Pat Daly reflects on 44 years of service to the GAA

By John Harrington

After 44 years as a full-time employee of the GAA, Pat Daly is finally hanging up his hurley.

Through 16 GAA presidencies he has served in a variety of roles and made an impact that is nigh on impossible to quantify.

Put simply, his work at the coalface of coaching and games development has been utterly transformative.

No matter what your involvement in Gaelic games as a player, coach, or parent, there’s a good chance your life has been touched by an initiative that Daly has been centrally involved in.

Here are a few to give you a flavour. Féile Peile na nÓg, Go Games, Cúl Camps, Super Games, Celtic Challenge, Táin, Hawkeye, International Rules, GAA World Games, GAA All-Stars tours, AIB Club Awards, GAA Coaching Conferences, the Yellow Sliotar, the SMART Sliotar, Intangible Cultural Heritage Recognition for Hurling from UNESCO.

Those are just some of the front of house initiatives and behind the scenes his fingerprints are over countless iterations of GAA coaching and games development strategies, publications, and resources.

“It's been a vocation as much as anything else,” says Daly of his 44 years year with the GAA.

“You get an opportunity to do things in a way that you would never get anywhere else and I was driven by a sense of passion and commitment and a preparedness to work hard.

“It was never an exercise in coming in and lounging around. You were always pushing the boundaries out and you were looking for more staff and you might not necessarily be getting as many as you needed.

“That was a challenge but I enjoyed it. I've loved working here. I've been proud and privileged to have worked here. It's been an amazing opportunity to work across so many frontiers.

“You give it your best shot and as much energy as you have. It was challenging and you have ups and downs and ins and outs and plenty of people along the way you wouldn't be going for a pint with, but that's the nature of it.

“It was challenging but it was inspiring and I was very fortunate to work with a wonderful crew of people.”

Daly’s commitment to making the GAA as vibrant and as inclusive a sporting organisation as it could possibly went beyond professional diligence.

He had felt the power of that inclusivity himself in a very real way in his formative years. Both his parents had passed away by the time he was 12 and, in a way, the GAA became something of a surrogate family.

The warm embrace of his club Tallow and the bonds he formed hurling with De La Salle College in Waterford, St. Patrick’s Teacher Training College in Dublin, and the Waterford senior hurling team showed him what the GAA could be when at its very best. In receiving, he was highly motivated to give back himself.

“It shaped me as a person,” says Daly. “No doubt. I think the day after I watched my mother buried I went to boarding school. She died of a sudden brain haemorrhage.

“If you have no parents then perception meets reality fairly quickly. You say to yourself, 'where do I belong here? What do I hang on to?'

“In a sense the GAA was a life raft for me. And the people in Tallow would be good to you because they were conscious of the fact that you were a sole trader.

“I would have been welcome any place in Tallow. They would have known the situation. Then I was in boarding school and when I left boarding school I went to St. Pat's. I was flitting in and out. The only reason I'd be in Tallow was to play GAA.

“So, it did become your second home. You developed an understanding of what it could be and what it should be. Maybe I was forced into that space, but it definitely moulded me as a person.

“I always had a sense that this is what the GAA is about. It's about giving back and developing people and ensuring you become another person on foot of your involvement with it.

“Either consciously or unconsciously that always would have been there allied to whatever I would have picked up from being trained to be a teacher and then being exposed to coach education in other sports like soccer and rugby.”

Daly first joined the GAA in 1981 as a Regional Development Officer. It was a new role and was Government funded after the then Minister for Youth & Sport, Jim Tunney, granted all youth organisations funding for the deployment of development staff.

Lorcan O Ruairc from Galway was employed as a Development Manager, Daly and Fintan Lalor from Offaly came in as Regional Development Managers, and the trio reported to Muiris De Prionnbhail, the GAA’s Head of Development.

Their appointments brought the number of full-time staff deployed in Croke Park at the time up to just 14, and not everyone viewed Daly’s career move as a smart one.

“People said to me, 'you're giving up a full-time teaching job to go working in Croke Park?!'”

“Going to Dublin at that time from Tallow was like emigrating. It was five hours away.

“People would come for All-Irelands but after that you wouldn't be going to Dublin unless you really had to.

“When I first came here, Croke Park basically wasn't in great shape. Then things evolved. You got to the Centenary year in '84, that was the first time I saw a colour photograph here. There was a colour photograph on the cover of the All-Ireland Final that year in Thurles.

“So, it was black and white photography, the internet was unheard of, small staff, and you were running projects basically.”

In 1988 the GAA set up a Games Development Department and Daly set about marrying the practice of hurling and football with the theory to provide educational resources for GAA coaches.

