Around Half of GAA Clubs Lack Hurling Access. Mac Néan Shows One Way Forward

On a map, Belcoo and Blacklion sit on opposite sides of a border. In hurling terms, until recently, both sat well outside the game’s traditional map.

That is why the GAA’s latest hurling development launch in Belcoo matters more than the usual photo-call.

Mac Néan Hurling Club brings together Belcoo O’Raghallaigh in Fermanagh and Shannon Gaels in Cavan. The two communities have built a shared hurling pathway across both a county boundary and the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. When the new set-up held its first training session in 2025, 120 children turned up.

The easy version of the story is that it is a heart-warming cross-border project. The more important version is that Mac Néan is becoming a live test of one of the biggest questions facing hurling: how do you create the game in places where the players, families and facilities may already exist, but the pathway does not?

The number behind the launch

The GAA’s Hurling Development Committee says approximately 50% of GAA clubs currently provide access to hurling for their members.

Turn that around and the scale of the opportunity becomes obvious. Roughly half of the Association’s clubs do not currently offer their members a hurling pathway.

The new Musco HDC Starter Pack programme is targeting 90 clubs that want to introduce hurling or restart it. The GAA says 45 starter packs were provided to new or returning hurling units last year, while Budget 2026 included just under €750,000 specifically to support the growth of hurling in non-traditional and urban areas.

Those figures make this more than a campaign to hand out hurleys and sliotars. The question is whether the GAA can turn initial curiosity into something that survives for five, ten or twenty years.

Mac Néan started with the obvious question

Belcoo and Blacklion are neighbouring communities. Belcoo O’Raghallaigh is in Fermanagh; Shannon Gaels is in Cavan. The administrative lines are real, but they do not necessarily reflect how people live locally.

Mac Néan emerged by treating the area as one community for the purpose of developing hurling.

That mattered because the normal route into the game was not already sitting there waiting for children to join. RTÉ reported in 2025 that the Táin Óg Hurling League, which is designed to create meaningful underage games across county boundaries, gave the project a competition structure that suited what they were trying to build.

That is one of the strongest lessons from the project. If the aim is genuinely to grow hurling, structures sometimes have to follow the players rather than asking the players to fit structures designed for established hurling areas.

A new club needs more than equipment

The starter pack removes one obvious barrier: the cost and difficulty of getting the basic equipment together.

But everyone involved appears to understand that equipment is the beginning rather than the solution.

When RTÉ spoke to Mac Néan organiser John Flanagan in 2025, his priority was blunt: “coaches, coaches, and more coaches”. The GAA’s Hurling Development Committee is making much the same argument now. Sustainable hurling needs coaching, regular games, volunteers and a club structure capable of carrying the project after the excitement of launch night disappears.

This is where the wider GAA demographics debate becomes relevant.

The Association’s National Demographics Committee reported in December 2025 that 78% of GAA clubs are in rural areas with declining populations, while fast-growing urban clubs face a different problem: overcrowding, stretched volunteers and limited facilities.

Those pressures do not disappear because a club wants to add another code. In smaller communities especially, collaboration may become less of an experiment and more of a necessity.

The jersey is a small detail that is not really small

There was another detail in the early Mac Néan story that is easy to overlook. The new hurling group created its own jersey.

For a new club, that is not simply kit.

A jersey is one of the first visible signs that a sporting community exists. Children who previously belonged to different clubs, schools or counties can pull on the same colours and immediately have something shared.

That is particularly powerful in Gaelic games, where club and county colours carry so much identity. We see the same thing in GAA clubs around Ireland and overseas: the shirt often becomes the quickest way of telling the story of where a club comes from and who it represents.

If you are interested in that side of Gaelic games, our guide to GAA jerseys, Gaelic football and hurling looks at why county, club and international Gaelic jerseys can be so different.

Could the model work elsewhere?

It would be a mistake to treat Mac Néan as a template that can simply be copied into every county.

Local geography matters. Volunteers matter. Existing club relationships matter. The availability of coaches and meaningful fixtures matters most of all.

But there is a principle here worth paying attention to.

The GAA already has members in hundreds of clubs that do not currently provide access to hurling. In many cases, the challenge may not be convincing people that hurling is worth playing. Mac Néan’s first-night turnout suggests the appetite can already be there.

The harder job is building the bridge between interest and a sustainable team.

That is why the target of 90 clubs is worth watching. The meaningful number will not be how many starter packs are distributed in 2026. It will be how many of those clubs are still coaching children, entering competitions and developing new coaches several seasons from now.

A border project with a much bigger question behind it

Mac Néan is a Fermanagh-Cavan story, but the issue it raises is national.

If around half of GAA clubs still do not provide access to hurling, then the next phase of the game’s growth cannot depend only on its traditional heartlands producing more players.

It will also depend on places such as Belcoo and Blacklion deciding that hurling belongs to them too.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the project. Nobody had to manufacture a demand for the game. When the opportunity appeared, 120 children arrived.

The opportunity was the missing piece.

More from Mystique: read our complete guide to GAA jerseys, Gaelic football and hurling for more on the colours, identity and stories carried by Gaelic jerseys.

More GAA: Read how Fossa climbed from junior champions to Kerry senior football after four seasons of near misses and progress.

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