THUGGERY ON AND OFF FIELD
The silence from the GAA leadership in the face of recent acts of thuggery is deafening
It’s becoming a major issue for the GAA... outbreaks of violence both on and off the field. Social media videos are magnifying the problem and the officials seem a little slow to take action. Columnists Marc Ó Sé, Shane McGrath and Michael Duignan on a modern scourge
IWITNESSED a couple of incidents lately which might not have been shocking enough for mass online consumption, but which left me sickened to the pit of my stomach. In the grand scheme of things they might seem pretty mild, but one of the fringe benefits of working as a teacher is that I get to maintain my love affair with colleges football.
For me, it has always been the purest grade of all, in the main because although it is played on grass, the rules of the classroom apply. My ears are immune to coarseness at this stage, but during a well-attended Corn Uí Mhuirí match last year I could not get over the abuse that rained down on the players from the stand.
I am not pointing the finger at any one set of supporters, only to say that a lot of parents were at that game and yet the children on the field were not insulated from the kind of bile and bad language that has no place in our game, and most certainly not in our schools.
More recently in a challenge game featuring our school team, one of our players – whose only provocation was in playing well – was slapped across the face by an opponent in an incident which could have led to a melee, had we not rushed to assert control.
Asserting control is something I have never had to do at college level in football before, but that is the thing about indiscipline. It doesn’t drop as a hate bomb from the sky, it creeps up on you insidiously. We live in fast changing times, where hardy bucks leaping out of octagon rings serves a dual purpose, it qualifies as both in-themoment entertainment and as a promotional tool that will bleed a lot more dollars out of the pockets of fools in the future.
But the GAA is in no position to rush the high moral ground and deride Conor McGregor and those who ride shotgun with him in the circus that is the MMA. Because, these days, we can’t tell the 45metre line from the clubhouse car park.
And if you don’t know what I am talking about, you won’t have to travel far to see what happened when Ballyholland played Downpatrick last weekend, when both sets of players left the pitch, leapt a fence, before engaging in a mass brawl with each other and with supporters. Just when you think we have scraped the bottom, you find that this is a multi-layered pit of shame.
That makes it five serious incidents which have all occurred in Ulster and that may well be more than a coincidence given that their passions tends to be red-hot, but the truth is that this has nothing to do with passion and everything to do with undiluted thuggery.
But we are fooling ourselves if we think that we can, in the words of that great Fermanagh Camogie player, Arlene Foster draw a ‘bloodred’ line between Ulster and the rest of us. Ulster is merely in the frame right now, but we have all been responsible in our insidious ways for taking a great game and turning it into a fight club.
It happens down here, too. For example, in a recent county championship match a young talented player, one with aspirations of making the step-up, spent a game spewing verbal poison in the face of a current county star. It was loud enough for others to hear it, but not loud enough for the referee to issue the black card which was designed to flush out this kind of toilet talk.
In promoting hate through words, you are normalising the mindset that allows adults to shout abuse at kids from a distance, thus allowing kids to lash out at each other. Monkey see, monkey do…
It is all fair game now and yet we have the cheek to cry wolf when it explodes in our face. What to do then? There is a multitude of things, but the silence from the GAA leadership has been deafening over the past month.
I am not laying the blame for the violence at the door of Croke Park, but the GAA leadership must understand that we are all diminished when these incidents occur and it impacts in every way. It normalises a culture of hate and leaves parents thinking hard about whether they should send their kids into an environment that seems to tolerate gross acts of thuggery.
That is why GAA president John Horan should have been on the national airwaves this week not just condemning what we have witnessed but also reminding county boards of their duty to uphold law and order in the association.
People need to hear that, and county boards need to realise that their competence will be measured in how they deal when acts of gross indiscipline visit their doorstep.
We should be operating a culture of zero tolerance when it comes to indiscipline.
County boards should rate their match officials in their competence with implementing that policy on the pitch, and rate themselves when it comes to how far they are willing to go when dealing with those who commit serious acts of indiscipline.
If that means throwing clubs out of competitions, then so be it.
It never ceases to amaze me how the club game is never shy about saying that the GAA operates a two-tiered structure – and to its shame it does – when handing clubs the thin end of the wedge in terms of fixtures.
But the other side to that is there is a two-tiered approach to discipline too, and too often at club level there is a culture which suggests that bad behaviour does not carry the same consequences as would apply at inter-county level.
The GAA at county board level needs to get its act together.
If they don’t somewhere down the line the GAA will be left with blood on its hands.