Cork’s All Star midfielder Aidan Walsh may have to drop out of Dublin City University having been deemed ineligible to play Sigerson Cup football this year.
Walsh and Donegal goalkeeper Michael Boyle lost appeals to the Disputes Resolution Authority last month after new participation rules by the GAA’s Higher Education Authority, which state that players who have studied for six years or undertaken more than two college courses can not play hurling or football at third level, were upheld.
The 23-year-old keeps his DCU scholarship for 2013, studying PE and biology, as the ruling came in after he started but next year remains uncertain.
“If I can’t play next year I won’t be able to get a scholarship, which will have an effect on my family, my parents,” said Walsh yesterday at the GAA’s launch of a national anti-bullying campaign. “It’s expensive in Dublin and there’s a lot of expense in terms of accommodation .
“It will affect a lot of people around the country in the next few years, especially with the way things are going with the economy, everything is so dear. I was fierce lucky to get a scholarship to cover the accommodation but if I can’t play next year, I won’t get it. What annoys me the most is that I only got to play two years of Sigerson, there was a lot of people out there who’ve played five or six. It’s an amateur game and all you want to do is play a bit of football for your college, it’s not that big of a deal really because you’re not committing a crime.
“I hoping something can be done during the summer, Congress might alter the rules.”
DCU lost their semi-final to eventual Sigerson champions DIT. “Yeah, it was very hard (to watch). I was able to train with DCU all year and the effort that was put in, for it all to end like that against DIT was very disappointing. I was kind of always holding out a bit of hope. We had a good enough case in the sense what caught me was the course I did when I first went to college when I was 18, I dropped out after five months.
“That was a building service engineer course in Cork Institute of technology. Back then I didn’t know this rule was going to come in and if I knew something like this was going to come in, maybe I would have dropped out earlier.”
