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"Things haven't moved quickly enough" | John Horan's defence of Dublin funding scrutinised

The reference points for John Horan's assertion that reports of Dublin's funding have been misint...



Football

"Things haven't moved quickly enough" | John Horan's defence of Dublin funding scrutinised

The reference points for John Horan's assertion that reports of Dublin's funding have been misinterpreted, Shane Flanagan (Leinster GAA) and Seamus Kenny (Meath GAA) discussed the GAA President's comments on Thursday's OTB AM.

"Listen, it is a very simple metric," Leinster GAA operations manager Shane Flanagan explained when questioned whether Meath received more per capita funding than Dublin.

"It was difficult selling [the east Leinster project] to clubs and one way of explaining it was that per head of population, if this goes through, you will get more than Dublin."

A scheme which sought to provide Games Development Officers (GDOs) to clubs outside of Dublin with the promise of partial funding from the Leinster Council, Flanagan's remit saw him attempting to persuade clubs to pay the remainder of the cost.

Flanagan explained that according to the metric he applied during those sales pitches, certain Leinster counties have indeed received greater sums of funding than Dublin.

However, given that the scheme was only introduced in 2016, there was an understandable reluctance on his part to use this particular reading of the numbers as a means of suggesting that Dublin are in fact under-resourced compared to their neighbouring counties.

"It's ironic with all the chat around the Strategic Review Committee report of late that if you study the document in detail, aside from what it recommended for Dublin, it also recommended that the counties surrounding Dublin would have to be looked at too in the same context as Dublin.

"It's only gotten round to that in 2016, and it only really got up an running in 2017."

Acknowledging that there has been tremendous progress made in that time, it nevertheless demonstrates a certain amount of shortsightedness in what the association's President John Horan appeared to be suggesting when he commented on the matter during the last week.

Of the opinion that there is still much to be done until true balance is achieved, Flanagan, along with Seamus Kenny, provided a necessary insight into the challenges facing counties in Leinster, and how money is spent when received from bodies such as the provincial council. You can listen to that interview in full here.

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Dublin GAA GAA Gaelic Football John Horan Meath GAA