Integration to resignation: Finance, skorts and a waste of McAleese skills… the inside story of how grand integration plan under former President fell apart and sparked a toxic war of words

When A sports story moves from the back of the paper to the front, and there isn’t an historic achievement being celebrated, the news is rarely good.

When it stays plastered there for the rest of the week, then the subjects of that story are in quite the bind.

So it goes for the GAA, one of three parties to the planned integration of the Ladies Gaelic Football Association and the Camogie Association into the wider GAA.

The resignation of Mary McAleese has fuelled fierce debates and validated old prejudices.

The upshot is a process now under unblinking scrutiny across Irish society – but the story up to now has been an intriguing one of optimism that turned sour.

New beginnings

In February 2022, the congresses of the GAA, Ladies Gaelic Football Association and the Camogie Association all voted to prioritise integration.

From that vote, the Steering Group on Integration (SGI) was formed in September 2022, with Mary McAleese appointed chair.

The make-up of the steering group has since been criticised for insufficient independent voices; it was made up of the presidents and directors-general of each association, plus a project manager, Mark Dorman.

It’s an odd complaint given the three organisations at the centre of the process will be the ones selling the process to their members and also living with the eventual integrated association and so have to be heavily represented.

The first meeting of the SGI was held in October 2022, at which the principle of equality was enshrined as a guiding light for the process, described as One Association for All.

The target date of 2027 was set.

A plan to hold a series of one-day forums with cross-sections of the three organisations’ communities were also announced from that December.

In those more innocent times, hope still floated even as the scale of the project started to become apparent.

The desire to integrate ladies’ football and camogie into the GAA was long-standing in all three bodies, even if resistance was also a significant force in all three, to varying degrees.

The stalled process has been blamed this week on misogyny in the GAA, but fears within the ladies’ games about the loss of independence and concerns that their voices would not be heard were also commonly held.

However, the commitment of the GAA, the LGFA and the Camogie Association at their congresses to the process was an unprecedented declaration of intent.

The choice of a former president in McAleese to chair the steering group was another bold statement of ambition.

The hard work was about to begin.

F is for finance

FIVE MONTHS after the appointment of McAleese, Jarlath Burns was elected president of the GAA, and he was a hugely popular choice.

His reputation as a player and latterly as an administrator, but more importantly as a GAA leader in the North who had shown courage in discussing what inclusion might look like in a united Ireland, was formidable.

He won the election on the first count by 88 votes from his closest challenger.

A year later, as he prepared to take office, he spoke to the GAA website about his goals. And while an advocate for integration, he addressed spiralling inter-county costs, and the long-term effects they could have on an integrated GAA.

‘The amateur status is one of our values and what we are spending on preparing our teams is unsustainable. Particularly as we prepare for integration when we’ll have other teams to take care of.’

It wasn’t the only indication of the GAA leadership’s thinking. On the night Burns was elected, Tom Ryan spoke with prophetic judgement on the pitfalls involved. ‘We’ll be judged harshly if we don’t deliver that,’ he said plainly – but what he said next has a strong resonance given the turbulence of this week.

‘I also feel strongly about how that is delivered. It could be damaging to all three if not delivered properly and we should be given time and space.’

The three Fs became a neat shorthand for the main challenges: finance, fixtures, and facilities.

But finance was a concern in Croke Park from the off.

Rumblings

In early January of 2024, then Laois GAA chair PJ Kelly went on local radio and gave voice to the first significant public discontent from a GAA official.

He accused McAleese of giving people ‘false hope’ when she announced in September 2023 that a roadmap to integration would issue in early 2024.

This was on the back of a consultation by the SGI that was heralded as the largest sports survey ever conducted in Ireland.

More than 30,000 members of the GAA, LGFA and Camogie Association were interviewed, and the results showed overwhelming support for integration, registering at more than 90 per cent.

Yet these findings didn’t convince Kelly in Laois, who also took issue with the positive tone McAleese sounded when she appeared on the Late Late Show to discuss the project.

‘She may have given out, my own belief, false hope that this is nearer to fruition than it actually is,’ he claimed, while also arguing that ‘I think it needs to slow down a little. I think we do need to have a better plan in place. We all talk about infrastructure. Have we enough for ourselves in the GAA at present? I would say no’.

