I spend a good proportion of my time involved with my local GAA club, Eoghan Rua CLG Cúil Raithin. I coach under 8 football and hurling, senior camogie and am involved in various club administration functions including being chair of the cultural committee and doing bits of PR.

But in reality as anyone involved in a GAA club knows, your activities very quickly expand to fill the time available  and beyond. Involvement at managerial or administrative leve,l or as a player, is ideally suited to the public servant or teacher  – people who either get generous holidays or can do a bit of GAA work during the working day, usually at the State’s expense.

How many reams of government-bought paper are used to run off agendas and other documentation? How many staples, rubber bands, paper clips, pens and gegabytes of computer memory is used to underwrite and hold together the GAA?

In the last week we conducted a very worthwhile and enjoyable exercise in the club. During a historic visit to our new Clubrooms prior to Christmas, we were advised by an Uachtarán CLG Christy Cooney to draw up a new development plan/strategy. I thought it would be a good idea to propose this at the AGM and have a business like brainstorming session to take the thing forward. (Angela tells me that in the PC world of education ‘brainstorming’ is no longer an acceptable term so the the less violent term ‘thought shower’ is now the preferred lingo. Maybe that explains the problems in the local education system, that shower in DeNI. Anyhow I digress).

We got about fifty people involved in the club to gether together in the clubhouse last Saturday. And in true management consultant style we split them up into five smaller sub groups that would rotate through the topics, covering each in turn. Each group was given twenty minutes to get their ideas of their chest and anything else they could down on paper. Best of all we told people that we would be finished at 1.00pm and even allowing for a teabreak we let everyone go home, first part of the job done at 12:45.

The pressure is now on us guys to sort out the next stage of the process. Looking forward to that part of it.