Feature Interview
7 November 2003
PJ NOLAN INTERVIEW: THE PRESIDENT'S ANGLE (Part 1) Click Here for Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
Cycling Ireland will hold its AGM at the Abbey Court Hotel in Nenagh on Saturday week, November 22nd. With time ticking down to the meeting, IrishCycling.com put questions to CI’s president PJ Nolan on a range of topics, from the achievements of 2003, the plans for 2004 and the issues which went well and not so well during the year.
Shane
Stokes: What are your thoughts on the AGM coming up?
PJ
Nolan: Obviously it is a very important forum. I personally am disappointed
that more people aren’t going forward for offices. For instance, it is a shame
that besides the people who are being rotated and who are putting themselves up
for re-election, there was a place left vacant by the resignation of Ciaran
McKenna. There is only one person who has been nominated to go for that. That
means de facto there will not be an election – that everybody, if they get one
vote, they will go forward. There is nobody to oppose them. I don’t know if
that means that everybody is super happy with the job we are doing, or does it
mean something else. Does it mean that the membership don’t think that it is
worth getting involved at this level? That is the worrying thing, that there
aren’t enough volunteers out there on the ground, doing the ordinary jobs.
SS: Did clubs get enough notification?
PJ: The notification went out as according to the terms of the constitution…the clubs got an initial notification a number of weeks ago to put in motions etc, and then the actual format is posted out. That is the same that it ever was.
You have said that you are disappointed that nobody is challenging you for the presidency. Why do you say that?
PJ: I am sure that there are people out there who could do the job better than I could and am sure that there are people out there who could also do the job better than the board is doing it…It is a shame that this isn’t being looked at in a way that can improve cycling. The board is doing a very good job, I think, and we are doing our best. But I am sure that there are people out there who could do it better. These are people who haven’t been identified, haven’t been approached or who aren’t interested enough. I just feel that maybe it is symptomatic of what is happening in a lot of sports, that there aren’t enough volunteers.
Don’t get me wrong – we have some unbelievable people out there who are doing some incredible work.. the likes of Gabriel Howard, Alice Sheratt and people like that. There are some phenomenal workers out there and it shows…the amount of participation in events has grown. It is interesting that we have increased our membership this year when the vast majority of cycling organisations throughout the world have experienced a drop.
SS: You
have also stated that you are convinced that there are other people out there
who could do a better job. What is the reason behind this?
PJ: Well, I mean, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses in any job. It would be very arrogant of me to say I am the best….I will do the best job that I can do, but it may not be the best job that can be done. I recognise that. Certainly our board…people think that the board of Cycling Ireland may just be some group of individuals who meet, but it is a very dynamic board. I have the title of president but that certainly doesn’t mean that I would hold any more sway than anybody else on the board. I can tell you that the other people on the board have very much their own opinions. I suppose it is a great credit to the board that there hasn’t been a vote on anything in the past…I think almost three years. It is a discursive rather than a didactic situation…we talk about things and figure things out. I think they are mature people and sometimes I don’t agree with the way things are being done, but if the rest of the people in their collective wisdom think that is the right way to do it, we do it that way. It is important that we work very much in co-operation with each other. To be honest with you the sport has done quite well over the past number of years. Not just since I have been here, but in the way that it has been put together by a lot of very good people.
SS: With
what you say is a lack of volunteers coming forward and a lack of new people
getting involved, do that make it hard to take the kind of criticism that is on
the messageboard or from other sources? In other words, do you feel frustrated
that there is criticism without people getting involved?
PJ: Well, I have no problem with criticism whatsoever. Sometimes criticism is justified. That said, I think the real place to criticise is face to face, or at the AGM. Enough people know my phone-number, they can talk to me or other members of the board. I welcome it, because there are better ways of doing things. The worry is that a lot of people in cycling….a lot of us have been there a long time and there are better, newer ideas coming up. We have put an awful lot of stuff in place at the moment. If you look at what has been happened this year, there has been a lot happening.
You see, people may not understand precisely what the board does. If you take it that last Friday Phil Collins and I would have spent the day in with the sports council. Over the past number of years, Jack Watson has been rewriting the technical rules and we also have to redo the constitution. You are talking about numbers of days of peoples’ time, for example people spending time in the Four Courts trying to deal with various legal matters that come up. That kind of things takes up huge chunks of peoples’ days, it is all very time-consuming.
As another example, consider the BC-NICF-UCI resolution which is being put to the British Cycling’s national council next week at Newport. We have put our set of proposals to BC and they are examining them the whole time. Hopefully we will try to resolve that issue, with regard to the status of BC and the UCI resolution. That is obviously a very important thing. That has taken a lot of time this year. Compliance matters of NGB’s are very high at the moment. You have to do an awful lot of compliance, in other words filling in reports, targets and schedules. Like the Olympic team manager thing – the amount of work that takes and the amount of work High Performance and preparing all those reports takes is huge.
