Dublin football manager Jim Gavin has admitted it comes as no surprise that calls to split Dublin GAA in two have resurfaced.
While some argue that the county has become too strong, Gavin insists that this belief has nothing to back it up, and he feels it would be a huge mistake to go down the road of splitting the county for GAA purposes:”I know it has come up in the past and was in one report a number of years ago and it was quashed,” Gavin say’s in Friday’s Irish Sun newspaper. “One All-Ireland title in 17 years speaks volumes for the dominance of the Dublin senior football team, or lack of.
“I don’t think when Kerry were dominant in the 2000s or Kilkenny and Cork were dominant in hurling that there was any talk of splitting those counties into two.
“So I’m not surprised to hear it, but I just think you have to look at the pure stats of even how many All-Ireland finals we have competed in. Mayo have competed in more in the last few years.
“At underage level, yeah, Dublin have been dominant, but only in the last few years.
“In most Leinster counties there has been a hell of a lot of good work done in all of those underage grades, and I think you’ll see some of those teams come through strongly in the next few years.
“Prraic Duffy has said, even though the population is strong in Dublin, that Dublin GAA needs to compete for players with other sporting organisations. So it doesn’t wash with me to say we have a dominance.
“We have 6.5 million people on the island and 20 per cent of that in the capital but there is not 20 per cent of that population playing Gaelic games.
“The other sporting organisations are very strong in Dublin. You just have to walk through any of the parks on Saturday and Sunday afternoons to see that and compare how many are playing Gaelic football and how many are playing other sports.”
