Aidan O'Shea says there are not enough GAA clubs in Mayo

Aidan O’Shea sees no reason why he won’t be playing for Mayo next season, if he’s selected. Speaking on the BBC’s GAA Social podcast, the Breaffy man told hosts Thomas Niblock and Oisin McConville, he didn’t view questions around his participation next season as a big thing. “As soon as you turn 30, people start wondering if every season is your last. You don’t hear of people asking a 26-year-old if he’ll be back next year. I don’t see it as a big thing - it’s not a big story. I turned 34 last week, I still feel very good, body is good, don’t get injuries,” he stated in a long and wide-ranging interview.

During the discussion, recorded in Breaffy GAA clubhouse, O’Shea revealed he’s received hate mail over the years, which have been regularly intercepted by his mother Sheila and fiance Kristin Vass.

“When you’re getting stuff in through your post box at home, into your family home, that is just scandalous in my opinion. “Hand-written letters, typed letters, personal stuff about you, what you should do. It’s quite delicate stuff, that stuff is very difficult. And I know Dad has gone to higher powers to see if we could do something about it.

“It’s very hard to trace this stuff and that can be quite difficult. Nameless stuff, or the same person probably with different names. So that’s very hard to the point where my mother would have intercepted it at home and when I moved into my house in town, my fiancé would now intercept it.

“It hasn’t happened in the last while, but she would intercept it because you’d know from the writing, there’d be some smart comment on the outside of the letter. They’d hide it and take it away from me.”

FALSE NARRATIVES

In the interview on the very popular podcast, O’Shea said he has accepted he is "not everyone’s cup of tea" and that it is difficult to change perceptions. He told Niblock and McConville that false perceptions are easily created and there’s no defence when anonymous figures on social media go on the attack.

“Narratives have been created around who I am as a person, which are false, and it can be difficult to answer that in a space where you are just sitting at home and there are mediums for other people to utilise. “It’s kind of one of those things I’ve gotten quite used to,” O’Shea added. “There’s a couple of things to that and I don’t have a general reason why that is. In one way, I wouldn’t want to be universally liked. If I was, there would be something wrong.

“You wouldn’t be authentic if you were loved by everybody. That’s the first thing and the second thing is I’ve obviously been playing for Mayo for a while and we haven’t got over the line and with that comes criticism. “And being a player who has been to the forefront of those times, when you don’t win, that criticism is going to come your way and you have to kind of accept that as well. That’s par for the course.

“Yeah, we’ve been close and all that good stuff, but as a player who has been knocking around, and there are few of us in that camp, you have to face up to that criticism.

MORE CLUBS

In a lengthy, unedited recording, O’Shea proposed a revolutionary change to Mayo club football when suggesting a change to the current parish rule in order to stop young people being lost to the sport.

“In Mayo when you look at the population of our towns, in terms of Castlebar, Ballina, Westport - our three biggest towns. We don’t have enough GAA teams in those towns. I know that’s something you can’t fix overnight. But when you look at Tralee in Kerry, you have got O’Rahillys, Austin Stacks, Na Gael who are a new enough club and got to an All-Ireland series recently.

“In the overall development of your county, you’ve got to bring it down to your club. I think playing populations are getting lost in these places.I know a lot of that is historical but you have to think about that down the road as a county board. There is definitely room for three or four more clubs in our county.”

However, one of the O’Shea’s most important comments hit out at the woeful lack of training facilities for Mayo teams. He said the Green and Red had enjoyed a lengthy period at the top of the game, but there were still no training facilities for the youth of the county.

“Here in Mayo we don’t have a training pitch. You go up to Leitrim, they have a Centre of Excellence. You go to Kerry, they have Austin Stack Park, they have Fitzgerald Stadium (and a Centre of Excellence in Currans). We don't have that. We have been to however number of All-Ireland Finals and we’re still talking about building a Centre of Excellence. We don’t even have a field, to train on. We’re using the Connacht Centre of Excellence in Bekan but that’s not sustainable. We need to have a home where 14, 15, 16 year-old boys and girls come and play football. At the moment for a county this big with the playing population like we have, it all needs to be a bit more coordinated than that. That’s really important that we match ambitions that we do want on the pitch with what we do off it.”

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