The easiest way to silence abusers is to ignore them
OF ALL the problems the GAA have been flummoxed by this summer, the issue of jackasses in Irish society is the one over which they have least control. Ignorance, creepiness and nastiness have leached from the minds, mouths and pens of a minority for generations, and they always will.
A number of prominent GAA figures discussing the issue has highlighted it in recent days, but this is not a problem confined to hurling and football. A spokesperson for the GAA was interviewed on the News at One on RTÉ earlier in the week.
‘It seems to be something that the GAA struggles to get a handle on,’ suggested the presenter, Claire Byrne.
This is a societal problem, came the reasonable reply.
‘Given that everybody is talking about this now again since Éamonn [Fitzmaurice] brought it up, do you think it’s time for the GAA to look again at what more can be done?’ Byrne asked later in the interview.
The sending of poisonous letters cannot be stopped. Trolls on social media can never be entirely silenced.
This is not a modern phenomenon: Fitzmaurice, John Kiely, Micheál Donoghue and James Horan spoke about receiving letters, which suggests they were being baited not by tech-savvy malcontents, but older cranks. Public discourse may have coarsened, or perhaps its startling expansion as a consequence of social media merely amplifies distasteful and offensive attitudes that have survived through generations.
This is one problem that cannot be neatly packaged and blamed on new media, however.
The more traditional forms have a responsibility to prioritise reason and decency. So when Byrne wondered about what more could be done, a reasonable response could have been to suggest she start with her own organisation.
RTÉ’s sports coverage thrives on punditry, and its biggest stars are controversial. Joe Brolly said in 2013 that ‘you can forget about Sean Cavanagh as far as he’s a man’ after the latter’s notorious dragdown on Monaghan’s Conor McManus in an All-Ireland quarter-final. Discussing the style of game played by Cavan on another occasion, he said, ‘as somebody said, it’s as ugly as Marty Morrissey, their football’. Years earlier, the Mayo footballer Ciarán McDonald was compared to a ‘Swedish maid’ in RTÉ analysis. Eamon Dunphy’s departure from the national broadcaster was celebrated in some places with compilations of his most memorable quotes. They included calling Niall Quinn a ‘creep’ and the former Liverpool player Harry Kewell a ‘fat clown’.
Agonised discussions about coarsened debate need to encompass more than Twitter accounts and Facebook rants. And yes, it must include newspaper coverage, too.
Only a fool, of course, would take inspiration from pungent commentary in a TV studio or on the page and then abuse managers and players through letters or online.
The fact is that there has always been an unfortunate minority intent on targeting figures in sport who they believe have failed them in some way.
It didn’t take the emergence of a pundits’ industry to mobilise them. And it is also the case that there is very little to be done about these fools. They are anonymised online, and the more disturbed correspondents do not tend to sign their names to letters.
Anthony Daly has recalled phoning up some letter-writers who had left their names and numbers, and in some cases he reported agreeable exchanges with them.
Éamonn Fitzmaurice did not, it seems, have that kind of person writing to him.
The managers who made their experiences public found a broadly similar way of dealing with pests: they mostly forgot about them.
And beyond that, there is not a great deal they or the GAA or much anyone else can do. You may as well try and ban daft and incoherent opinions. Everyone is entitled to them, but they should not all be weighed the same.
There is not an aspiring player or manager in the country who will be dissuaded by this week’s events.
They are well used to abuse, hearing plenty of it on sidelines and from behind the wire at matches since they were juveniles.
That is not to defend it, but the air is rendered blue at pitches all over the country every weekend – and in codes other than hurling and football, too.
When it follows them home, then matters darken. It must be dreadful for an individual and their family when an envelope stiffened with bitterness lands on the mat, and the Gardaí should become involved in any instance where people feel threatened.
In most cases, the clowns should simply be ignored. They have always moved among us, gutless and nasty.
And they always will.