MARGARET Thatcher famously said “there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and there are families.”

The single-minded promotion of elitism that occurred during her period in office destroyed the strong sense of community and common purpose that had been the hallmark of the United Kingdom since the end of the second World War.

Council houses were sold off and were no longer built. Trade Unions were broken up. Social security became a weapon to stigmatise the poor. The financial system was deregulated, the elites flourished, inequality soared and today, the UK is a shitshow, with nurses and teachers visiting foodbanks, houses unaffordable, rent soaring, homelessness out of control, corporations writing the tax codes and dog eating dog.

Exactly the same has happened in Ireland, with Leo Varadkar’s best suggestion being that children should borrow the deposit for a house from their parents.

At my father’s wake, all my old friends and neighbours from my childhood in Dungiven came to pay their respects. At the end of the second day, the thought hit me that all of them had been reared in council houses in the town, including my father, whose mother Hannah and father Joe’s house was the hub of the community at number seven, Station Road.

Everyone we knew lived in the large council estates of Mitchell Park, Priory Road, Magherabuoy, Garvagh Road and Curragh Road. A handful of people had private houses but with council houses easily available there was no housing market, so they were cheap as chips. Wind forward 40 years, the council houses are gone, all the younger generation are renting and houses are unaffordable save for the few.

It is a widely acknowledged truth that unchecked elitism destroys community. Elitism has flourished, and the process of destroying the country is well underway.

We have an almost identical, parallel situation in the GAA, with a Director General whose approach is summed up in his own words “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” This mirrors the instinct of the hierarchy, which is to leave things alone, and talk up the strength of the GAA economy (Tom Ryan boasted this week about annual revenue of €73.9M) again on the basis of figures that no one can understand and that do not translate into our day-to-day experience. Things have become so twisted that for the hierarchy, success is now measured by how much money has come in at the end of the year.

When the President of our association publicly states that “the fixtures problem is unsolvable” we know we are in serious, serious trouble. As the high-powered board of the CPA has made clear, the fixtures problem is only unsolvable because the GAA hierarchy does not want to solve it. This is because a shorter season (which would solve almost every problem) means less money.   

Elitism (in our case the partnership between the GPA, GAA and vested corporate interests) is flourishing. Being that the entire purpose of the GAA is community, the exact opposite of elitism, our destruction is proceeding at an incredible pace. The GAA, because their instinct is to leave things alone and hope for the best, ignored county players’ modest demands, allowing a private company to fill the vacuum, and thereby creating a monster that is tearing us down bit by bit.

Cahair O’Kane, the Irish News’ GAA correspondent, described this week’s statement by the GPA’s Paul Flynn (synopsis: We, the elite county players ARE the GAA so you better give us what we want in our upcoming negotiations or else) as “a disgrace, which with each passing sentence grew worse.” Note to readers: If you ever hear someone using the word “synergy” or “stakeholder” stick your fingers in your ears and walk away humming loudly.

As O’Kane quite rightly points out, “The GAA has been party in allowing the inter-county game to mushroom to unsustainable levels. The bigger it gets, the more money it makes.

“The more money it makes, the stronger a case the GAA feels it has when throwing the “84 per cent is redistributed back to clubs and counties” line out.” He might have added to hell with the rest.

This is the way elitism plays out wherever it takes root. In the vast majority of counties, the good people are staying with their clubs, volunteering and working for the good of community life in their areas. This is where the real GAA is, people giving their time and money to make their people and place better.

It is the clubs who have been left to promote identity, equality, real well-being, and selflessness. It is the clubs who teach our young people that the true importance of the game isn’t whether we win or not, but that we give of our best on and off the field.

As Ryan Feeney recently put it “it is at club level where the GAA is created and sustained. We give something that is valued and cherished to the next generation. They pass it on to their descendants. In this way, we have survived and flourished as a community for almost 140 years. Now, the real GAA people are excluded from power because the truth is uncomfortable.”

We see now how county boards have become little more than fundraisers for the senior county teams. They are no longer anything to do with the GAA. Instead, they are the opposite of what the GAA is, identical to the Boards of League of Ireland soccer clubs, their sole purpose being to keep the county team afloat. As one visitor to the wake house put it, “the GAA no longer exists. What we have now is unrecognisable.”

Happy to siphon cash off from gate receipts and pay it in brown envelopes to the county manager and his backroom team? Happy to arrange silent payments from wealthy benefactors? Happy to fudge the figures and lie about the size of the debt? Happy to piss on the clubs from a great height and do whatever the senior county manager says? Happy to vote along with whatever the GAA hierarchy wants regardless of the damage it will cause? Congratulations, you are the new county chairman.

We see the effects of elitism in the destruction of club rugby since the advent of professionalism, something that ex-Irish internationals like Trevor Ringland and Keith Crossan have warned the GAA repeatedly about. Only this week, the RFU in England cut their second tier teams adrift, reducing their annual grants by 50 percent.

As Robert Kitson wrote in the Guardian on Friday morning, “What price a national union that takes a chopper to its own roots?” He goes on to make the point that it is bad enough that professionalism killed off so many clubs, but now the peak of the mountain has been “jackhammered further away from its base.” Sound familiar? Another point Kitson makes is that the elitism that is systematically destroying the rugby community (turning it into a spectator sport with only a handful of elite teams) has been supported by multi-million pound injections from private equity.

In our games, apart from the Dubs and a few others, the teams in the top third are surviving because of massive injections of capital from wealthy benefactors. How could Limerick function without JP McManus? Or Roscommon without Sean Mulryan? Or Donegal without Donagh Kelly, founder and CEO of the KN Group?

Noam Chomsky, the renowned American philosopher and economist, in his landmark work “Requiem for the American Dream” charts the planned disintegration of American society into an nightmare where 40 million people live in trailer parks in the richest country in the world and the ten wealthiest people own more than the bottom 50 percent of the population combined.

He describes the core problem as “the concerted attack on solidarity by the elites” where social responsibility and community are not only irrelevant but are positively dangerous things, and where an individual is encouraged to focus only on personal success and wealth. Those who resist this are stigmatised as “un-American” and “commies”.

Paul Flynn should be ashamed of himself. So should the GAA hierarchy. Their concerted attack on solidarity is destroying the GAA. Margaret Thatcher would approve.

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