In 1991 he edited the Gaelic Football Skills Hurling & Camogie Skills Manuals for children.

The following year he authored the Complete Guide to Gaelic Games, for adolescents and adults.

He devised a ‘Total Performance Coaching Framework which was based on the three T's and the three P's. Techncial Precision, Tactical Prowess, Team Play, Physical fitness, Psychological Focus, and Participant Feedback.

All of this fed into a coaching ethos that was designed to ensure as many people as possible ‘Play to Stay with the GAA’.

This found full expression in arguably the greatest legacy of Daly’s 44 years with the GAA, Go Games, which have made hurling, camogie, and Gaelic football a far more inclusive experience for children by ensuring every child gets to play in every game for the full game

“My own youngest son was playing with Ratoath and we'd go to an U10 game and there would be 30 of them there,” recalls Daly. “15 of them would get a game and the other 15 wouldn't get a game.

“He'd come home and all hell would break loose. He wouldn't say anything to me but he'd say to his mother that he'd got no game.

“At the time I had been working with Niall Moyna and Noel McCaffrey on the Go Games. Setting up games where every kid got an opportunity to play for the entire game.

“We had a philosophy that you play to learn, you learn to perform, and you perform to your potential as a child, youth and adult. And you won't perform to your potential at adult level unless you play to learn and learn to perform.

“So we rolled out the Go Games in 2004 to huge opposition. People didn't want it. There was a very strong culture of keep the best, forget the rest, and win at all costs.

“The attitude was, 'what's this thing about inclusivity and ensuring everybody gets a go for the entire game? This is second-rate stuff. We don't need this stuff’.

“Mickey Whelan completed a PhD on the Go Games which very much said this is the way to go. We're providing more touches, we're providing involvement, we're doing everything you should be doing with a child.

“Mickey used to have this saying, ‘Do you want to get good at playing the piano? Yes? Then go and play the piano. Do you want to get good at playing the game? Yes? Then play the game.'

“That’s where I was coming from was in terms of the child. The child has to be a participant in the game.

“There was this thinking that Go Games were non-competitive. There's no such thing as a non-competitive game. If kids are playing in the garden its competitive.

“The critical thing is that it's developmental. And if winning is at the end of it then the likelihood is that it won't be developmental because everything will be keep the best, forget the rest, and win."

Attitudes didn’t change overnight but the process was helped over time by the annual GAA Coaching Conferences which disseminated ideas and philosophies of best practice throughout the GAA coaching community.

“We started the coaching conference in 1998 and Liam Griffin was the key-note speaker,” says Daly.

“They were literally hanging out of the rafters over in the Ash Suite of the Cusack Stand. We had around 250 people at that first one and a thousand at the last one I was involved with in January 2020 before Covid kicked in.

“It was big networking event that enabled us to provide examples of good practice and to get our message out there. It was a tonic for the troops and became a big annual event.

“There was a psychologist or psychotherapist by the name of Colm O'Connor and he did a session on the soul of sport one time.

“He said, ‘when you come into this stadium you can do things you wouldn't dream of doing the day you got married. You can stand up and shout and roar. These are the things you can do under the banner of sport’

“He also said it's important to remember that the day you don't provide a kid with the opportunity to play you stop them from playing in their imagination. And if you don't have imagination, you won't have innovation. You'll have nothing.

“Fellas like him would have been a big help around the Go Games. And we also brought over guys came from Rugby League to perpetuate the message.

“They had gone through it five years before us but told us they got to a place where if they withdrew their version of Go Games then all hell would break lose.

“I think we're probably there now. There's still a residue of keep the best, forget the rest, that's still going on, and you constantly have to keep working away at that.”

Daly was a driving force behind the rising standards in Gaelic games coaching in recent decades but is concerned by one of the unintended consequences of that – the creeping professionalism now endemic in the preparation of inter-county teams and, increasingly, club teams.

As money spent on preparing teams continues to sky-rocket, he believes it is an existential threat to the ethos of volunteerism that underpins what’s best about the GAA.

“I think that's a good example of the thing evolving away from where it should be and nothing being done about it,” says Daly. “It's evolving away to the detriment of the Association.

“I liken it to the data centres that are drawing a huge amount of energy off the national grid. County teams and journey-men coaches are a bit like that in the GAA.

“Someone else has to be putting more energy back into the grid, it has to come from someplace.

“And it comes from volunteers and it's absolutely essential that they are recognised. You have to drive that spirit of volunteerism.

