Return of August All-Ireland finals likely to meet Cork opposition

The February meeting of Cork County Board was due to take place last Tuesday but instead it had to be postponed by a week – and that might prove to be no bad thing.

In the interim, the annual report of GAA Director General Tom Ryan was released and in it was mention of the proposals of a work group examining the schedule, chaired by his predecessor Páraic Duffy.

While the split-season was found to have far more positives than negatives – something reflected in player surveys – the group has proposed extending the inter-county season into August.

To allow for this, the provincial pre-season competitions, which were absent in 2025 but returned this year, would be once again discontinued.

The motion, which would also re-insert a two-week gap between the All-Ireland hurling and football finals, is set to go before the GAA’s annual Congress at the end of the month “There has been discussion about the timing of the All-Ireland finals and what that means and the pressures that that creates and the shortcomings about promotion and all those things,” Ryan said at the launch of his report.

“I think sometimes they’re a little bit overstated but at the same time there’s a clear imperative to move things back a little bit and put in a little bit of breathing space.

“If you’re going to do that, you can’t ask players to perform earlier at one end of the year and later at the other.

“So we’ll just ask people to assess that in the round, which works better for the association? What we have in January or what we could have in August? I think it’s August.” Since 2022, when normality resumed in terms of Covid-19’s impact on the schedule having passed, the Cork football championships have started on the last weekend in July, clashing directly with the All-Ireland football final weekend – if Cork were to reach that, the entire programme would be pushed back a week.

In 2025, the earliest county finals were player in mid-October, 12 weeks later, while the intermediate A hurling did not conclude until a further month after that.

The current system allows for breaks to aid dual clubs – and to finish the divisions and colleges sections of the premier senior competitions – but any such grace periods would be removed if the start date went back any further than present. Equally, there would be little or no contingencies to deal with postponements in a worsening climate.

Cork top brass have spoken out in the past about the need for sufficient time to play off the county championships and one would expect that Tuesday’s meeting will have that view endorsed, not least in order to canvass support from elsewhere ahead of Congress.