Link between crime and punishment long broken

ON GAELIC GAMES:Sunday's latest GAA pitch row and the fudge over paying managers stem from the same source: rampant rule bending when it suits and no accountability

IN THE recoil from the latest disgrace on GAA playing fields, there has been a reproach, sometimes implicit, that this is the real problem facing the association – not payments to managers, which dominated last week’s agenda.

Taken to the extreme, it’s a classic parry: a problem should be disregarded because there’s another, bigger one demanding your attention. The practical response would, of course, be to deal with one and then refocus on the other. Except in the case of the GAA the issues of irregular payment and violence can’t be separated and compartmentalised.

They both relate to the most crippling deficiency in an otherwise admirable organisation: an outlaw tendency to bend or ignore rules when they are seen to be obstacles to self-interest.

What motivated director general Páraic Duffy to initiate the debate on payments to managers was an interesting event, organised by the NUI Galway Alumni Association. It featured a paper The Challenge of Change(sadly unrecorded) by Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh to mark the GAA's 125th anniversary.

Duffy attended and was impressed by Ó Tuathaigh’s contention that widespread, irregular payments to managers constituted a huge challenge to the GAA. He cited the fall from grace of the Roman Catholic church within Irish society as a warning of what happens to institutions that chronically fail to practise what they preach and fail to punish those who breach their rules.

It was Duffy’s off-the-cuff response (he was present simply as a member of the audience) to this that commanded headlines for the following few days and the point about the moral corruption of sustained hypocrisy was lost. It is, however, central to the issues that have consumed coverage of the GAA in the past two weeks.

Gaelic games are not systemically violent. A sense of the wider sentiment could have been identified at the 2009 annual congress where disciplinary reforms were discussed and came within a hair’s breadth of securing the two-thirds majority necessary. An impressive range of speakers contributed to the debate and repeatedly the point was made that cynicism and indiscipline shouldn’t be seen to create advantage within the games.

The problem for the association, one that the reform proposals of three years ago tried to address, is a culture of loosening the necessary connection between breaking rules and being made fully accountable for the delinquency has long been ingrained.

The problem is there because so many units and individuals have decided over the years their interest outweighs the importance of having a functioning set of rules. We see it when the kitchen sink gets thrown at the Disputes Resolution Authority(itself a creature of the membership’s willingness to flout the rule about not taking the GAA to court) to secure some technical release for a transgressor before a big match.

We see it in the recently highlighted unwillingness to obey the rule on amateurism and we see it in the refusal to observe a close season, as accepted by congress.

Above all we see it in indiscipline on the field, which is effectively a desire to benefit your team outside of the rules and hope to get away with it – in other words, cheating.

The latest sorry chapter came at the weekend with the All-Ireland junior football semi-final between Kerry’s Dromid Pearses and Derrytresk from Tyrone.

There should be a natural caution about pre-empting the likely GAA investigation into the matter. Most of the testimony has come from the Dromid Pearses' perspective and the video clip shown on RTE's Six-One Newswas shorn of context.

It has been widely remarked on that this is the latest serious eruption of indiscipline involving a Tyrone club but that is not relevant to what happened and Derrytresk do not come to this with a reputation of that nature.

Nonetheless any neutral I have spoken to saw the Tyrone club as the principal culprits in the free-for-all before half-time and the video clip shows Derrytresk replacements jumping over the barrier on to the pitch and getting involved in the melee.

The alleged post-match attack on Kerry player Declan O’Sullivan was also independently attested to.

Significantly this is a Croke Park matter. It will be dealt with neither by a county board nor even a provincial council but, by the GAA’s national Central Competitions Control Committee and for the sake of the association they need to make a good job of it.

They will have to consider the referee’s report and presumably conduct an investigation, which will need to talk to both clubs as well as the organising officials at the Portlaoise venue before coming to a conclusion.

The question in most peoples’ minds is whether – if the investigation’s conclusion is in line with the prima facie evidence – the GAA will have the gumption to disqualify Derrytresk as well as to punish the assorted miscreants from both sides.

Such a sanction would be bitterly contested by the club and almost certainly delay the scheduled date for the All-Ireland intermediate football final, due to be played on a double bill with the junior.

It would also deprive Galway club Clonbur of their big day in Croke Park given that Dromid would hardly be reinstated. In other words there are many reasons why it would be more convenient to let the final go ahead even with all of the identified Derrytresk players and replacements suspended for the match. It depends how serious the GAA are about forging the link between misbehaviour and appropriate punishment.

This isn’t a case of who started it and associated whatabout-ery. Neither is it a media plot. It’s understandable the GAA might be angry at times that there is such focus on their junior and intermediate matches. Any outbreak of indiscipline in Gaelic games, no matter how insignificant the level, can attain national prominence in a way that doesn’t apply to other sports.

But there’s no point in complaining about media and programmes like Liveline taking a sensationalist interest in events like Sunday’s. These scenes took place and it was GAA people, albeit mostly from Kerry, on the radio complaining about the ugliness of what took place. They might be partial observers but it’s hardly credible to explain away the reactions as simply sour grapes.

Similarly the video clip may not tell the whole story but it tells enough to shock viewers and cast Gaelic games, again, in a poor light.

How badly does the GAA want to address this?