The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Social media could save GAA from itself
WBig Brother is watching you – George Orwell, 1942
ELL then which is it? Has the GAA suddenly become much, much more violent? Or is it simply the case that we’re seeing more of the violence because of the advent of social media?
It feels like every weekend now when we log onto our social media platform of choice we see images of violence perpetrated on GAA fields – and even in one instance in the terraces – up and down the country.
Incidents on successive weekends in Tyrone, Derry (where a referee was assaulted during a senior championship match), Down and now here in the Kingdom have painted a pretty grim picture of life in the Association.
Instinctively it feels like it’s getting worse – after all we’re seeing more of it – but one thing doesn’t necessarily follow the other. It’s just as likely that, even if there has been a marginal up-tick in these sorts of incidents, it’s simply an issue of exposure.
There’s every chance that (in the absence of a set of statistics proving otherwise) the GAA is no more violent now in 2018 than it was in 2017 or 2016. We say this not to downplay the seriousness of what we’ve seen, or to suggest that these are merely isolated incidents that we need not worry too much about.
More so it’s to make the point that this issue was extant long before somebody whipped out a smart-phone and filmed an incident. That’s the only new thing here. Bust-ups and brawls and a good old-fashioned schmozzle are as old as the Association itself, older even, much older.
Perhaps that’s why when something like this blows up there’s a somewhat inevitable backlash against those who highlight it. There’s a sizeable minority out there who seem to think the biggest issue with these bust-ups is those who film them rather than those who carry them out.
We suppose it falls under that old omerta about what happens on the field stays on the field. It’s a nonsense, but a prevailing and disappointingly prevalent one. It’s only through luck that what’s happened on pitches in the last couple of weeks has stayed there.
The dangers of a one-punch fatality have been highlighted by people like former Tyrone footballer Enda McGinley. All it takes is a single blow to the head to bring about serious consequences up to and including death.
That might seem overly dramatic and, yes, it’s a rare thing for a single blow to the head to kill somebody, but it’s by no means unheard of either. It’s a real and present danger and highlighting incidents like those we’ve seen recently does us all, not least of all the GAA itself, a favour.
If the Association is feeling a little bit besieged at the moment and picked upon then it’s looking at it the wrong way entirely. This is a glorious opportunity to grasp the nettle and finally get to grips with this sort of thing once and for all.
In the wake of Sunday’s incident in Austin Stack Park many commentators have highlighted the push by former President of the GAA Liam O’Neill to clamp down on numbers on the sideline a few years ago.
The Laois man was bang on the money. The trouble was his proposals were weakened and watered down to the point where they didn’t solve that which they were intended to. No fault of O’Neill’s just the inevitable consequence of the GAA’s resistance to change.
Beyond this there’s even the chance that merely by having the potential for such incidents to be picked up and widely shared they’ll become less likely to happen. The reasons are two-fold.
For one thing it massively increases the chances of getting caught. Every second of every game Big Brother is watching you, or at least has the potential to be watching you. What you might think is a sneaky dig could well have been picked up on film.
We understand that video evidence, which had previously been disseminated on social media, was key in the disciplinary proceedings in pretty much all of the incidents we’ve seen of late.
Beyond the fear of getting caught – there’s a reason why you see much less of this sort of thing in televised games – there’s the fear of social disapproval or even shaming.
If you were the have-a-go hero from last weekend in Austin Stack Park would you not be absolutely mortified this week? The entire country has seen you at your absolute worst moment and can watch it over and over again. There’s a stigma to that, a stigma that’s going to last (even as it fades somewhat over time) and justifiably so. Actions have consequences.
Somebody in a position of authority ought to know better. It’s one thing for a player to react in the heat of the moment like that – there’s physiological reasons why players sometimes lose the rag, as adrenaline pumps through their veins in the heat of battle – it’s another for a middle aged man on the sideline to do so.
A lot of the time social media has been a force for ill in our world – it arguably gave us Donald Trump as President of the United States and it’s been credibly accused of being a tool of genocide in at least one country – but in this instance it just might be a force for good. Keep on filming everybody.