Camogie Association

I have Fergus O'Cohuir on.

He's a brother of Dara O'Cohuir who works with the Camogie Association.

Fergus did the film with Tommy Malone and Liam Fenley, the hurlers, and Anne Downey and Anne Dalton, the Camogie players, and they're showing it next weekend in Nolan Park.

So I'll have him on and I'll hopefully have some other players, but also I'll have Dixborough and Emeralds over the next week or so to kind of bring them up to talk about them winning the county and then heading into Leinster.

Um, two stories, John, you wanted to touch on.

So- James McLean with a very interesting interview in the paper this Sunday, and Camogie Association versus LGFA, not for the first time over fixture clashes.

This is kind of, uh, the business end of the club championships across the country.

So in Meath, for instance, there was just a, a, a, an, an, a nightmare clash for Kilmessan, Meath, Junior A Camogie semi-final, the same day, same time as the Junior B football final.

You've got three dual players.

Kilmessan say they raised this with the Camogie Association earlier in the year.

"This, this, this could...

This very likely to happen for us." And as often seems to happen, almost with the Camogie Association and the LGFA more than GAA, um, clashes, very little, uh, cooperation between the two, given they're on the road to integration suddenly, and so the two matches are just locked in for those times.

Yeah.

Look, we, um, we posted a story online which was written by Anna Gardiner, who, um, thank God for Anna because, uh, we won't get into, get into it again 'cause we, we mentioned the last few weeks, but the, the level of publicity and, um, communication between the LGFA and the Camogie Association with the local media has been awful, um, in that nothing comes tr- you know, a sentence message here or an email there, but nothing comes into the, the Meath Chronicle, uh, official channels to let us know about fixtures or results or anything like that coming in.

So in fairness, Anna Gardiner noticed this and, uh, has come on board as our, uh, LGFA and camogie correspondent this year, and she's been brilliant.

But, um-

Yeah, yeah

...

Anna's also a dual player as well, um, plays, plays football with Simonstown and camogie with Navan O' Magnys, and she can see from both sides of the coin, uh, just the problems that are there at the minute as regards clashes of fixtures and the lack of communication that seems to be going on between the LGFA and the Camogie Association.

And I see Senator Linda Nelsen Murray, uh, had a, had a post up on Facebook yesterday and I saw a couple of other people mention in different, uh, or p- post in different comments as well, and the, the general theme of the comments is, you know, we're looking for integration.

Okay, just part that to one side.

The sports industry, which is... basically run by all the different sporting associations what we call the NGBs and the local sports partnerships there's 86 of those they get 31 million a year and that's they got an increase this year of 1.7 million on that okay so next year they're going to get 32 whatever 32 point something million That's the money that keeps the show on the road for every sport in the country at the non-elite level.

That keeps the lights on in the offices, in the sports grounds, pays the coaches, pays the staff.

In cricket Ireland, triathlon Ireland, you know, it's not elite.

And do you

know, there are two of the budgets for the Department of Sport and Culture and Media and the budgets for the Department of Agriculture are really important budgets in terms of signalling government policy and government direction and what the government believes in.

I think I wanted to get your take just adjacent on politics you were writing about the Oireachtas the sports Oireachtas committee on Sunday they've had two very high profile outings they had the FAI in and then they had the three GEA associations the GEA the Camogie Association and the LGFA to almost say well what's going on with integration this week so they've had two big outings you weren't impressed with their performance with the FAI in your piece on Sunday

Yeah, I don't think many could be.

not totally there's so much happening at the moment so fair play to Cillian O'Connor in time hopefully we'll get to speak to him actually at some point over the next couple of months there was the integration discussion at the Aratus committee yesterday Now, we won't go into too much detail here because there were two pieces well worth watching back from last night's Off the Ball.

The LGFA CEO, Lynn Savage, and the Camogie Association President, Brian Malloy, were both on talking about the fallout from integration.

Basically, the gist of it, to put it very simply, is that all three organisations are in agreement in words that this should happen, integration.

Integration, basically, is a good thing.

Look, listen, it's well worth watching back and listening back to the interviews last night on News Talk for Off The Ball.

They're available for free as well, wherever you get your podcasts and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

So it's the LGFA CEO, Lynn Savage, and Brian Malloy, who's the Camogie Association president.

We don't even have time, really, to talk about Munster appointing Avan Lee as the new interim CEO, the New Zealander, who was speaking extremely bullishly about his tenure here.

So the three Gaelic games bodies were before the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture, and Sport this afternoon.

You had the LGFA, the Camogie Association, and GAA in the room, and they all asserted their commitment to the integration process.

Now, uh, Lynn Savage is CEO of the LGFA, and she was one of those in the room today.

Lynne, a very good evening to you.

See store or website for details.

You are welcome back.

So we're continuing our chat about today's joint Oireachtas committee featuring the GAA, LGFA, and Camogie Association at government buildings.

Before the break, we were speaking to Lynn Savage, CEO of the LGFA, and I'm very happy to say we now have the president of the Camogie Association with us on the line.