GAA’s Groucho system needs a bog-hole burial

GROUCHO MARX had the GAA figured out without ever having to contribute to a melee. ‘Politics,’ he once declared ‘is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.’

Whenever, and we can only hope it will be very soon, they dismantle and bury the GAA’s disciplinary infrastructure in a deep bog hole, naturally only with Eamonn Ryan’s permission, Groucho’s (right) inscription should mark its grave.

This week, a bit like a broken clock, it actually worked because it failed. Conor McKenna will be available for Tyrone today for the visit of Derry to Omagh, having had the red card shown to him in the closing minutes of their win over Fermanagh, successfully rescinded.

It was the right call. After all, he was charged with our old friend of ‘contributing to a melee’ so tame it would most likely invite derisory abuse from onlookers had it occurred outside the chipper on a Saturday night, while two Fermanagh players’ contribution was so feeble it met with just yellow cards from referee Joe McQuillan.

McKenna didn’t do enough to get sent off and miss a game but, had Armagh’s Aidan Nugent and Stefan Campbell’s legal representatives not exploited a loophole the previous week by pointing out that referee Paddy Neilan had failed to specify what they had done in the aftermath of their League game against Donegal, apart from actually getting stuck into it, the chances are McKenna would be watching the action from the Healy

Park stands today. Rather than looking at a disciplinary process so complex it has become a plaything for the legal profession, the GAA’s reaction to recent events is to advise referees to be more specific in describing what the offending player did in the first instance to contribute to a melee.

We assume this will run the whole gambit from name-calling to Tyson Fury impersonations, with the onus now being put on referees to upgrade their writing skills and do it all literary justice.

Naturally, when faced with this hard evidence, Ireland’s finest legal minds will leave well enough alone. Sure, what else would they do?