With the final round of the league taking place on Sunday, attentions in the GAA world will quickly shift towards towards the championship over the coming weeks.

The provincial competitions will get underway on April 11th, with fixtures taking place in all four provinces that weekend. The condensed nature of the inter-county calendar means that those championships will be finished by mid-May, at which point the All-Ireland series will begin.

Of course, the All-Ireland series is now split into two with the Sam Maguire and Tailteann Cup competitions. While the latter has been a success since its inception, some feel that another new competition is needed in order to keep some of the weaker counties interested throughout the summer.

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Could GAA establish new inter-county competition?

The Tailteann Cup was introduced in order to give lesser counties a competition they could compete deep into the inter-county season. In saying that, the list of winners up to this point makes for interesting reading.

Westmeath, Meath, Kildare, and Down are all counties who are on the bubble of the top two divisions and would have been disappointed to find themselves in the competition in the first place. There has been little success for bottom tier teams during the competition’s brief history.

Writing in the Irish Independent, Colm O’Rourke suggested that a new competition for Division 4 teams is something that the GAA should consider, with the Tailteann Cup an unrealistic goal for those counties as things stand.

Paths will diverge by late afternoon. Some to promotion, others to a lower division as the Tailteann Cup takes shape. It’s future too is debatable…

County boards in the lowest division must be beginning to question whether wasting valuable time playing Tailteann Cup and spending a sack full of money is worth keeping squeezing the lemon for. The answer, of course, is no.

Another championship for the bottom eight or 10 is badly needed with the final in Croke Park. Otherwise these counties would be better off playing club games.

A third tier competition is something that has been suggested in the past, although it remains to be seen how such an event could be accommodated alongside the two current championships. Three tiers of 12 teams makes sense on paper, although counties may be hesitant to vote in a proposal that would see four less teams compete for the Sam Maguire each summer.

In any case, it is something that the GAA may consider moving forward.

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