Hard to know what to make of Mayo mess

Damian Stack looks at some of the stories making backpage news over the past seven days

WATCHING the whole saga play out you did tend to wonder why the players who walked away weren’t more vocal. They left the panel mid-championship saying that they felt the Mayo ladies camp was “unsafe” and “unhealthy”. Those are some pretty loaded terms. They’re also pretty vague. What we wanted – nay needed – to know was how was it unsafe? In what way was it unhealthy?

To toss out an allegation like that without backing it up is at best disrespectful and at worst reckless. It must have been really difficult for the man who oversaw the Mayo set-up – manager Peter Leahy – to know how to react.

For one thing it was in the middle of the season. Leahy had to think about what was best for the players who remained and what was best for their championship campaign. Getting involved in a war of words with the departed wasn’t the best way of going about that quite clearly.

Instead Leahy waited until after the season had come to a close before speaking out, to Colm Parkinson on The GAA Hour podcast, where he set out his side of the story, which prompted the twelve players (and two backroom members) to release a fuller statement on Tuesday morning.

The statement puts a bit more meat on the bones of their complaints, but not much. It remains, for us, a little vague. The central point they make is this: “Ultimately our issues related to a lack of communication, being undermined, intimidated, feeling isolated and eventually helpless in the entire situation.”

That obviously doesn’t sound great – a management team should have a good look at itself if people under its care feel that way – but does it justify or explain the use of the words “unsafe” and “unhealthy”? We’re honestly not sure that it does.

Clearly we have to take their statement at face value to a certain extent, but we need to know more, we need specifics. We need to know how they were intimidated or undermined and not out of any sort of prurient desire to rubberneck.

We need to know in order to know if the use of the words unsafe and unhealthy was justifiable.

The few specifics which have emerged from Tuesday morning’s press conference – one player was told she was lazy and not committed enough when she asked why she had been dropped for a game – do not rise to the level of unhealthy or unsafe.

Nowhere near.

We need more than this. This story has more to run – if those twelve players thought they were drawing a line under the affair on Tuesday morning, we’d suggest that was somewhat naive.

What’s more we’re likely to be met with a conflicting narrative (the Mayo Board soon released a statement of their own in response). There are two or even three sides to this story.

The majority of players who remained on the panel this summer, for instance, released a statement earlier this month saying that “no player welfare issues exist” within the set-up. There’s quite a disparity between those two statements.

It really is quite the mess. Whose side do you take? Whose testimony do you judge more compelling? In the end we’re likely to be left none the wiser by any of this. It’s possible even to believe that both sides of the divide believe in what they’re saying and are acting in good faith. We don’t for one moment doubt that the players who walked genuinely felt the way they did and felt they had to react the way that they did – why on Earth would they bring all this upon themselves otherwise? – but if you give them that benefit of the doubt you’ve also got to extend it to those who “categorically disagree” with them.

A one-sided narrative doesn’t do us any favours. Just don’t expect to find clarity when everybody has had their say. One person’s intimidation is another’s motivation. It’s really not a black and white thing.

All sides of this debate would do well to bear that in mind – especially those who escalated the rhetorical stakes so readily and doubled down upon them Tuesday morning, adding even that their experience on the Mayo panel this year “had a significant impact on our mental health”.

It’s a big charge to make and one we’d be remiss to dismiss out of hand. Their lived experience is theirs and theirs alone. It’s not for us to judge, save to say that we hope they didn’t make the charge lightly.

Whatever the ins and the outs, whatever the rights and the wrongs, it’s a real shame this situation has arisen. It’s not good for anybody involved – for those who walked, for those who stayed and for those who have to pick up the pieces.

For ladies football too it’s a shame that we’re talking about this sort of dysfunction on the week of an All Ireland final which attracted over fifty thousand people to Croke Park. That’s what we should be talking about. We should be talking about a cracking second half of football, about the skill-set of brilliant players on both sides, about the athleticism and the fitness of these athletes.

On the one hand ladies football is scaling new heights, on the other Mayo is tearing itself apart. Everybody involved deserves better.