Divisional teams in the Laois SFC

[SCFC]

I can't imagine one Slieve Bloom player making the Emo team. Ben Conroy might but he'll have a lot of hurling commitments.

[Laoischat]

I can't imagine one Slieve Bloom player making the Emo team. Ben Conroy might but he'll have a lot of hurling commitments.

He and his brother Gavin are the only ones who might. Ben, if available, would definitely add something to the Emo attack. Good pace, can kick off both feet. Was always one of the best footballers on the underage Laois teams, up until he chose to follow hurling solely.

[merman]

They would also pick up a few decent minor footballers, Ben's younger brother being an obvious example.

[Keyser Söze]

They would also pick up a few decent minor footballers, Ben's younger brother being an obvious example.

This is where it might become complicated?
If Castletown or Castletown Slieve Bloom (as their juvenile club is called) were to have a minor football team how could players play minor with Emo? Or if they could, would players be playing together at U16 level in football for Castletown Slieve Bloom and then potentially playing against each other at Minor football?

So, would you have Slieve Bloom playing hurling with Castletown at minor level and Emo with Na Fianna?
And then Slieve Bloom playing football at minor level with Emo Courtwood The Rock and not with Castletown?
And would you have Emo playing football at minor level as part of Emo Courtwood The Rock Slieve Bloom and not with Sarsfield Gaels?
Who becomes eligible to play with who?!



I don't see this as a join up or amalgamation. It is a club offering (or agreeing?) to accomodate "isolated players" who have no football on offer to them in their own club?

[Downtheroad]

To add to the confusion,  technically Emo and Courtwood play as isolated players with The Rock which is in Mountmellick parish. Actually if Castletown put in an adult football team , Brendan Reddin won't be able to play with Mountmellick which won't go down well. The bottom line is that there won't be any Slieve Bloom players going anywhere if Castletown put in a football team.

[merman]

I understand the Reddins can play with Mountmellick under the parentage rule.

[oneflewoverthecuckoonest]

approx. 5 years ago I was amongst the committee which drew up the designated areas for all the clubs in laois. there was much argument at the time about parishes and boundaries. I know for a fact that the three smallest junior hurling clubs, kyle, slieve bloom and ballypickas refused to be pigeon holed into one parish, as they held their ground on the fact that traditionally they sourced their membership and players from 2 or 3 straddling parishes. from memory ballypickas and slieve bloom, on articles accepted by the laois executive at the time were granted territory in three different parishes. that particular "map" has not been altered in the interim. so the posters who would pigeon hole slieve bloom into castletown parish or ballypickas into ballyroan/abbeyleix simply do not know the existing situation. slieve bloom's juveniles may mostly play with castletown at underage level, this does not mean that slieve bloom is a castletown parish club. it's grounds may be within the parish, the allotted club territory is not exclusively within that one parish.

a second piece of information. central council passed into law a rule effective from the first of January 2014, that from that date onwards, players from an Exclusively Hurling or Football Club, could only play the other code with a club that was Exclusive in the opposite code.

the above two items are the facts as exist now, as opposed to plenty of opinions ignoring gaa law.


as and from 2014, if you play hurling with an exclusively hurling club, for example in laois, kyle, clonad, trumera and now slieve bloom, and should you wish to kick adult football in laois, your options are limited to a handful of exclusive football Only clubs.

I would not have thought that slieve bloom had much in the way of talented footballers, excuse my ignorance, if they do, and they want to play football at adult level, then their options looking from a geographic perspective(ruling out the Carlow side of the county), would be The Rock, Port, O Dempseys, Courtwood, Annanough, The Heath or Emo. logically looking at the lie of the land you could narrow it down to Emo or O Dempseys, and if they are really keen to play then let them at it. it is not as though we are talking about 4 or 5 inter county class players, at best I would guess a few squad club players.

[Giovanni]

approx. 5 years ago I was amongst the committee which drew up the designated areas for all the clubs in laois. there was much argument at the time about parishes and boundaries. I know for a fact that the three smallest junior hurling clubs, kyle, slieve bloom and ballypickas refused to be pigeon holed into one parish, as they held their ground on the fact that traditionally they sourced their membership and players from 2 or 3 straddling parishes. from memory ballypickas and slieve bloom, on articles accepted by the laois executive at the time were granted territory in three different parishes. that particular "map" has not been altered in the interim. so the posters who would pigeon hole slieve bloom into castletown parish or ballypickas into ballyroan/abbeyleix simply do not know the existing situation. slieve bloom's juveniles may mostly play with castletown at underage level, this does not mean that slieve bloom is a castletown parish club. it's grounds may be within the parish, the allotted club territory is not exclusively within that one parish.

a second piece of information. central council passed into law a rule effective from the first of January 2014, that from that date onwards, players from an Exclusively Hurling or Football Club, could only play the other code with a club that was Exclusive in the opposite code.

the above two items are the facts as exist now, as opposed to plenty of opinions ignoring gaa law.


as and from 2014, if you play hurling with an exclusively hurling club, for example in laois, kyle, clonad, trumera and now slieve bloom, and should you wish to kick adult football in laois, your options are limited to a handful of exclusive football Only clubs.