His comments caused controversy and were dismissed in places, but whatever about the substance of what he said, his desire to see the process slow down wasn’t an isolated one within the GAA.

Skorts

The mood music around integration had turned sombre by the time an extraordinary controversy erupted in May 2025 over what camogie player should wear.

The debacle made worldwide headlines, and no wonder: a story that involves women being told what to wear while pursuing a pastime in the 21st century sells itself.

This was a controversy with deep roots, tangled around how camogie had been administered for years, and the effect that had on relations with generations of players.

Yet crucial details got lost in the storm.

That camogie was run by its own independent body, which had an overwhelmingly female leadership, might be an important point that international commentators might overlook.

But astonishingly, many here also either didn’t know or simply didn’t care that this wasn’t a GAA story, and so there were screeds about the patriarchy and misogyny dotting the opinion pages and filling the airwaves.

And that was relevant to integration because it exposed deep-seated attitudes to the GAA, and the jealousies and prejudices held by some in this country towards the organisation.

It was an important reminder of those attitudes, and the opprobrium that would be heaped upon Croke Park if integration stumbled, as Tom Ryan had forecast.

Failures to communicate

A sectionof the GAA website is dedicated to the subject of integration.

It includes a link where readers can access the updates issued by the SGI.

There are 21 in all. Some only run to a handful of paragraphs. Others are stories from the GAA website, and there are press releases included, too.

From the end of 2024, though, they became more detailed, and by last year they included language from the chair that was becoming more urgent.

Take this from May 2025. The previous month, a central fixtures oversight committee had been formed, with the aim of helping create fixture schedules across three sports under one umbrella.

Towards the end of the update, McAleese is quoted thus: ‘I urge all stakeholders to do everything they can to make an integrated mindset a reality in their sphere of influence. It is our future and making it happen is the responsibility of all.’

That in retrospect reads like an appeal not to ordinary members of the three organisations, but to the leadership of one of them, in particular.

But it was one of just four updates issued by the SGI in all of 2025. There was just one this year, released in March. Five were released in 2024, but three of them were in February of that month, all stemming from a press event that revealed the 2027 timeline.

Communication has been an ongoing issue for the steering group, or the lack of it.

McAleese addressed that point when it was raised at an Oireachtas hearing last year, appearing to sympathise with the point about an information gap but arguing that her group was merely an advisory body, and one that wasn’t mandated to speak on behalf of three organisations.

That was a weakness which should have been addressed. McAleese is one of the most fluent communicators in Irish life. Charging her with explaining the work of the SGI in a manner agreed by all three bodies wasn’t an unreasonable expectation.

The failure to do that leads directly to this week’s chaos.

Rupture

INTEGRATION as originally envisaged was a retreating ambition throughout last year, and it was finished just before Christmas.

McAleese appeared before an Oireachtas committee in December alongside Burns and other stakeholders to discuss the project.

She reiterated her belief that 2027 was an achievable target.

The following months, minutes of a meeting between the GAA’s powerful management committee – subject to withering criticism from McAleese on her departure – and the chair were released.

This meeting took place just days after her upbeat appearance at the Oireachtas committee, and the message from the GAA management was blunt.

‘The consensus of Coiste Bainistíochta was that 2027 represents an unrealistic target for full and complete integration,’ it read, noting the reaction of McAleese, too: ‘The view was rejected by the independent chair, who expressed her disappointment at the view of the Coiste’.

The writing was on the wall, with unconfirmed reports this week that McAleese offered her resignation shortly after.

The messaging only got more public. After his election at Congress in March as president-elect after Burns, Derek Kent said 2034, the 150th anniversary of the GAA, was a more realistic target.

In his Congress address, Burns noted the shifting goalposts and hardly discouraged their moving. He said he detected ‘a realisation that what matters is not that we hit a deadline’, but instead that a sustainable process was completed.

‘Integration doesn’t have an expiry date,’ he went on, and if those words were meant to soothe his own constituency, they went down like a lead balloon elsewhere.

For anyone who didn’t get it, the GAA’s position was now up in lights: 2027 wasn’t a runner.

Back before the Oireachtas committee in June, Burns was bullish and said a fully integrated GAA will be ‘unstoppable in terms of commercial capability’.

That day seems further away than ever, after a week of unprecedented upheaval.

Further drama lies ahead – which won’t spell good news.