Kildare clubs vote to retain Championship structures 

Turkeys aren’t known to vote for Christmas and unsurprisingly the clubs of Kildare were not inclined to reduce the number competing in the Senior Football Championship at tonight’s County Board meeting at Cedral St Conleth’s Park.

Clubs were given the option of the status quo, with sixteen senior clubs, or a gradual move to a structure with twelve senior clubs, sixteen intermediate and eight each in two junior grades, but the latter was rejected by 42 votes to 13.

With a wide range of topics discussed, the meeting, under the chairmanship of Mick Mullen, lasted almost 75 minutes, a welcome change from the recent past.

The issue which exercised the top table most was that of child safeguarding and garda vetting for coaches, with Coaching Officer Eamonn Costello providing a visual scorecard for one unnamed club that was awash with far too many yellows and reds for his liking.

Mullen emphasised that “we need our children to be safe in our environment,” and that “Kildare GAA cannot continue like this.” 

He emphasised the point by comparing it to strict practices around building site safety and asked all delegates to bring this issue back to their club executives if they “took one thing back from this meeting.” 

A lively discussion took place around the potential for clubs to be required to have their accounts audited in order to appease Revenue concerns on tax compliance in the GAA. One delegate had surveyed accounting firms in the county and suggested that it would cost a minimum of €13,000 to €15,000 to have a club’s accounts audited and even that assumed clubs employed a bookkeeper to prepare them in advance of audit.

The same delegate painted a vista of club officials having to obtain an invoice or receipt from referees prior to handing over their fee on the pitch, something that both Mullen and Treasurer Alan Dunney confirmed would not be happening in their clubs!

Dunney, who confirmed that all county boards would be required to self-assess their tax compliance based on a sample from one year’s expenditure on specific types of expenditure, as agreed between the GAA and Revenue, but that there was no suggestion clubs would have to engage in similar exercises.

Dunney reported a surplus of €246,517 for the four months to the end of January, with income at €840,418 and expenditure of €593,901, though he indicated there were “lots of invoices not in yet.” 

He confirmed that the recently launched Club Kildare Business Network, which costs €2,500 to join had proven “really successful” with 25 to 30 members having signed up to date, while a business plan had been developed to monetise the Cedral Lounge facility and a separate company had been set up to administer the facility, taking it “out of the GAA” and to deal with VAT etc.