It was just after 1.30pm on Saturday afternoon at the Canal Court Hotel in Newry when the people from south Armagh began filing into the function room hosting GAA Congress and lined the walls on all sides. They came with a blue-and-gold Silverbridge GAA flag, wearing their club tops, school uniforms from St Paul’s Bressbrook and Armagh jerseys.
Buggies were wheeled in bearing babies and toddlers, people struggled in on crutches. The rest of the crowd streamed out the doors down the corridor outside. All of them waiting for Jarlath Burns: their neighbour, friend, team-mate, club secretary. Their man.
“If you want to know me,” Burns said, “walk around the club and spend time with these people.”
Ten minutes later outgoing president Larry McCarthy pinned the presidential medal to Burns’s lapel, making him the GAA’s 41st president and the first from Armagh in 60 years, bearing a level of expectation carried by few presidents at such a transformative stage of the association’s history. The most pressing items of business laid out for him over the past week all impact the cornerstones of the GAA itself: integration with the LGFA and Camogie Association by 2027, protecting the GAA’s amateur status, addressing problems with Gaelic football, giving hurling the leg-up it desperately needs.
The top-line stuff from Burns’s inauguration speech echoed all those issues: the appointment of a high-end Football Review Committee led by the former Dublin manager Jim Gavin, the commitment to drive the integration of the GAA with the LGFA and Camogie Association, given a deadline last week of 2027.
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Burns also announced the creation of Tiomáint to drive the development of hurling and a new Amateur Status Committee to explore a new 21st century definition of GAA amateurism with a brief to cut the intercounty costs hanging like a noose around every county board.
“Where does this €40 million [annual intercounty spend] come from?” he asked. “It comes from you people: busting your gut to get sponsors, begging people who have money to spare, raffling houses, cars, holidays, running golf classics, nights at the races, nights at the dogs, strictly come dancings, gala dinners, auctions and even trying to get rock concerts into our grounds.
“Every year it’s a struggle as we, the volunteers, begin the task of gathering up enough cash to keep the county bandwagon on the road, the vast majority of us knowing exactly how it will end up.”
The years he spent himself finding common ground with the assumption Burns would eventually become GAA president that stretched back almost into his own time as an Armagh footballer, reflected the winding nature of change within the GAA itself: slow, gradual but ultimately inevitable.
In late March 2003 Burns sat in his office as principal at St Paul’s, batting away the notion of ever being GAA president. In 2000, barely six months after retiring as an Armagh player, then GAA president Sean McCague had quickly returned him to the battlefields as chairman of the GAA’s Players’ Committee, a new body created as a human shield against the encroaching Gaelic Players’ Association.
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In those three years Burns had already seen too much: the political hoops McCague needed to jump through, the presidential workload once laid out for him by the former president Peter Quinn that Burns wasn’t remotely ready to consider.
“People come to you as if they’re the first person to say ‘Listen you, hear this,” he said that day, “and you know what they’re going to say, ‘I’ve a funny feeling you’re gonna be president, blah blah blah.’ But at this stage I certainly don’t want to go down that route. An awful lot of things have had to take second place.”
His weariness in 2003 with the idea was understandable. The vibes between the GPA and Burns had been awkward from the beginning. Whatever about his past reputation as an outstanding leader whose joy at winning the 1999 Ulster title epitomised Armagh’s liberation from their 18-year wander through the wilderness, he was now a suit. The committee man.
But he made an impossible situation work. By the end of his time a lot of the improvements in basic welfare the GPA had agitated for had been delivered by Burns’s committee. Getting the credit was harder.
“The good things we have done,” he said then, “the GPA have taken credit for some. It was like they got the mileage increase, they got the gear sorted out. They didn’t make the phone calls, they didn’t have to make the fight. To expand [playing] panels to 30, I had to ring every member of Ard Chomhairle [Central Council] and beg them to take this on board. I would like to think the players will look at where they are now and think in three years these guys have dragged us, if not all the way, near enough to where we should be.”
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Seeking that uneasy blend of consensus politics while pushing against hard boundaries has been repeated through the years: reaching out to the Orange Order as principal at Bessbrook while retaining strong views on the GAA’s role in advancing the concept of a united Ireland, gently mentioned again yesterday. In 2014 he led a group of pupils and staff taking part in a Gay Pride march in Newry as the first school in the country to make that gesture.
He got the Gaelic football mark over the line as head of the GAA’s Playing Rules Committee. He started conversations about the GAA’s hypocrisy around its amateur status and the effect of spiralling team costs. He wondered aloud if every GAA member was truly committed to the promotion of hurling and whether reducing the use of flags and anthems at GAA grounds might open those places up to the unionist community.
“If you want to progress in the GAA world, very often you’re better saying nothing really, just speak in platitudes,” he said in 2015. “Praise everybody and offend nobody. Some of my opinions might be divisive. A president has to be a safe pair of hands. And I sometimes ask myself: ‘does that mean I’m the right person?’”
In time, those concepts of guardian and interrogator of the GAA’s values grew closer to each other. Losing to Larry McCarthy in the 2020 election reflected how Burns still split opinion, relying heavily on first preference votes and eventually getting beaten by the mountains of transfers McCarthy gathered.
By last year’s election Burns had every vote shored up and strolled home with comfortably more first preference votes than the other two candidates combined. Given the incredible breadth of truly profound issues facing the GAA, it wasn’t surprising Burns immediately resisted any notion of leaving a legacy as president after that election.
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Although the most achievable dividend from Burns’s time as president will be clarity of ideas and purpose, Saturday’s proposals were the product of major, ground breaking ideas forcing everything to think big.
“My plans are ambitious,” he said. “They’re not fancy or grandiose, but they are value-led and based on what you have told me what we need to do: our amateur status, our Unesco game of hurling, the dream of unifying our Gaelic games associations, being realistic about our infrastructure agenda and of course, the small matter of Gaelic football and its current standing. All of these could be controversial or radical or even transformational. We don’t know.”
Achieve anything near that, legacy will take care of itself.
