On Liveline, RTÉ radio’s uproarious phone-in show, many cases are tried summarily before the court of public opinion.
On Monday and Tuesday, the All Stars committee made their first appearance in the dock, after many decades of misdemeanours that failed to attract Liveline’s attention. Contentious selection decisions, or outrageous selection decisions, or unresolvable selection decisions were tried in lower courts.
The difference in this case was the identity of the co-defendant, Kyle Hayes. On Friday he was awarded an All Star at left half back, having also appeared on the three-person shortlist for Hurler of the Year. That shortlist, and the full list of All Star nominees, were announced on September 20th, 10 days after the Limerick hurler was found guilty of dangerous driving, and 10 months after he was found guilty of two counts of violent disorder.
Hayes is appealing the dangerous driving conviction, but he is expected to appear again at Limerick Circuit Court next month to discover if the two-year suspended sentence imposed on him last March will be activated.
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In a parallel world Hayes was selected for an All Star. The thrust of the complaints on Liveline, and elsewhere, is that Hayes’s convictions should have disqualified him from consideration. But if that argument holds water, why was he allowed to line out for Limerick in this year’s league and championship? Why was he not suspended by the GAA for bringing the Association into disrepute?
After his first conviction last December, that possibility was never raised. Should it have been? That was not a matter for the All Stars committee.
With an issue as emotive as this, there is just a small peninsula of solid ground. The task of the All Stars committee, made up of GAA reporters from the national media, is to pick the best 15 players in hurling and football from a given season.
Having spent 25 years as part of the selection committee, it is never a frictionless process, and nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Arguments and counter arguments are thrashed out and from year to year only a handful of winners are chosen by consensus.
For his performances in this year’s championship, Hayes would have fallen into that bracket. Once Hayes was free to appear on the list of nominees in September he was bound to appear on the final team in November. Any other outcome would have been dishonest. He was the best left half back in the championship. The league doesn’t matter.
Should Hayes have appeared on the shortlist for Hurler of the Year? His performances made him a plausible candidate. Would there have been an outcry if he had been omitted from that list? Clearly not.
The All Stars committee could have spared themselves some opprobrium by nominating somebody else, but they based their judgment on his performances for Limerick, and nothing else. In their application of the relevant criteria, they were consistent.
It used to be the case that players who were sent off during the year were disqualified from consideration for an All Star. When that restriction was discarded in 1997, it was replaced by a much looser “sportsmanship” rule to be applied at the discretion of the committee. That rule hasn’t been raised for years, and, in any case, it was irrelevant here. Hayes’s merits as an All Star were founded solely on his performances in a Limerick jersey.
There is no provision in the conditions of the scheme to disqualify a player for their behaviour off the field. Should such a provision exist? It is certain to be raised at the next meeting of the All Stars steering committee. What is far from certain is that any change will be made. Where would you draw the line? Would minor offences be tolerated, for example? Which ones?
For their purpose, the All Star selectors were obliged to compartmentalise Hayes’s behaviour and judge him as a hurler. In court, and in the judgment of anybody who followed the cases against him, no such division was realistic. Hayes’s public image is the sum of everything.
In Hayes’s first sentencing hearing last January, character references were made by people from every strand of his life, from those who dealt with him in education, his workplace, his charitable work and hurling.
The court was being asked to judge Hayes not just as the man who was guilty of violent disorder in a Limerick nightclub, or who was seen outside the nightclub attacking another man with “swinging kicks”, as Judge Dermot Sheehan noted, but as somebody who had redeeming qualities too and had “matured”, the court was told.
Judge Sheehan’s sentencing remarks took 31 minutes to deliver. It was abundantly clear that he had given serious consideration to a custodial sentence. At the previous hearing, Cillian McCarthy made a powerful victim impact statement and Judge Sheehan noted the “traumatic” impact of the incident on the young man.
In her appearance on Liveline on Tuesday, the victim’s mother, Elaine McCarthy, said that “her whole world fell apart” on the morning after the attack. She also said that it had “a profound effect” on her son. In the context of all that, hurling is incomparably trivial.
But, at the mercy of the court, Hayes was at liberty to return to the Limerick team. Eyebrows were raised when he was picked for a Saturday evening league game against Dublin in Croke Park, weeks before his final sentencing hearing. But it was clear that the Limerick management were anxious to reintegrate him. His name was greeted with cheers by the couple of thousand Limerick supporters who travelled that night.
Where he stands now in the eyes of the wider public is a different matter. People will judge him by the sum of everything. The All Stars committee, though, did not have that licence. It was not their business to dwell on his criminal convictions or reflect on the facts of those cases.
Under the terms of the scheme, they were obliged to judge him on his performances for Limerick. They had no choice.
