Former Limerick star Niall Moran has laid the gauntlet down to the GAA “to get back off their high horse” to ensure that the Dillon Quirke Foundation is at the centre of Tipperary’s Munster SHC clash with the Treaty next month.
Tipperary and Limerick had agreed to carry the logo of the Dillon Quirke Foundation on their jerseys for their round-robin meeting with other fundraising efforts also planned around the match.
That is all up in the air at present, though, after the GAA’s recent decision to ban temporary sponsors on jerseys, which includes one-off charity logos.
Quirke, who starred in all of the Premier’s Munster games last year, died last summer while in action for his club Clonoulty-Rossmore in the Tipp SHC and Moran cannot get his head around how the GAA are so out of touch.
“If the GAA go and do not allow Tipp and Limerick to play for the Dillon Quirke Foundation gameโฆI’m sick of some particular people in administration, not all of them, who are so far adrift of what goes on on the ground,” Moran told OurGame.
“Be it with player welfare, which I know we are seeing with the Cavan ladies and in terms of scheduling an All-Star camogie tour for the week of championship. This issue with the Dillon Quirke Foundation, are they for real?
“In an organisation that sometimes struggles and it’s called the Grab All Association and yet when we try to do this huge thing. Dillon Quirke used to work with me when he was younger and he was a top guy.
“The people of Clonoulty are devastated after it, if this can allow cardiac screening to take place for young lads and prevent one child from being killed (it’s so important). They are wound up in their administrative loophole.
“I know here in our local club two or three years ago, we carried a logo by our own choice, ‘Castleconnell, Ahane, Montpelier Cancer Group’, if you have a spare few bob throw it towards them.
“They went around supporting local people who had family members suffering from cancer and what that meant to them. We gave them a few bob, a couple of hundred Euro, but what the actual exposure meant to them.”
Moran has called for leadership from the power brokers within Croke Park to change their decision and support a cause which is at the very centre of the GAA.
“Somebody would want to be the face behind the GAA and say why this decision was taken because to stand behind the umbrella of the GAA, the umbrella of the GAA is the clubs, the kids, the parents, the families, the schools,” the Ahane clubman added.
“They’d want to get back off their high horse and those two teams better be wearing those jerseys, allow the rest of us to pump our few bob in behind that foundation, because that is what the GAA is about, win, lose or draw.
“When there’s 82,000 people in Croke Park for this year’s All-Ireland final, let us raise more publicity around it and do what the GAA is about and what really characterises who we are.”
