VHI Cul Camps Cost Difference Not Cool at All
Talking Balls
It has emerged that there is a considerable differential in the cost of sending your child to one of the GAA’s official VHI Cul Camps depending on where you live. For the uninitiated, the Cul Camps are adminstered through the county boards. Each participant - aged from 7 to 13 years of age, gets five days’ intensive coaching in hurling and football, a full Cul Camps strip, water bottle and rucksack.
In return for handing over the fee, the parents get five days without their lovely children so they can cut the grass, get their hair done, go shopping, have an affair - whatever it is they do with a bit of spare time on their hands. Some may even go and give a hand at the camps.
However this time around there is a considerable difference in sending your child to a camp in the likes of Derry or Tyrone - where it costs £30 or €38 as opposed to €70 in Mayo or €65 in Sligo. It’s not as if the coaching will be any the better over in Connacht like?
Jimmy O’Dwyer, national coordinator of the programme, attributes the price difference to various factors, including the relative strength of sterling versus the euro, and British Government funding of sport at local level.
He said: “Those are certainly factors influencing the prices. We have set down guidelines regarding prices - for instance, we don’t want kids to be charged as much as €100 and in fairness to all the counties involved, none of them are near that figure. The cost of the Cul camps are determined at county level by the county boards involved, but they’re all cognisant of the costs involved, and we’re working hard to bring those costs down. Many counties are offering reduced prices if one or more children from the same family sign up together, for example.”
The good news is that the Cul Camps are cheaper than rival schemes run by the IRFU and FAI which each apparently charge €99. It’s also better than having the children run riot for a week - drinking, smoking and taking drugs and whatever other badness they might like to get up to on a hot summer’s day.