CASE DISMISSED
Anyone arguing in favour of the GAA’s complicated and flabby disciplinary process should take a good look at the AFL’s streamlined system of justice
IT WAS Conor McKenna’s good fortune this week that Van Diemen’s Land takes a more enlightened approach to justice than was once the case. That was more than could be said for his Monaghan neighbour, Alexander Pearse, who was hung in 1824 at Hobart Town Gaol for cannibalism.
The Monaghan’s man gift was a fleetness of foot that would leave Conor McManus blushing and which twice facilitated his escape from prison.
His curse was a hearty appetite and he may also have been hard of hearing, confusing a prison break-away for a trip to the take-away.
Over the course of his two break-outs he was suspected of dining out on five of his fellow escapees but, in the end, was convicted for just a dinner on one.
Anyhow, the likelihood is that the truth of the matter was as flimsy as the charge that saw him transported from his native shore in the first instance – an apparent shoe fetish which led to the crown prosecutor charging him with the theft of six pairs.
The court reporter for the Hobart Town Gazette at Pearse’s trial noted deep scepticism as to the voracity of his appetite.
He did not seem to be someone who was ‘laden with the weight of human blood, and believed to have banqueted on human flesh,’ suggested the scribe, in an age when court reporting was a little less shackled by legal constraints or burdened by forensics.
At no stage in the 90 minutes of McKenna’s hearing this week, which took place 48 hours after the Essendon player was cited for biting his Western Bulldogs opponent Tory Dickson, was the Tyrone man accused of ‘banqueting’.
He, however, admitted to having ‘nipped’ Dickson’s neck, and within six minutes of the hearing’s conclusion was hit with a three-match ban.
We know all this because the disciplinary process was reported on a live blog carried on the AFL’s official webpage, which also broadcast McKenna’s contrite admission of guilt.
‘I’d like to take full responsibility for my actions. I’m really sorry for what I’ve done and I’m just looking forward to moving on now,’ he proffered.
However, it was hard to marry those words to his Tyrone tongue.
After all, he comes from a land where ‘full responsibility’ is an alien concept and one which is happily torched on the altar of opportunism.
In GAA’s justice food chain, taking responsibility comes in a distant second to taking your chance.
This is not because AFL players are blessed with a more sensitive morale threshold – we have seen enough in the International Rules over the years to nail that lie – but because their disciplinary process delivers on protecting the game and its players.
In 2005 they streamlined the process, extending to a match review panel which meets on a Monday and retains the right to cite, a tribunal for those who want to contest a charge and an appeal tribunal as a fall-back.
And it is done as transparently and expeditiously as possible, aware that justice delayed is justice denied.
Here, the GAA operates in the belief that justice cannot be delivered unless you make a Rumpole of the Bailey song-and-dance out of it.
Roughly the same structures as the AFL possess exist, it is just that there are more of them and the full process can drag on for an age.
The Central Control Competitions Committee (CCCC) is a lesser version of the AFL’s Match Review Panel – diminished because it is restricted to dealing retrospectively with incidents the match official has not dealt with it. Then there is the disciplinary alphabet soup of Central Hearings Committee (CHC), Central Appeals Committee (CAC) and Disputes Resolution Authority (DRA) which the charged are invited to dine on.
And all of this is carried out under the cover of darkness; the lack of transparency justified on the basis the process must not be prejudiced.
In the AFL their process is modelled on what works best for sport, in the GAA it is modelled on what works best for the criminal judicial system.
The GAA would benefit from accepting that there is a difference between prosecuting first degree murder and a third-man tackle.
Whereas GAA players are encouraged and, at times, rewarded for chancing their arm, in the AFL the opposite is the case.
Any player who accepts a charge has that taken into account – they work on a points system which sees a deduction for acceptance of a charge – if they land in disciplinary hot-water again.
That is not to the say that the GAA disciplinary process is not working – the reward for exhausting the process has become diminished in recent years.
Over a three-year period up to last summer, less than a quarter of those
In the GAA justice food chain, taking responsibility comes second to taking your chance
who contested a charge were successful, while only two out of the 15 who appealed were successful.
The DRA has been an unqualified success, not only in taking the courts out of play, but in ensuring the process is now more thorough in execution.
And yet it is nowhere close to being fit for purpose.
Jack Anderson, who served as secretary to the DRA, pointed out recently that the multi-tiered structure was not practical, especially in a condensed Championship season which will see week-on-week games in both codes.
That could see players go through a hearing, an appeal and a sitting of the DRA inside six days. That is farcical and cruel. Diarmuid Connolly infamously took that route in 2015 when he was cleared to play in that year’s semi-final replay, but it was a match in which the Dublin player made little impact. It’s little wonder as he was still sitting in the lobby of a hotel until the early hours, awaiting the DRA’s verdict, which is the kind of insanity that could be visited on players on a weekly basis this summer. The introduction of all-encompassing citing panel and merging the DRA and CAC into a singular appeal structure would do wonders, and let’s be transparent about it, too. After all, we are not dealing with convicts or cannibals; just citizens at play.