Tipperary subjected to isolation measures
ALL-IRELAND hurling champions Tipperary have become caught up in the Covid-19 pandemic, with the entire squad and backroom team facing work and social restrictions for a two-week period on their return last night from a warm-weather training camp in Spain.
Liam Sheedy’s team flew out to the Costa Blanca on Monday in the wake of a last-round Allianz Hurling League defeat to Galway which ended their participation in the competition.
And as a further sign of how the coronavirus has impacted on this country, with all GAA activity on hold until March 29, now the All-Ireland champions will have to follow government guidelines after the bulk of the squad were due to land at Shannon Airport.
Minister for Health Simon Harris told RTÉ Radio 1’s Morning Ireland programme yesterday that more advice is being given to people coming back from areas where there have been significant coronavirus outbreaks. Within Europe, all people coming back from Spain and Italy are being asked to restrict their movements for the next two weeks.
That includes not going to work, and a general lessening of their social interactions.
‘It is not quite self-isolate, but to restrict their movements,’ the Minister said. ‘Anyone returning from Italy and Spain will be met by environmental health workers on their return at the airport and told to restrict their movements.’
Tipperary officials said they went ahead with the trip following “consideration of travel guidance”.
Meanwhile, GAA director general Tom Ryan admitted that the future of the concluding stages of the leagues — and whether the championships will go ahead as scheduled – is up in the air right now. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said in an interview on GAA.ie.
‘What we need to do now is sit down and consider how we reignite the whole program, or what parts of it, or in what sequence or where.
‘We’ll put a bit of thought and a bit of work into that, but, to be honest, I really don’t know what that looks like and it’s been incredible even how quickly the situation has changed and evolved over the course of the last two or three days.
‘The most important thing now is not football or hurling, it’s the health of the country and there’s a lot of ways that the GAA can contribute to that.’
He explained why they came to the conclusion that playing the League games scheduled for this weekend behind closed doors was discounted.
‘Off the top of my head, there were maybe 22/23 games and over that list there were 15 or 16 that were critical in terms of where League positions might end up or who might be promoted and so on,’ said Ryan.
‘We talked ourselves about playing games behind closed doors, playing 15 or 16 games out of 22, and then looking at a following week then subsequent.
‘I think that would been very much out of out of touch with what the country needs to do at the moment and it wouldn’t look or feel right to have the GAA playing, albeit behind closed doors, an almost full inter-county fixture program.
‘So, we decided very, very quickly that that’s something that we weren’t going to do.
‘The second facet, I suppose, was the school closures and it was very, very difficult to envisage a scenario where 30 or 40 children can be prohibited from assembling in a school classroom but they can gather and assemble on a GAA club ground.
‘So, what I’d really ask people to do is... we took a very grave step and we took it with a very heavy heart yesterday, but for people in GAA clubs to give that their best shot and abide by those as best they can because I think the better that we observe what we’re being asked to do now, hopefully the shorter the closed period will be,’ he added.