Ulster and IRFU need to set an example
LAST Saturday, Old Belvedere’s ground at Anglesea Road was a hive of activity. The club reverberated to the quintessential rugby soundtrack of boots clattering on concrete as players came and went from the changing room, kids shouting excitedly as they aped Ireland heroes and blazer-clad alickadoos swapping exaggerated ‘back-inthe-day’ anecdotes.
The same scenes were being played out at the same time in similar venues across the country.
The clubs may feel like barnacles clinging to the hull of the luxury liner that is Irish rugby in the professional era, but on All-Ireland League Saturdays, they still feel relevant.
Because clubs remain the lifeblood of the game in this country, the foundation that national success is built upon. It is a grassroots environment where commitment is a given — from players and coaches to ex-players, parents and committee members — and there is no better barometer of the opinions and concerns of the Irish rugby fraternity than the club bar or terraces on an AIL afternoon.
Which is why last Saturday felt so weird.
UCC won a tense, high-scoring game against the home side in an encounter packed with drama and skill; Irish rugby was still basking in the afterglow of glorious Grand Slam-consummation at Twickenham seven days previously and yet the dominant topic of conversation afterwards revolved around a dense and deeply unsettling court case taking place over 100 miles away in Belfast.
Unsettling because the rape trial involving Ulster and Ireland stars Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding lifted the rock on a culture that has existed, and been enthusiastically indulged, in rugby for generations.
No one who has experienced it can deny the laddishness that permeates the rugby dressing-room.
It is an overtly machismo-driven environment, where testosterone is the chosen currency and the ‘conquest’ is king. It is the backdrop to the jovially embraced ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’ mantra and the reason why, in defiance of statistical evidence and simple logic, so few high-profile rugby players have come out as gay.
The defendants in the Belfast trial — Jackson, Olding and their friends Blane McIlroy and Rory Harrison — were acquitted and exonerated yesterday but their jury-decreed innocence does not dilute the damage that has been done to the game.
The evidence from the defendants over nine torrid weeks of trial has indisputably brought the game into disrepute and created a legacy that will be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to shift.
The notion that rugby has long been a haven for misogynists is now cemented in the wider public consciousness and, without raking over the particulars of the 2016 night in question, there is a sordid aspect to it all that has polluted perception and left an oil-slick of unease in its wake.
Rugby has traditionally been viewed as ‘a game for animals played by gentlemen’ in reference to its physical nature and roots in fee-paying schooling and privileged practitioners.
Regardless of their innocence in the face of the charges levelled in this trial, there is nothing gentlemanly about the evidence presented by the defendants or the messages exchanged around it.
Sexual norms may have adjusted to the era of Tinder and accessall-areas online titillation but basic respect should persist through any technological or cultural shifts and respect was clearly abandoned here.
There was a defiant aspect to the post-acquittal statements issued by Jackson and Olding yesterday but, while both will wish to put this episode behind them and resume their Ulster and Ireland careers, that will not, and should not, be seen as a matter of course.
Their evidence has not only tainted the players in question, it has tainted all those associated with them and Irish rugby as a whole.
Which brings us to their employers, Ulster Rugby and, by extension, the IRFU. Both bodies issued statements yesterday stressing they would conduct reviews into the whole affair and those reviews are now critical to repairing rugby’s image.
Jackson and Olding are highprofile, sporting figureheads that youngsters aspire to emulate.
Parents will now justifiably question whether the rugby culture, as exposed in this trial, is a sporting path they wish their children to follow and thus it is vital that Ulster and the IRFU take a stand.
These players are innocent of these charges levelled against them but their conduct was still unbecoming as professional rugby players and public icons, and that demands censure.
At a time when Irish rugby is enjoying unprecedented highs on the pitch, this trial has brought the game to unprecedented lows off it and it filters all the way down.
A terrible example has been set and, for rugby’s image to have any hope of recovery, proper example must now be made.