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‘Absolutely massive’ - Keegan excited by new changes

Paul Fitzpatrick recently say down with our President Dessie Keegan to discuss some of the exciting changes that lie ahead for GAA Handball. 

Can you explain the importance of the news that has been confirmed recently in handball?

There are a few angles to this. It’s great for people to maybe understand that at Congress in February, the GAA announced that handball was being integrated into the Coaching and Development department. That is absolutely massive.

We are now under the director, Shane Flanagan, and once everything is in place, good things will be coming down the line from that. One of the first actions from Tom Moloney in his interim report, from working with Shane and ourselves, is that we really need development officers on the ground.

Handball just can’t grow without development officers, it’s as simple as that. So this is going to bring handball to a place we’ve never, ever seen in our near-100 year history. It’s fantastic.

Was this a goal for your presidency from the outset or was it something that evolved as it went along?

When people got my manifesto in 2019 when I was going for President, I identified development officers as key. It was definitely number one, integration into the GAA was definitely close to the top of the list as well. As a handball person, I’m absolutely over the moon and still kind of pinching myself.

A lot of handball people are really going to take notice when they see the development person knocking on their door and ringing wondering what is going on, how can they help in their clubs and stuff like that, linking in with county boards.

There are targets and goals in place through the Strategic Plan. How does this tie into that?

This is going to turbo-charge the Strategic Plan. Yes, we are a volunteer-led organisation but we need office support as well but it’s crucial that the volunteers lead. If a volunteer chairperson or whoever it is from a province is leading an initiative from the Strategic Plan, if they have a professional person in your province to talk to, to help and guide and give you advice, that’s going to be enormous.

You know yourself, we need energy as volunteers and sometimes that’s all you need, a person lending a hand.

We all know that burn-out of volunteers has been an issue. How will this help alleviate that?

Obviously handball was hit very hard during the pandemic. Covid was a disaster on some levels but the positive out of it was that we had time. We had time to review things. Tom came in as an Interim Manager and was a fresh pair of eyes to look at our organisation and he had an honest, hard look at it.

Some uncomfortable truths came out, stuff we all probably know but they needed to be said. And that’s okay. A plan has come out now and I think it’s very, very important going forward.

Can you explain the thinking behind the governance review?

We would feel that there are things there in the constitution that are perhaps hurting us. For example, if we have an Ard Comhairle meeting, if you want to send a proxy, you have to give seven days’ notice. But what if something happens the day before and it is unavoidable? That province then don’t have a voice at the table. You can’t have that. That’s just one small example of what I’m talking about.

Without down-playing handball, we are a small organisation and we need to be more stream-lined. If we are more stream-lined, we don’t need identical rules to what the GAA has – they have a lot more volunteers to fill certain positions and so on.

We need to be slimmer and we need to be faster and to be able to move quicker. Another thing that would be particularly irritating to me is that you are only allowed to set up a committee once a year, and that’s immediately after Congress.

But let’s just say that something happens in August and we need to act, as per the constitution, we can’t do anything until the following February. So with things like that, I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.

What sort of support are the wider GAA giving handball now?

All of us handballers have said at some stage over the years, ‘oh God, why aren’t the GAA helping us more?’. I always said that we need to help ourselves first, we can’t keep going with a begging bowl – we need to go with a plan.

Where all this started was that I met with Tom Ryan and we had a very honest exchange of views and he said to me, ‘Dessie, get your Strategic Plan in place and if we like it, we’ll back it and we’ll work with you’.
Immediately he gave me two of his staff members to work with me on the Strategic Plan from a professional point of view and then I got some volunteers to go on the committee to put it together. Now, they are simply backing the Strategic Plan. Everything we’re seeing now is in the Strategic Plan if you look at it.
This is the first time we’ve had a working Strategic Plan since 2011. We launched one in 2011 but it fell by the wayside in 2013 for one reason or another. Since then, we have been going on with no Strategic Plan so how can we expect our parent organisation to take us seriously if we’re not putting any plans in front of them?
It’s as simple as that. We have met the GAA, we have talked to them, the top people in the GAA have been happy to meet with us, happy to talk to us and happy to listen to us and, so far, happy to back us.

Obviously there have been teething problems with the new National Centre. What is the time-frame for those being ironed out and when it’s sorted, what do you see as the potential for what the centre can do for the sport?

I think personally we have a European tour stop scheduled for later in the year, the first time this has happened in Ireland. Again, this was very important to me, I feel that some of the main One Wall events should be in the latter end of the year so we can get more media coverage and so on.

I think an official opening in November would be the way to go. We’ll all the teething problems sorted out before then.

Can you explain what the purpose of the proposed ladies handball committee is?

I am very passionate about that and as Tom Moloney often says, we all have mothers. I always feel that we need to give the ladies the platform they deserve. I’ve always felt that ladies handball should not be treated the same as men’s.

I think issues in the ladies game need to be sorted out by the ladies themselves. We have put together a very exciting committee, we have Aisling O’Keeffe, Fiona Tully, Michelle Warren and Ellen O’Connor, so let’s see what happens. Tom recommends that the chairperson of the ladies committee should be on Ard Comhairle – if you want something to happen, you need to be at the table that’s making decisions.
For me personally, I hope that we will have Special Congress where people will vote to have that ladies chairperson on Ard Comahairle and let ladies run ladies handball.