 makes sense] Basically at provincial level, Ulster seem to be the only province that have employees at provincial level who actually coach with the others being more administrators.

At a county level I started off by looking at the Kerry GAA website and it matched what I kinda knew already - 1 Games Manager and 8 GDAs. In my ignorance at this stage I thought it would be a case of simply going into each counties website, throwing the number of GPOs/GDAs into a spreadsheet and adding them up to see what the numbers looked like nationwide. Poor fool me.

I did find the number for some counties this way, for some I googled "county name GPO" or "county name GDA" or "county name coach" Some I found in the annual reports for counties. [I should probably have taken note of the euro amounts spent on coacing in the finanical reports for the various counties but I only thought of this midway through] For some counties I couldn't find anything. For others the up-to-dateness of the numbers seemed a bit questionable.

The following is my best estimate list of the number of actual coaches [it doesn't include the Games Development Managers] There are a number of caveats about this. A fair chunk of the information was from county websites and I'm not sure how up-to-date these are. For for the counties where I couldn't find anything if anyone has an idea let me know. I'll admit my searching wasn't the most thorough For some of the Ulster counties, I'm not sure whether the figures I found for the individual counties included the coaches thay are actually employed by the Ulster Council. If I had to guess I would say that the individual counties were including the coaches paid for by the Ulster Council in their totals. There is every possibility that these numbers aren't exact/up-to-date/are wrong. However I do think [even with 10 counties missing] they do give a good overall general sense of the number of coaches working in pitches around the country. I think there are possibly 300 games development personnel but about 40 of these would be administrators [county GDMs and provincial GDMs] so I would say a mimium of 260 coaches nationwide and probably a maximum of 300, with the most likely figure being around the 280 mark.

Dublin 76
Meath 21
Kildare 16
Wexford 11
Antrim 10
Galway 9
Tyrone 9
Donegal 8
Louth 8
Kerry 7
Cork 7
Cavan 7
Mayo 6
Wicklow 6
Monaghan 5
Tipperary 4
Roscommon 4
Longford 4
Waterford 3
Sligo 3
Offaly 3
Laois 3
Limerick ?
Clare ?
Leitrim ?
Derry ?
Down ?
Fermanagh ?
Armagh ?
Carlow ?
Kilkenny ?
Westmeath ?

Boom__Boom wrote: »

This post sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole over the last week or so because I distinctly recalled hearing a reference recently that Dublin had 76 coaching staff. I think it was on radio or on one of the GAA podcasts but I couldn't track it down. I did manage to find the article in the paper from 2018 where the Dublin GAA chairman had said that Dublin had 70 coaches. The fact that there was 70 coaches 3 years ago leads me to believe that the figure of 76 is good odds to be fairly accurate.

https://www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-games/dublin-express-concern-at-cut-in-funding-for-coaching-36558793.html

I was also curious to see whether the 300 games development officers figure was accurate because this seemed a bit higher than what I would have guessed.

This page linked below say " the Association employs over 300 Games Development Personnel nationwide" and based on what I've found that looks to be a bit of an over-estimate, especially when looking at the number of actual coaches who work with a ball or a hurl in a field.



Basically there are 32 GDMs (one in every county) and then GDAs and GPOs under the GDMs who work at the coaching coal-face [going into schools/going into clubs/arranging Cul Camp/arrranging coaching courses/arranging blitzes/doing bits with development squads] The GDM role from what I could figure is pretty much an office based adminstration role and doesn't go any actual coaching but is the boss of all the GDAs/GPOs in a county. The GDA title and the GPO title is pretty much interchangeable as some counties seem to call them one thing and some the other and some have both, but in all of them it's pretty much all about coaching at the coal-face.

https://www.gaa.ie/my-gaa/administrators/games-development-personnel

Things are also complicated a bit by the fact that there are some provincial coaching roles and this seems to vary a bit between the 4 provinces. For Munster there was 2 Provincial Games Managers (one for football and one for hurling) Connacht seem to have one Provincial Games Manager [Cathal Cregg] For Leinster there seems to be 2 Provincial Games Managers (north and south)
However Ulster GAA seem to have 25 coaches employed at provincial level. Some of these seem to be involved in the administration side of things, but most of these 25 seem to be on the ground coaches, that are basically seconded to work with/for various county boards. It looks like some of these 25 are funded from a Stormont scheme and are more school based as opposed to club based but I'd say a good 20 of these are coaching youngsters. There's also some number of coaches involved in Gaelfast but from what I saw these extra coaches are employed by Antrim GAA [I did find a thing that said before Gaelfast there was 3 coaches for the entire county, so I think the figure of 10 makes sense] Basically at provincial level, Ulster seem to be the only province that have employees at provincial level who actually coach with the others being more administrators.

