The GAA have announced details of their upcoming Club forum which will be held in Croke Park on February 9th next. The forum, which will involve representatives from over 300 clubs, is intended as one of a series of initiatives which will contribute to the development of a National Strategic Plan for the Association which will be launched later in the year by incoming Director General of the GAA, Mr Paraic Duffy.
The development of this plan will involve an extensive consultation process which will see the GAA canvassing a broad range of views from across a wide spectrum of Irish society and from within the Association itself. Each County committee will be nominating ten club representatives to attend the forum where they will be involved in a series of workshops covering many areas of GAA activity. The forum has been designed to allow discussion on key aspects of Association policy and to elicit feedback as to the direction and emphasis that club members feel the GAA should be taking over the next five years.
The President of the GAA, Mr Nickey Brennan said that the forum was a great opportunity for club members from around the country to put their points across in relation to matters of importance to them and to their clubs generally.
Paraic Duffy said the Club Forum will play an important role in the development of the National Strategic Plan: "It is intended that the plan will identify priority areas for the Association in the short to medium term, outline our goals in these areas and most importantly, how we intend to achieve them. The club forum will be the first step in identifying what club members see as the main areas of immediate concern for the Association", he said.
Mr Duffy said that ideally the Forum would have featured representation from every single club in the country, but that the numbers involved would have proven unmanÓgeable and that for the Forum to best achieve its goals effectively, it was necessary to limit the numbers involved.
31-Jan-08 by Croke Park
