Zulu, I've dealt with all the questions you raise dozens of times. No need to re-hash it all again and I'm not interested in a long drawn out debate. We won't enlighten each other and we have fundamentally differing positions on the benefits or depredations of professionalism, as evidenced in your second-last paragraph.
I do, though, object to your gratuitous portrayal of me as some kind of extremist prophet of doom. This comes, of course with the implied suggestion that you are the epitome of reason by comparison. It's especially irritating because I have taken the trouble to support my argument with references, examples and an attempt at reasoned deduction, while you offer only unsupported statements of what can and cannot be. But we'll let that slide.
So just four quick answers:
1. How can professionalism be forced on us:
- How was it forced on tennis and rugby?
2. How can there be professionalism without an international dimension?
- There is a professional Danish women's handball league, as I stated. Not international handball. The women playing in the domestic league get paid to play in that league. I could give you another dozen examples in Europe alone in sports that don’t have an 82,000-capacity stadium, a club in every village and a TV audience of 20% of the entire population for big games. But you can use Google as well as I can.
3. The GPA "hope to eventually represent all players".
- That's a strange thing to say, since they're officially supposed to be representing them already, as they have been set up by us, the GAA membership, as the representative organisation for all players. I know it's hard to do that while specifically banning them from membership of the organisation that "represents" them, so I see their difficulty. I presume, then that what they're expressing is the "hope" that they will actually represent them some day rather than banning them. Yeah, right. What's stopping them? Of course I know. And you know. And I'm surprised you'd swallow horseshit like that.
4. The GPA have said that professionalism is not a goal.
- They have also stated the direct opposite. And their leader has stated that their strategy is to conceal their goal of achieving professionalism until they achieve some lesser goals. "Small steps" I seem to remember he called the strategy. So which statement should I believe?