Consent to accept official judgment and arbitration is grossly lacking, writes SEÁN MORAN

WOULD THE GAA be better off with no rule book? Judging by some of the reactions to the Paul Galvin affair you could be forgiven for thinking that a set of rules is a strictly optional aspect of football and hurling.

The facts of this case are well known by this stage and have been flickering across television screens for the past 10 days during which period the nation at large has also been listening to the usual litany of special pleading and spurious argument designed to diminish the offence ("he didn't break anyone's leg" - bless him!) or at times blacken the reputation of referee Paddy Russell, who reported the Kerry captain for the offences that triggered the 24-week suspension announced yesterday by the Central Hearings Committee (CHC).

This is not or shouldn't be about Kerry or a Kerry captain regardless of a season which could lead to the county's first three-in-a-row in 22 years. The central issue concerns all counties and units of the association and is essentially about the willingness to observe good order and fair play, the absence of which is a blight on any organised sport.

Considered, disinterested opinion knows that what happened in this case was wrong and the suspension imposed covered by the rule book; punishment could indeed have been less stringent (12 weeks is the stipulated minimum) but equally it could have been greater (a second, eight-week ban is set to run concurrently).

The problem for the GAA in general is that consent to accept official judgment and arbitration is grossly lacking in its games.

This anarchic tendency is to be seen frequently. Teams lose, as they have to in competitive sport, but a regular reaction of those connected with beaten intercounty teams is to moan and bitch about extrinsic matters: venue, club matches, crowded schedules and most of all referees.

Officiating exists in a state of near-crisis (near-crisis because the recruitment of referees hasn't broken down entirely as yet) and there is scant respect shown to match officials whose performances are regularly criticised and often from the perspective of invincible ignorance regarding the rule book.

What if referees do make mistakes, which they are bound to do? In such circumstances there is even greater need for respect: a referee is never more right than when he is wrong, so to speak. This is because human arbitration carries the risk of error but games have to function on the basis of accepting decisions despite inevitable caprice - in the same way that the intervention of a goalpost or crossbar has to be accepted.

It can be argued - maybe in a touch of pseudo-anthropology - that an organisation founded as the sporting adjunct of an independence movement perhaps has more difficulty with authority than a traditionally establishment sport like rugby but too often the tendency is to confuse self-indulgent indiscipline with confronting injustice.

For a start, sport is sport no matter how many rainy nights you spend on the training field. The complicated checks and balances that society devises to protect life, liberty and possessions should not be relevant. Everyone understands the need to counter unfairness within the system but no sport should try to elevate its rule book to the status of a legal code. Watching the Sunday Game panel on the night of the Galvin incident react as if they were speakers at a legal symposium, just after an injunction had been served, was dispiriting. Maybe panellists were influenced by Down manager Ross Carr's blast at the RTÉ programme for setting the GAA's disciplinary agenda but there are no grounds for treating the Central Competitions Control Committee or CHC as if they were juries in danger of being prejudiced.

All that muttering about "due process" must have appeared grimly amusing to any referee who has been on the receiving end of withering and dismissive criticism regardless of "due process".

Of course consistency of application is the best way to guarantee acceptance of refereeing decisions but if that's not happening for whatever reason, get on with the game.

The disciplinary integrity of the GAA isn't the sole responsibility of referees. There are also rules and committees of process. Rules, as pointed out by Martin Breheny in the Irish Independent, haven't been that supportive of referees and whereas the offence of "minor physical interference" with officials now carries a minimum suspension of 12 weeks, two years ago the minimum was 24 weeks.

Adjusting the minimum downwards was proposed on the basis that six months would be too harsh a punishment for a supplicant tug at a referee's sleeve. From this angle, however, the games currently suggest the GAA would be better off erring on the side of protecting officials rather than worrying about that minority of players who see it as a right to confront match officials.

Nonetheless better news is emerging from the various committees charged with enforcing the rules. There is this season a growing consistency about the type of punishment being handed down and to date an encouraging lack of jaw-dropping leniency.

Changing what is grandly referred to as "the culture" of games doesn't require seismic paradigm shifts. Consistently firm enforcement of rules will do the trick equally well.

County boards and certainly county teams have made no secret of their intention to flog the system for anything that can be wrung out of it regardless of the merit of cases and despite the importance of prioritising discipline and responsibility to the collective.

The removal of ambiguity and the wriggle room afforded by loss of administrative nerve will strengthen the connection between misbehaviour and punishment.

This sort of progress is by its nature a step-by-step process but already a respectable distance has been being covered.