Time to shout ‘Stop!’

Abuse of referees is out of control and now an all-out strike is needed

Insulting referees has become a type of degenerate norm

If this shame isn’t tackled, then officials have the right to walk away

IDENTIFYING the Neanderthal who assaulted a referee in Roscommon on Wednesday night should be easy. Footage was widespread across social media within hours of what happened to Kevin Naughton in Ballyforan. The fervent wish is that the actions of the aggressor are investigated, and that justice is done. And if that happens, then one symptom of a sickness that represents a serious threat to the GAA will have been addressed.

But beyond some short-term deterrent effect, a malady that has been allowed to eat into the wellbeing of Gaelic games like a fungus, will go untreated.

The instinctive reaction to yet another referee assault is to call for quick, merciless justice, and then maybe muse on the need for a cultural change. Then we can forget all about it, and busy ourselves with arguments about split seasons and whether Dublin are in transition or not, and maybe a bit about the glory of the clubs.

And with the forgetting, the sickness thrives, because the status quo remains untouched.

The governing thesis around the GAA holds that great sacrifice is made by those involved. Even at club level, players make a commitment that a generation ago would have been expected of inter-county teams. Managers devote dozens of hours every week to training and preparation.

Then there are the volunteers to consider, traditionally described as unsung but whose efforts, in fact, are so widely recognised, so lovingly detailed, that they constitute the point of most pride to the association and its members.

And then there are the referees. They are, in any objective perspective, as central to the action as the match-ball or the opposing goalkeepers. Yet the best they can hope for is anonymity. The old saw has it that a referee is doing a good job if no one notices them.

They are there to facilitate the action, not to participate in it.

The problem with that, in sports where the rules have existed in an ambiguous state for as long as anyone can remember, is that judging the referee’s performance is in the eye of the beholder.

And if the beholder happens to be a bully with the self-control of a startled mongrel, the consequences can be abhorrent.

Football and hurling regulations, are, in practice, played through great swathes of grey, a liminal space where law and disorder mix and meld. And it is in these ungoverned territories that the fate of referees is sealed. It is here that the sideline scrutineers can pass instant judgement on how the official is performing.

The right to criticise is not at issue here, and the right to grumble about the ref killing their team is one for which even the most reasonable of supporters must sometimes reach. But it’s a fact that every evening of the week at some grade of game, a referee is having disgusting insults fired at them.

And that simply isn’t healthy. That the incident in Roscommon took place at a minor match makes it feel worse; the sight of parents and other adults degrading themselves as they terrorise referees is one of the most depressing in all of sport.

The great problem is that because none of this surprises us, and because it has become some grotesque cultural offshoot of its own, stopping it will be very difficult.

A person who decides to take issue with an official’s call by entering the field of play and assaulting them is a menace, but they are, to an important degree, enabled by generations of silted tradition in which abusing the ref is a commonplace. That is a fact.

Goading, jeering and insulting match officials has, over decades, been allowed to become a type of degenerate norm.

Pundits routinely eviscerate them. All-Ireland winners devote columns to traducing them.

Famous managers tear them apart and question their motives.

This is not the same as clattering a referee on the jaw, but it’s easy to see how the thug that will take their unhappiness to that extreme is simply reaching the grotesque limits of a pervasive culture.

And rolling back all those years of hate won’t be easy. Blaming it all on Croke Park won’t wash, either.

Referees are certainly entitled to feel aggrieved at the inconsistent treatment of miscreants when they appear at disciplinary hearings.

A well-informed lawyer or vigilant administrator will exploit sloppiness in procedure or rule, and the guilty get off and the yellow and red cards that brought them to account, come to nought.

Troubling as that recurrent weakness is, though, it is not at the root of the GAA’s refereeing crisis.

Attitudes are, and the fact is we have all tolerated the treatment of officials, and their classification as necessary irritants, for too long.

We’re getting our comeuppance now.

This weekend’s strike by referee in Roscommon is an honourable course of action, and the chances of an island-wide protest must be high, come the next eruption of cowardly abuse.

But what if it happened next weekend? What if every referee in the country decided to follow the lead of their Roscommon counterparts and refused to take part for a whole round of fixtures?

Club championship season is underway, and big local matches, worthy of the frothiest sponsors’ hype, are spilling out of the match lists.

But what if the referees put a stop to all that for 72 hours, and said that from Friday until Sunday, there would be no whistle brought to lips?

It sounds far-fetched, and it would be resisted, albeit in fierce whispers, at local and national level.

Yet it would also provide exactly the kind of jolt that the GAA needs. And the GAA means more than the director general and the president, and the senior officials in Croke Park and at board level in every county.

The GAA means exactly what the blurbs say: it means the community.

And communities have to accept that the abuse of referees is a great shame, and that if it isn’t tackled properly, then officials have the right to walk away.

It won’t close every big mouth, and a lunatic fringe will always find their way in under the wire, to games of all standards.

Reasonable people, though, need to be made aware of what happens when a referee is assaulted, of the effect it has on their families, and on their careers, and on their sense of self-worth.

Assaults routinely ruin people’s lives. There is enough witness testimony reported from the courts every day to illustrate that.

A trauma inflicted in front of a handful of people on a peaceful midweek evening in a quiet corner of Roscommon, can have as catastrophic an impact as an assault that happens outside a nightclub in the early hours of a Sunday morning.

This has to stop. The particulars of the Ballyforan case will emerge fully, one hopes, through the appropriate channels, and individual miscreants, where guilty, must be harshly treated.

Automatic lifetime bans from any association with the GAA should be the least of their worries, but they should nonetheless be introduced.

But picking individual weeds won’t stop the blight.

That requires a more sustained, dramatic, unequivocal stance.

And an island-wide strike would be a powerful first step.