At a county level I started off by looking at the Kerry GAA website and it matched what I kinda knew already - 1 Games Manager and 8 GDAs. In my ignorance at this stage I thought it would be a case of simply going into each counties website, throwing the number of GPOs/GDAs into a spreadsheet and adding them up to see what the numbers looked like nationwide. Poor fool me.

I did find the number for some counties this way, for some I googled "county name GPO" or "county name GDA" or "county name coach" Some I found in the annual reports for counties. [I should probably have taken note of the euro amounts spent on coacing in the finanical reports for the various counties but I only thought of this midway through] For some counties I couldn't find anything. For others the up-to-dateness of the numbers seemed a bit questionable.

The following is my best estimate list of the number of actual coaches [it doesn't include the Games Development Managers] There are a number of caveats about this. A fair chunk of the information was from county websites and I'm not sure how up-to-date these are. For for the counties where I couldn't find anything if anyone has an idea let me know. I'll admit my searching wasn't the most thorough For some of the Ulster counties, I'm not sure whether the figures I found for the individual counties included the coaches thay are actually employed by the Ulster Council. If I had to guess I would say that the individual counties were including the coaches paid for by the Ulster Council in their totals. There is every possibility that these numbers aren't exact/up-to-date/are wrong. However I do think [even with 10 counties missing] they do give a good overall general sense of the number of coaches working in pitches around the country. I think there are possibly 300 games development personnel but about 40 of these would be administrators [county GDMs and provincial GDMs] so I would say a mimium of 260 coaches nationwide and probably a maximum of 300, with the most likely figure being around the 280 mark.

Dublin 76
Meath 21
Kildare 16
Wexford 11
Antrim 10
Galway 9
Tyrone 9
Donegal 8
Louth 8
Kerry 7
Cork 7
Cavan 7
Mayo 6
Wicklow 6
Monaghan 5
Tipperary 4
Roscommon 4
Longford 4
Waterford 3
Sligo 3
Offaly 3
Laois 3
Limerick ?
Clare ?
Leitrim ?
Derry ?
Down ?
Fermanagh ?
Armagh ?
Carlow ?
Kilkenny ?
Westmeath ?

You could have saved yourself some heartache if you’d started with the games development report to sports ireland that I quoted previously. It’s for 2015 so a little dated but it’s fair to say that all indicators are that any funding gap has narrowed since. For example the figure given for rest of Leinster is now 118 so a substantial increase in that spend.

https://learning.gaa.ie/sites/default/files/GDC_1.8_Appendix11_Games Development Annual Report 2015.pdf

This represents what the GAA spend on games development resources and reported by the GAA for the Irish sports council so it should be a pretty accurate representation and equally should exclude any resources funded from elsewhere. Unfortunately I can’t find a later report for this. The breakdown is as follows:

National 9
Dublin. 61
Leinster. 74
Munster. 34
Ulster. 67
Connacht. 86

This of course makes nonsense of the claim that the GAA funded a coach for almost every club in dublin as one poster has stated. County assignments are in there too. There are caveats, for example the Munster figure dropped by 10 from the previous year. It seems unlikely that the GAA dropped them off a cliff so I assume there’s some shuffling going on- given all the personell are named perhaps someone closer to Munster GAA can clarify. In addition the report puts a bit of a best face on things: Connachts very high figure doesn’t reflect the number of part time coaches for that province. Equally dublins figure doesn’t reflect that the clubs themselves are funding a large chunk of the spend, so the cost to the GAA is lower. The job titles are also a little inconsistent.

Within that dublin have 5-7 personell who are assigned at a regional level, which I understand to be the equivalent of the provincial level managers for the others (though I’m not convinced the provincial personell are purely administrative tbh). The total above is 331 I think and excluding the provincial personell etc that drops by up to 59 or so depending on what you think a person is doing in a role.