We have had one big plus this year with regard to time constraints in that Stuart Hallam has introduced a lot of voice conferencing meetings, which means that a lot of the time people don’t have to travel from their house… If you take Jack Watson, he lives in Belfast, while Micheal Concannon lives in Killorglin. You are talking about a collective 800 mile round trip for those two people, which is crazy. That is too much of their time. But if we can do the same business over the phone, it means that is costing the organisation less and obviously we want to cut down on the costs as much as we can.
SS: You talk about the stuff that has been achieved this year. Do you accept though that the PR end of things has not been good? For example, last year Ciarán McKenna said to me that this was one area which would have to be addressed, but this year there has been little improvement in terms of getting the message out there.
PJ: In some terms, I would accept that. In other terms I wouldn't. I think that the work that Gabriel and Kay Howard do with regards to the race results is very good.
SS: Okay, but I don’t mean the area of race results. You listed the things that have been achieved this year yet a lot people wouldn’t know about that……
PJ: Well, we do issue a newsletter to every single person in the organisation twice a year. That was never done before. We would like to issue it four times a year but the bloomin’ thing costs money. That actually comes into somebody in hard copy, well-presented twice a year. That is good, but admittedly it may not be often enough.
We are in the process of re-launching our website, that will take place imminently. Peter Purfield pointed out to us that there are actually huge limitations with the site as it is. Peter has been looking at this too and he has pointed out that we need to get more information out there to the members, and do it quicker. Stuart is obviously heavy duty into IT and all that stuff, so he has been doing up more stuff for the website as of recently.
But, yeah, I would accept that if people don’t know something that is not super-sensitive, well then it is a fault that we haven’t got it out there. We are getting a situation now where people on the various different commissions will have passwords and will be able to put stuff onto the website themselves. Just say that somebody wins a stage of a race somewhere, the manager will be able to put in a password and post the stuff on the website without having to send it centrally first.
I suppose from a journalist’s point of view it is frustrating that you don’t get the information quickly enough and I would say, yeah, the communication at some levels does have to be improved. Certainly with the new website we hope to improve that end of things. A lot of the thing is the pure lack of resources and the amount of work that goes on. If you take the amount of work which goes on with National Bike Week, or even posting stuff for the AGM…all that stuff has to by physically done and that takes time. The newsletter has to be prepared twice a year and the amount of meetings that Stuart Hallam has to go to is just ridiculous. He is always meeting people about the various different things, between sponsors, government, initiatives. If you take today, for example – Stuart is doing the YDO interviews for Northern Ireland. It has already taken him four days of his time, between getting the application forms in, sending out the packs, getting the replies in and then wheeling it down to a short list. These are the human resource issues that we have to deal with…it is huge. Certainly Stuart has brought a business ethos into the organisation. Not that it wasn’t there before but he certainly has crystallised a lot of matter that we need to look at. I am very happy with the way things are going for him, from that point of view.
SS: If I think back to a few years ago when yourself and Ciarán got involved, it seemed that whenever anything was happening, Ciarán would be on the phone to the journalists or a press release would be sent out. From this people got the impression that a lot was being done. From what you are saying to me, it seems like a lot is being done but the problem is that a lot of people don’t see that. I think people have the impression that CI may have lost momentum….
PJ: Well, listen, Ciarán’s loss to the board was huge. Apart from the amount of work he did, Ciarán is a great guy and was very, very good at doing PR. We haven’t filled his place yet.
SS: Will there be someone stepping in next year?
PJ: Sure, if you look at the nominations, someone is going forward for that position. We thought about filling it during the year but the problem is that because of the way things worked out, it was not possible. We have only had three board meetings since Ciarán, because we do most of our board meetings over the phone. It would have been unfair on somebody to come into the middle of that situation and to have to try to hit the ground running. If you ask people who have been on the board over the years, the amount of work they have had to do is phenomenal.
I am very sorry that Ciarán resigned because he certainly was the architect of the strategy plan and with the amount of work he had done with High Performance, he had certainly brought cycling to a new level. It is a real pity.
SS: So is there going to be someone appointed to a general PR role?
PJ: I think recently Stuart has been working that role. I suppose the new board will obviously see this as a hole that needs to be filled in and whether we appoint somebody or do it through the office, that remains to be seen. The trouble is if you appoint a volunteer, someone like me who is away some of the time, then you become inaccessible. That is a problem. The big problem is because we are volunteers, we are not…..it goes back to your original question, that of why I think somebody else could do the job better… Consider my case. I am a commercial dairy farmer and I work every second weekend. You cannot get anyone else to do that work. One of the problems with being the President is because you have to attend so many meetings during the week, you don’t get to the things you want to get to which are the bicycle races at the weekend. You have to work to make up the time. It is a pity. People say to me the whole time ‘I haven’t seen you in ages’ – they are right, as I don’t get to as many races as I want to, because of work commitments.