I would not have thought that slieve bloom had much in the way of talented footballers, excuse my ignorance, if they do, and they want to play football at adult level, then their options looking from a geographic perspective(ruling out the Carlow side of the county), would be The Rock, Port, O Dempseys, Courtwood, Annanough, The Heath or Emo. logically looking at the lie of the land you could narrow it down to Emo or O Dempseys, and if they are really keen to play then let them at it. it is not as though we are talking about 4 or 5 inter county class players, at best I would guess a few squad club players.

Very clear and helpful post. I didn't know most of this!

[Keyser Söze]

approx. 5 years ago I was amongst the committee which drew up the designated areas for all the clubs in laois. there was much argument at the time about parishes and boundaries. I know for a fact that the three smallest junior hurling clubs, kyle, slieve bloom and ballypickas refused to be pigeon holed into one parish, as they held their ground on the fact that traditionally they sourced their membership and players from 2 or 3 straddling parishes. from memory ballypickas and slieve bloom, on articles accepted by the laois executive at the time were granted territory in three different parishes. that particular "map" has not been altered in the interim. so the posters who would pigeon hole slieve bloom into castletown parish or ballypickas into ballyroan/abbeyleix simply do not know the existing situation. slieve bloom's juveniles may mostly play with castletown at underage level, this does not mean that slieve bloom is a castletown parish club. it's grounds may be within the parish, the allotted club territory is not exclusively within that one parish.

Interesting. I did not know this. Regarding "allotted club territory" would you mind explaining a couple of points.
You use the example of Slieve Bloom. I presume that they were granted "territory" in Castletown and two of Camross, Mountrath and Ballyfin.
Is it only particular pockets of these 3 parishes that are alotted to Slieve Bloom?
Were the 3 clubs into whose territory it could be argued they were encroaching given opportunity to make their cases?
Is this map available anywhere?

a second piece of information. central council passed into law a rule effective from the first of January 2014, that from that date onwards, players from an Exclusively Hurling or Football Club, could only play the other code with a club that was Exclusive in the opposite code.

the above two items are the facts as exist now, as opposed to plenty of opinions ignoring gaa law.

as and from 2014, if you play hurling with an exclusively hurling club, for example in laois, kyle, clonad, trumera and now slieve bloom, and should you wish to kick adult football in laois, your options are limited to a handful of exclusive football Only clubs.

Didn't this rule exist well before 1/1/14. Isn't that why Mountmellick split into separate Hurling & Football clubs several years ago?

I would not have thought that slieve bloom had much in the way of talented footballers, excuse my ignorance, if they do, and they want to play football at adult level, then their options looking from a geographic perspective(ruling out the Carlow side of the county), would be The Rock, Port, O Dempseys, Courtwood, Annanough, The Heath or Emo.

Would you include Mountmellick Football in this list?

I would not have thought that slieve bloom had much in the way of talented footballers, excuse my ignorance, if they do, and they want to play football at adult level, then their options looking from a geographic perspective(ruling out the Carlow side of the county), would be The Rock, Port, O Dempseys, Courtwood, Annanough, The Heath or Emo. logically looking at the lie of the land you could narrow it down to Emo or O Dempseys, and if they are really keen to play then let them at it. it is not as though we are talking about 4 or 5 inter county class players, at best I would guess a few squad club players.

On the face of it, I don't think anyone has any problem with anyone playing.
I don't speak for anyone other than myself, but my issues would be based on the fixture chaos it creates and the knock on effect it has on other clubs not involved when games are held up/moved because of how difficult it is to facilitate such alliances.