Enquiring wrote: »

I nearly fell off my chair laughing at this. Did you actually look at the list? It basically backs up everything you've been told but you have decided to make a very peculiar interpretation of what you read.

Boom_Boom just informed you that the coaches are called Games Promotion officer's or Games development administrators. Let's just take a few examples. Donegal have 3 full time coaches, Antrim have 3, Meath have 6, Kildare have 4, Kerry have 5, Cork have 6, Galway have 2 full time, same with Mayo.

You've been repeatedly told that every county had less than 6. You looked at a list telling you that every county had less than 6. Did you not believe what you were reading? You've also been told about administrative staff and the difference between them and coaches. And do you know what a third level coach is? You somehow managed to add 7 Dublin based third level coaches onto the rest of Leinster list.

Before we move onto the list for Dublin, I just want to see if you now understand what you read or is there any other confusion?

Ah it’s the poster who says the GAA funded a coach for almost every club in dublin

Not quite what that shows is it?

How many clubs in dublin?

Enquiring wrote: »

I take it from this post that you understand that your post backs up that every county had very few coaches, between 1 and 6 while Dublin had far more?

I'll be moving onto the Dublin list, don't worry.

Per capita what’s the breakdown? How many coaches per capita for Leinster compared to dublin? How does that look when we up the Leinster number to the current 118?

What’s the breakdown when you allocate the percentage funded by the clubs themselves? We’re these the numbers you were using when you we’re going on about a coach for every club?

Enquiring wrote: »

Not for the first time, you have a load of questions but you failed to answer any put to you. You already know that the 118 figure is flawed. You're desperately scrambling here as you know the figures you provided go completely against your argument.

Let's get some answers from you before the rest of your post is dismantled.

As expected you deflect from the pure guff you’ve posted. Are you saying the GAA have lied in their report to the sports council- that would be fraud and you might want to take it up with the guards, should be easy to prove since they’ve named the individuals in each role.

Are you disputing the numbers they’ve given for Leinster there? Again the individuals are named. I can verify that my own club has the correct name against it, I’m sure others can do the same, so that’s 50% of a resource accounted for from the GAA funds

Enquiring wrote: »

Oh dear. Where did I say the GAA has lied? I've said you couldn't understand what you were reading and it appears that this still is the case.

The numbers are correct and it proves what you've been told. Every county in Ireland had under 6 coaches except for Dublin. Most had 2, 3 or 4.

You included third level coaches, 7 of which are in Dublin in the figures for other counties. Do you understand what a third level coach is? Do you now realise what you've been told is correct, every county had very few coaches apart from Dublin?

Wait, THATS your complaint? After the bull**** you’ve been posting you’re complaining about the third level coaches? Even though I’ve made it very clear that the breakdown is also in the figures. But you accept the figures at least? So you accept you lied when you said almost every dublin club got a coach funded by the GAA for example? How many coaches should a county have? Dublin has a multiple of population on the others and the coaches are to develop the game in that population. The GAA paid effectively for half of the dublin coaches. How many should dublin have? I’ll make it easy with a scenario if a county with 150k has 6 coaches funded how many should a county with over a million have? Given they’re meant to develop the game in that population

Enquiring wrote: »

The question is do you accept the figures you've posted? Very few coaches in every county except Dublin. You had to try and throw in administrative staff and third level coaches from Dublin to try to make the numbers in someway respectable and even then that failed. At least now we've established as fact that there were 6 coaches and less available to everyone bar Dublin.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's move on to the Dublin allocation. This will be really illuminating so pay attention. On this link:

https://www.dublingaa.ie/competitions

You can look up the first 3-4 divisions in hurling and football and tell me how many don't have access to a full time coach? Very few. This shows that the funding is being used for top level clubs, not reaching all areas of Dublin GAA as claimed.

You can look through the complete list of clubs if you'd like:

https://www.dublingaa.ie/clubs

As you've pointed out, the coaches are hired by the clubs. They work for them so improving standards within the club is their main task. So let's have a look at the numbers in regards to this and we'll just use the report you linked.

There are about 200,000 players aged between 8 and 18 registered to a club in Ireland. For Dublin, I'm going to be generous and include numbers of participants from hurling and football even though players who play both are being counted twice. That's in and around 24,000 for registered players between 8 and 18 in Dublin. That's 12% of the total.