“There's only one key performance indicator in the GAA - to keep people involved. That's the only key performance indicator, whether as a player, administrator, a coach, or a referee.

“You're giving back and you're promoting the common good. That's volunteerism by another name.

“The big thing for me is a sense of mission, vision, and ambition. Mission - do we understand why we exist? Vision - do we learn how we evolve? Ambition - do we know what we measure? Because the what, the how, and the why of anything is the key to everything.

“So, it should be why you exist, how you evolve, and what you evaluate. If you exist and you say this is why we exist then you also need to ask, 'are we evolving in line? Is what we're measuring telling us that we're evolving in the right direction?’

“I think there's some disconnects in there in terms of why we exist, how we're evolving, and what we're evaluating.

“That does require a degree of examination and perhaps recalibration. If this is our mission and why we exist, are we drifting away from why we exist? How can we adhere to the core principles there and how can we evaluate the extent to which we are?

“There are two key things through every club that we should evaluate in terms of our ambition as an Association. Self-sufficiency and sustainability. Have we seen self-sufficiency? Have we seen sustainability?

“In terms of driving self-sufficiency, a club should promote coaches from within. And if we don't have personnel, we're going to get the players to do it until we do.

“Then what are you doing? You're developing the person. They have to take responsibility.”

Daly believes the best example is now often being set by some of our youngest clubs in World GAA.

He’s played a big part himself in the rapid growth of Gaelic games beyond these shores though the introduction of the GAA World Games and reckons we can learn a lot from the energy and inclusivity of our overseas units.

“You have the essence of the GAA there,” says Daly. “One club models, no journey-men coaches. It’s about the game and inclusivity.

“You get people who go abroad who wouldn't touch the GAA with a bargepole here and they’re playing over there because of that spirit of inclusion.

“Where it's growing internationally it's organic and the people want to do it. No amount of planning or strategizing will do that.”

He’s a devout believer in the power of inclusivity and community that can flow from the GAA because he’s felt it all his life, in good times and in bad.

The worst time of all came in September, 2021 when his eldest son Cathal tragically passed away after a short illness.

Through those terribly difficult days, weeks, and months, the support he and his family received from the wider GAA community meant an awful lot.

“When Cathal passed away it's then you realise the value of the thing,” says Daly. “The support we got from the GAA was incredible. Just incredible. Nationally, internationally, from all over.

“At the time you needed it because they were difficult times with hard wallops. But that's how life unfolds, there will be ups and downs and ins and outs and all you can do is the best you can.”

Daly had thought his involvement with his adopted club, Ratoath in Meath, was over by then, but they pulled him back at a time when they perhaps sensed he needed it.

In 2022 he was invited him down to a family fun day to organise a game of GAA Fun & Run, an inclusive game that that Daly himself had devised akin to hurling or football rounders.

That was ultimately the launch pad for Daly getting involved with the establishment of ‘Ratoath Rockets’ which provided a practical outlet in the club for children with additional needs to come together and play games.

“We are into our third year now and have 42 kids with additional needs signed up,” says Daly.

“We run from May 9 until the end of September. It's free play by another name, it’s fun games, physical activity and communication.

“They said to me, ‘how are we going to remember Cathal?’ There's only one thing. We'll have what we call 'Cathal's Call' which is the Ratoath Rockets slogan, ‘Volunteer and give back to the common good!’

“Last year this girl Alice Kinsella, a transition year student, answered that call and said she wanted to be involved with Ratoath Rockets. That encapsulates the spirit of the GAA. You can't afford to lose that.”

Daly has plenty more to give to the GAA himself as a volunteer, it’s just his time as an employee that’s over.

As he leaves the building what does he hope the legacy of those 44 years of work has been?

“For putting some kind of a base in place that would serve the Association into the future and making sure that the key principles were sound and solid,” he says.

“That's what would give me most satisfaction. Everything changes all the time forever. Nothing ever stays the same. But if you put in decent foundations I think you set the thing up for the future.

“That's what would probably give me the most satisfaction between coach education and the different programmes, the varying initiatives.

“The key thing is to get as many kids as you can playing. Get the base as big as you can and get a system of games in place that will take them through the player pathway.

“And empower them give back in time when they exit the player pathway. That they want to give back themselves and promote the common good and develop other people.

“You have a person who becomes a participant who becomes a player who becomes a performer.

“But if you don't develop the person right through then you finish up with a shell of a performer. You haven't developed the person.

“We should always seek to develop the person as well as the performer.”

“In the final analysis, involvement in the GAA is more a means to a higher end than an end in itself.

“In that context, the foremost challenge is to ensure that better people are playing better games in the best community-based organisation in the world.”