I was never too fond of Churchill’s quote about the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone. He must have got us on a bad day. But he was spot on when he said that “history is written by the victors”.

GAA historians are likely to look back and see the changing face of the GAA over the last 20 years and observe that change came with the support of its members. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the façade of a true democratic process as represented by GAA Congress and Central Council has long managed to manipulate the association in the chosen direction of those who run things.

I suppose on one hand people might have no problem with that. Leaders lead and all that. But it sticks in the craw when we are told change is at the behest and with the approval of the majority. It simply isn’t.

The GAA is becoming an ever-increasing elitist organisation where a handful of counties are being prioritised over the rest, and what is worse the changes are being dressed up as benefitting those counties further down the food chain. Some of those counties have even managed to be convinced that it will somehow benefit them.

People can argue when the slippery slope was embarked on but there is no doubt in my mind that by the time of the introduction of the super eights we were in full on descent.

Pauric Duffy, the then Director General of the GAA, went on a whistle stop tour of county boards to extol the merits of the Super Eights. And he managed to convince some turkeys to vote for Christmas, including ourselves here in Fermanagh.

And if the Super Eights represented another nail in the coffin for those outside the top counties, the recent introduction of a two-tier championship sees the casket lowered into the ground. In fact, the soil is being shovelled as we speak.

Football is no more skewed than it was 20 years ago in terms of terms of an imbalance between teams. This column has written before about the fact that the average margin of victory has remained largely unchanged over the past 20 years, but such facts are lost amid the myriad of voices clamouring for a change to the system.

The GAA wants change. It wants a premier competition for what it views as its best teams, and it has got it. The top ten teams will remain the same over the coming years and that is all the GAA care about. Those teams from 11 to 22 will float between tier one and tier two, making no real progress, and if anything, running the risk of greater player loss for the summers they are confined to the second tier. There will be no incentive there for continual improvement.

And the bottom ten teams? Well they will continue where they are. The second tier will do nothing to increase their chances of winning a trophy but isn’t it ironic that they were the teams most referenced by those advocating change.

Patronising horse manure about Leitrim getting a chance to play in Croke Park was peddled out. Lovely Leitrim were in Division Four for ten years and only managed promotion last year. Do you really think that is down to the fact they had no tier two championship to play in?

If only there was a competition that pitted teams of equal ability against each other? Oh wait, isn’t there this thing called the league?

The reality is that the GAA are not interested in really helping the counties who are not traditionally strong or who have limited resources. If they were there would be a more equitable spread of coaching money. There isn’t. Rural Ireland is forgotten.

And then we have the fixtures fiasco. The GAA set up a Fixtures Review Group and before they had a chance to come forward with any suggestions, they foisted the two-tier championship on them.

There was no blank sheet approach. In fact, there was barely space on the sheet to write.

Last week the Club Players Association, who were part of the fixtures review, left the process. They accused the committee of being a Trojan horse to implement the wishes of the GAA on fixtures. And they are exactly right.

Those who run the association stack everything in their favour.

The veil of democracy barely covers their bare faced cheek at this stage. The two-tiered championship was voted in during a special congress where delegates from county boards are halved, leaving much more weight given to those who sit on committees in Croke Park.

And guess what, any reform in fixtures will be voted upon in the same manner. The GAA top brass will get exactly what they want because they have engineered it that way.

I repeat, they don’t care about teams in the second tier. The competition is going to be run off on a regional northern southern basis. What a slap in the face. I don’t see the All Ireland Qualifiers run in a similar fashion.

When it comes to TV coverage for the second tier the GAA President was able to say that he had received a text from some lad in RTE and that everything should be ok. Fr Ted stuff.

And it has now emerged that the promise of a big day out before a Super Eight game in Croke Park for the second-tier final is anything but certain. Goalposts being moved again, although I always felt that particular assurance was patronising oul guff anyway.

Counties need to start to fight for themselves. There needs to be a collective will among those of us who are continually being marginalised to say that things must stop. That won’t happen of course.

The slippery slope is a downhill ski run at this stage, and who knows where it will end. One thing is for sure “history will be written by the victors” and they will reside in Croke Park.