Of the 170 full time coaches, 54 of them are working for Dublin GAA. That's 31%. And remember, this is for a year where Dublin had lower than their usual number of coaches and also it's 2015, 13 years after the funding began. In the noughties, the gap would have been far bigger.

Just so we’re entirely clear here what are you including in your 170 full time coaches figure? Are you for example treating two part time as a full time? Which roles as are you including?

Enquiring wrote: »

I'm including full time coaches. I can't make it clearer than that.

It really is shocking the gap between Dublin and everywhere else. I've used them before but the difference between Dublin and Cork really shows this up as the scandal that it is. Cork with more clubs, players and a huge amount of territory to cover had 6 or less coaches while Dublin with less clubs, players and a smaller amount of territory got access to almost 9 times the amount of coaches.

Every county had to try their best with between 1 and 6 paid coaches. Why were Dublin provided with so many more coaches? Once again it shows how unbalanced things were placed in favour of Dublin. Let's not forget, the funding gap had closed by 2015. Dublin had well over a decade of even more of an imbalance than 2015.

And the part time ones? And what job titles GPO? Gdo? Coach? Gda ? Etc

And how are you accounting for the 50% of each dublin coach paid for by the clubs themselves?

Enquiring wrote: »

The coaches from the Dublin only scheme? How are they supposed to be counted? In 2015, there were 54 of them.

As I've pointed out, all these coaches were positioned in clubs in the top 4 divisions of Dublin hurling and football. Not many clubs in Dublin didn't have access to a professional coach.

Your argument is that GAA threw money at dublin. The clubs paid half of the cost of those coaches. Is that true for the other coaches in your listing?

tritium wrote: »

Your argument is that GAA threw money at dublin. The clubs paid half of the cost of those coaches. Is that true for the other coaches in your listing?

Tritium, the figures being bandied about by some posters are in direct opposition to their statements regarding numbers. There is a statement of 54 or 76 GPO's and every club having one. Yet the Dublin club count is 93 or 134 not sure which I believe, I'm no maths guru but 54 or 76 into 93 or 134 does not equate to every club having a professional coach. Some people post untruths and think if they repeat it enough that the majority of their fanbase will buy into it and believe it. Thankfully you are stating facts and not fiction. Fair play to you, you've great patience.

tritium wrote: »

Your argument is that GAA threw money at dublin. The clubs paid half of the cost of those coaches. Is that true for the other coaches in your listing?

My argument is to split Dublin. I've outlined why that has to happen.

Firstly, a detailed plan was drawn up for them by a task force set up by the GAA. Then the finance was given to Dublin to implement the plan that was only available to them. Millions of euro was pumped into Dublin GAA, far above the level of any other county. From this, inevitable improvements in results began across all areas of Dublin GAA. Sponsorship grew from this, from the Vodafone deal to AIG and a multitude of other sponsors. In 2019, Dublin were receiving 2.3 million from sponsorship. Dublin spend 3.8 million on games development in 2019. They spend over 2 million a year on wages and salaries. 1.5 million on team preparations.

So from the initial plan drawn up by the Strategic Review Committee, there was a domino effect and things spiralled out of control. One thing led to another and we've been in a position where one county is operating at a professional level in an amateur sport. That can't be let continue. That's my argument.

mitchelsontour wrote: »

The approx. coach to club ratio using a combination of Boom__Boom and tritium figures just for comparison.

Dublin - 76 coaches for 134 clubs a ratio of 0.56

The rest of the country 280 coaches for 1992 clubs a ratio of 0.14

Lets just say that is a significant difference.

The Dublin GAA website lists far fewer clubs:

https://www.dublingaa.ie/clubs

Festive Life wrote: »

How many of the coaches in Dublin are paid by the clubs themselves.
Nothing stopping clubs combining together and applying to get these coaches to work with them but then again it isnt needed everywhere.
My own club doesnt have a coach development officer but is lucky enough to have a coach who's job allows him enough time that he can attend/work with the schools in the parish on a very regular basis

Lot more clubs like that nationwide.

Again, this was a Dublin only scheme. There was very much something stopping clubs from outside Dublin gaining access to it. They weren't allowed as it was Dublin only. Taxpayers provided millions upon millions of euros to fund this Dublin only scheme by the way.