The last All-Ireland finals played in September in a normal season took place in 2017 and Burns outlined how it could happen, which would effectively end the split season.

“There is a way of achieving that (more space in inter-county calendar) going right back to the two finals in September,” he said on GAAGO’s “Ratified” magazine show with pundits Marc Ó Sé, Michael Murphy, Paddy Andrews and Aaron Kernan.

“The difficulty with it is the people who are going to have to compromise are the people with their own county championships. I think we missed the point to what the problem was. The problem is if you’re organising the Premier League fixtures, very simple all you have to look out for is the UEFA and FIFA fixtures.

“But if you’re organising the GAA’s master fixtures plan, what you bump into is 32 fixture making bodies, the Higher Education body and multiple that by two because you have hurling and football.

“Then within that you have seven or eight different iterations. You have groups of four, nobody can explain how you (Ó Sé) do it in Kerry, it’s easier to learn Chinese. In your (Murphy’s) county, it’s league format now and I think in Tyrone it’s straight knock-out. In Wexford, I think they play six games.

“It is totally ridiculous to think we can organise a master fixtures plan around that. So what my thinking on this is let’s say if we went to the old way of having All-Ireland finals back whenever they were, what you say is, ‘There’s the master fixtures plan and this will work if every county works its league and championship on this format’.

“Let’s say groups of four for the championship like most counties do it. We’re not saying you have to do it this way but if you don’t you do so at your own risk.

“I think that would be a good compromise to say to the counties we can work the master fixtures around this iteration of club organisation. If you want to continue the old way, don’t come running to us.” 

Burns highlighted the hotel difficulties experienced by finals taking place in July. “In the middle of July, it’s impossible for counties to get accommodation in Dublin. I know the Kerry Group look after all of Kerry’s expenses and they’re very lucky that they happen to do so, but it’s very virtually impossible for two counties to get accommodation the weekend of the All-Ireland final in the last weekend in July.

“All of these things, it’s not perfect, it’s working at the moment at a particular level. Club players love it but let’s not tie ourselves to that if we are going to innovate.” 

Burns expanded on his idea to enshrine the amateur status and cut down on the €40 million annual spend on inter-county team preparation expenditure by developing a licensing system.

Citing the GAA’s developing relationship with NFL franchise Pittsburgh Steelers, he said: “All of the (NFL’s) GPS systems are licensed, which means the NFL can tell if anyone is training by the fact the GPS systems are together at any one time.

“In Pittsburgh Steelers, there’s a camera on their training ground that it goes back to head office in the NFL and if there’s one player out on that, the club could lose its licence to perform. That’s how serious it is.

“When I rang counties last year suggesting putting cameras in centres of excellence, people laughed at me saying, ‘Catch a grip’. That’s how stark it has to be.” He continued: “We have this unlicensed amateur status in our game where everybody wants to improve and we’re all doing so and it’s more training sessions and longer, more intense training sessions, more money being spent.

“But all we’re doing is everybody is moving up and the players are the people losing out. The last people you blame for this is managers. The managers are being told by supporters to get out there and win a match.

“For example, my own county. We got to the league finals but everyone in Armagh expects us to win the Ulster and if we don’t that won’t be a successful year, so Kieran McGeeney has to do whatever it’s going to take to win the Ulster.

“I don’t blame Kieran for that, I don’t blame the Armagh County Board because if they appointed him, they have to spend the money that it’s going to take to get us there.

“So there’s this arms race going on and there is nobody in control of it and there’s nobody in control of it but it has to come tumbling down and we have to slim it right back down. It comes down to licensing the counties and making counties apply to compete. I speak to county chairs all the time and they’re crying out for this because the amount of money it is taking.” 

Burns describes the GAA’s core ethos of respect as being “a disaster” and spoke of introducing referee grading the discipline on teams in their match reports whereby teams who regularly showed indiscipline would be punished and the better teams rewarded.

He also joked that while he was chair of the playing rules committee that introduced the kick-out mark, he wasn’t involved in the advanced mark – “I don’t want that on my CV!” The “Ratified” Show can be watched here: