Gaelic Games: ‘Trust has been broken’ over GAA merger – Conor Meyler

The GAA, Camogie Association and LGFA all voted in favour of integration at their respective congress in 2022, while with the Steering Group for Integration surveyed 30,000 respondents with an “overwhelming majority in favour of integration”.

Meyler believes the key question that now needs answered is “how did we get here?”

“Is it structures? Is it facilities? Is it funding? Who is going to put their hands up now and say we didn’t get it right,” he continued.

“Because how do you rebuild trust then when you go into an organisation? We’re talking about unity, we want unanimous integrated association for every young boy and girl, every coach, referee, volunteer, committee member gets the same opportunity to play the game of Gaelic Games.

“That’s what we want, we want unity but now we’re still creating silos and we’re creating more friction and fighting between people because we’ve separated them rather than bringing them together. “

The Tyrone All-Star has recently completed his PhD in understanding sport leadership and gender reform.

During this time, he completed a case study on integration in Gaelic Games, which he presented to the Steering Committee three years ago.

“I presented the findings from our policy brief publication, and I’ve had conversations with different people in it throughout different periods, but it’s been very much a closed group,” he said.

“This is quite disappointing because anything that requires this level and magnitude of change requires a huge level of trust and a huge level of communication and we haven’t had communication really.

“Communication has been shocking compared to some of the other committees within Gaelic Games.”