[oneflewoverthecuckoonest]

hi keyser,

I had to check back on some locked away paperwork, it is not 5 years ago, actually 8 to 9 we are talking about.

there had been frequent comment on club boundaries and it was decided by the county executive to establish a task force to sort the thorny issue out. I was one of  6 on that taskforce. We initially sent out a circular to all adult clubs asking them to basically map out or state their perceived territories. Upon receiving the replies, "yield not an inch and take as much as you can" was the clear impression taken from the replies. Frequently we had clubs wishing on their territory maps to delete another club completely, that element surprised no one.
We also had a spanner thrown into  the works when Tom Cahill of Ballypickas asked us to get a clear definition of the phrase "parish" as referred to in places in the GAA rulebook.  Ballypickas wanted an answer from Croke Park as to whether the term "parish" referred to Catholic parish, Church Of Ireland parish, Presbyterian parish or other.....the chair of our task force was a strong and vocal advocate of the parish rule, so after a number of letters to Croke Park with no  satisfactory answer coming back, our group were given a meeting in Croke Park with the main rules people. That meeting defined the future.
We were basically told that under no circumstances could CLG come out and state that their basic structures(clubs) could be based on the geographical parishes of one specific church(ie the catholic church), as were the CLG/GAA to do so would leave it open to sectarian criticism. What we were told off the record, was the each county should try and keep to the local catholic parish boundaries, though this could never be set in stone. It was highlighted that each and every county had a little tweak on boundaries and in a nutshell a laois solution to a laois problem was the answer.

from that date, our committee chairman a long term advocate of the parish rule was crestfallen and to this day he has given up completely on promoting that idea as in the bigger picture, from a GAA political perspective the organisation will always refuse to associate with sectarianism and therefore official backing to a "catholic parish rule" will never ever be sanctioned.

after that, our task force went back to each and every club, trashed out their "boundaries", and in many cases we ended up with many clubs inside and outside of "catholic parishes" having overlapping territory. As Croke Park refused us permission to apply the parish rule, our hands were tied.

after this episode, the maps were drawn up and to this day they are still in some file in the O Moore Park offices. since then, advocates of the parish rule have got little hearing as they don't have any grounds, as a "Catholic" parish may have totally different boundaries to a "Church Of Ireland" parish in the same area, and as we are not entitled to carve up upon a perceived sectarian parish, the old chestnut of a laois solution to a laois problem is in play. I  must add that all that we dealt with fell under the umbrella of Adult Clubs, ie from Minor upwards, the juvenile set up is a totally different beast.

the rule about Exclusive clubs was altered a bit in 2014 as something happened in Cork in 2013 and Murphy got involved and a clear definitive rule was voted in.

I cannot answer you the question on Mountmellick, I do remember a few years ago they functioned in theory as Mountmellick Football and Mountmellick Hurling, supposedly as separate clubs when in effect it was all the one.......I have no idea if this is pertains.


on the final question of fixture chaos, get over it, it will be a problem that the fixtures committee will have to solve, in essence not that big a deal in the bigger scheme of things....and I say that as someone who has sat on fixtures committees within the county over a number of years.

[Keyser Söze]

Thanks for that info.
The specific question of the areas of where say Castletown & Slieve Blooms areas overlap or Camross & Slieve Bloom or Ballypickas & Abbeyleix.
Can players register with either/or as their first club?

[SCFC]

a second piece of information. central council passed into law a rule effective from the first of January 2014, that from that date onwards, players from an Exclusively Hurling or Football Club, could only play the other code with a club that was Exclusive in the opposite code.

If that's the case, why are the county board issuing declaration forms and I quote "for an Exclusive Club Player to Play other Code with a Dual Club" asking them to "Outline Reasons for why you are applying for Permission to play with a Dual Club"?

[oneflewoverthecuckoonest]

my memory is not good enough to answer that specific question about territory of individual clubs, I would suspect that there exists a number of juvenile players who play juvenile in some sort of area/amalgam setup, and these players may have a personal choice on which adult club they join, within the given area.

scfc, what you are describing may be another example of a laois solution for a laois problem......the laois county board may grant permission, but you will find said player may run into trouble should one of his teams end up playing in a club competition outside of laois, ie leinster club championship, and the presence of this player may akin to area teams winning a senior championship deem them ineligible to compete on a provincial stage.....as whilst laois may grant grace and permission to the player, he will still be breaching national rules.

[Keyser Söze]

This has turned into a very interesting thread! I know of instances in the past where it was just presumed that players could play with a club of the opposite code within their parish with no formal approval from the CB.

I always suspected there should have been some annual seeking of permission.

Also interesting that most (or at least some?) of these rules seems to have a proviso "subject to CB approval"!

[Ballygowen]

I remember in 2009 my club didn't enter any football team (as I am from a predominantly hurling club) I wanted to play with a football team outside my parish but I would not of been granted a transfer from the county board, as I had to play the other club that was in my parish (there's 3 separate clubs in my parish). It didn't overly bother me at the time but I would of thought that if your club hasn't a football team I would have been a free agent and could play football with whatever club I wanted to??