There is an increasingly marginalised cohort in Irish society whose needs have been largely overlooked during this lockdown. People who don’t like GAA.

This demographic includes the silent minority who prefer other leisure pursuits. Those who might have enjoyed a round of golf or a game of tennis over the last couple of months, for example. Those who would have loved to go to a play, and were perfectly prepared to wear a mask and sit two metres in any direction from the no more than 50 other people in the theatre. Those who wanted nothing more than to attend Mass in an almost empty church. Or those who just wanted to see their grandchildren.

In a pandemic, there’s nothing exceptional about exceptionalism. Everyone wants the thing they enjoy to be the thing that is exempt from the guidelines. As we’re learning, not everything can be exempt. Still, there’s something particularly special about GAA exceptionalism.

Hospital Report

Back in October, sharing his thoughts on Level 5, chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan said he was in favour of the inter-county championships going ahead because it would lift the spirits of the nation. It was, he said, "important to try to preserve some of that kind of activity to give us all something to look forward to". "That kind of activity", of course, being the GAA.

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It's certainly true that, as a society, we're in thrall to sport generally, and Gaelic games specifically. Otherwise, how to explain the 9½ minutes of peak, 8.35am airtime on RTÉ's Morning Ireland given over recently to an interminable hurling qualifier draw? Or the endless, largely unchallenged commentary about why "we" needed the All-Irelands to happen this year? Or the broad acceptance that the championship should go ahead when families are being kept apart, and small businesses shut down? Or the reluctance to speak out when GAA club celebrations were linked to outbreaks in several counties in September and October?

Cans on the couch

This isn’t about bashing sport which contributes hugely to communities and wellbeing – at least for those who actively participate in them. It’s less certain what the contribution is for those who sit on the couch at home with the lads, drinking cans while the games are on.

It’s about pointing out that other things make a contribution too. And it’s about wanting the rigours of consistency and science to be brought to discussions of compliance and restrictions during a pandemic.

The very public issues with breaches of Covid restrictions have more often been with supporters than with players

In this context, the case for GAA exceptionalism really hasn’t been made. Take all the arguments about why the inter-county championships are “different”, because they involve serious and elite athletes. This analysis overlooks two things: those serious and elite athletes have day jobs that mean mingling with other people on the Monday morning after a game. And the very public issues with breaches of Covid restrictions have more often been with supporters than with players.

GAA exceptionalism is why, when I was researching a piece on Covid clusters in a particular area in recent months, nobody wanted to be quoted on the record about the extent to which the outbreaks were attributable to post-match partying. They were worried about the backlash it might spark locally. And now it has led to frankly bizarre inferences that the breaches of guidelines surrounding GAA games are somehow less risky or more forgivable.

Asked at a National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) briefing last week about video footage of celebrations following provincial title wins, Holohan – incidentally a member of Templeogue Synge Street club – appears to have decided he’d had enough of admonishing us about our compliance and “standards of behaviour” and that, in some circumstances, we’d all do better to turn a blind eye.

Match vs job

“Teams that win titles and important matches tend to celebrate. That’s not a surprise. I think we all have to have a certain understanding and tolerance and acceptance in broad terms. I think we have tipped too much as a country into a sense of blame and trying to find the latest person who is in breach of a particular guideline and trying to find a lamppost to hang them from,” he said.

Participating in raucous post-match celebrations is tolerable, but going to your job is reckless?

He’s absolutely right about the futility of the blame game – but that benevolence should be extended to all of society equally. This is the same Holohan who, just a few days earlier, was worried people had “slipped” and that carparks and canteens were full, as people were “choosing to come into the workplace and meet up and have engagements”. So participating in raucous post-match celebrations is tolerable, but going to your job is reckless?

To be fair, Holohan is not alone in his insistence on special status for the GAA. The GAA itself asserted it in August, when it demanded then-acting chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn meet with it and present "empirical evidence" for the decision that all sport would go behind closed doors. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee – a niece of the Meath football manager Andy McEntee – has also insisted it was "appropriate" for the championships to go ahead because "sport is a really important part of people's lives, not just playing it, but watching it". She wasn't talking about just any sport, of course.

We're due to exit Level 5 shortly but it will be a temporary reprieve. So now that we're officially in a strategy of rolling lockdowns until V-day – that is, whenever it is we get enough of the population vaccinated to declare the pandemic under control, and go back to deciding for ourselves who to hug and when – it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that the decisions about what to reopen should be based on facts and that empirical evidence. Not hunches, not anecdotes, not personal value judgments about what lifts anyone else's mood – and certainly not the leisure-time pursuits of members of Nphet.