GAC disciplinary decisions: Seán Moran believes the committee's decision on Wednesday night struck a disappointing chord

If a good start is half the work, the new Games Administration Committee (GAC) has much to do. It must have been the last thing Tony O'Keeffe's newly-appointed GAC wanted. The first meetings of the GAA's most important national committee were dominated by the need to consider high-profile suspensions.

This would be serious at any stage, but at the start of a term of office when members have hardly met it's a particular challenge. Even allowing for these difficulties, the decisions reached on Wednesday night strike a most disappointing chord at the new committee's outset.

The facts concerning the Kilkenny-Tipperary NHL match are clear and were not substantively challenged at the hearing. Suffice it to say anyone who has viewed video footage of the incidents involving a) Redser O'Grady and Philly Larkin and, b) Henry Shefflin, will be surprised the GAC saw fit to take no action whatsoever.

Aside from the question of enforcing discipline, this permissiveness is doubly regrettable in its timing. The season is about to enter its busiest phase and there will be disciplinary matters for resolution in the course of which suspensions will be imposed. To have turned a blind eye to offences committed by elite hurlers from what are currently the two strongest counties guarantees resentment when suspensions are given to less favoured players.

And it will not help the administration of discipline that the GAC has allowed a perception of this nature to emerge at the very start of its term of office.

On a wider level, there is an even greater problem. The rationale behind the decision turned back the clock on an important power the previous GAC fought to have approved for most of its three years.

In June 2000, Cork hurler Diarmuid O'Sullivan pulled across Limerick opponent Brian Begley's head. Dublin referee Aodhan MacSuibhne showed O'Sullivan a yellow card. The GAC reviewed video evidence of the incident and decided against suspending the player, eventually accepting his county's defence that the referee has taken action and shouldn't be overruled.

This effectively meant a yellow card became a guarantee against suspension. Eventually this absurdity was addressed, and in August last year the GAC was given the power by Central Council to act on video evidence.

So for the new GAC to refuse to take action on the grounds the referee had issued a yellow card is regressive. It goes even further than that. Shefflin was not shown a card at all but because the relevant incident took place in front of the referee, Michael Wadding, it was deemed he had noted it and "dealt" with it by waving play on.

There is some consolation in all of this. It has been learnt this interpretation will not stand as a precedent. At the GAC's next meeting the attitude to video evidence will be discussed and a policy adopted. It is to be hoped that such a policy veers back towards stricter enforcement than that upheld by last week's decision.

This would also be in the GAC's best interests. Once a firm line is taken with indiscipline, it reduces the scope for special pleading and appropriate suspensions are accepted as the norm.

This percolates down to on-field behaviour, with the vast majority of players happy to know that the parameters within which they operate are fixed. In other words, foul play will be punished and any would-be miscreant must take that risk into account.

If he doesn't, then team management presumably will.

This is, of course, a delicate time of year with the championship speeding down the tracks. Tipperary's predicament was obvious, with a Munster first round tie in a fortnight, whereas Kilkenny have a five-week wait before being called into action.

This again illuminates the inconsistency of suspensions in general. Although the whole structure was considerably improved by the recent reforms piloted through Congress, the unwillingness to accept match-based rather than time-based suspensions perpetuates anomalies.

Had the GAC decided to hand down suspensions in different circumstances, why should a Tipperary player have suffered more than his Kilkenny counterpart in respect of precisely the same incident, simply because his team's championship campaign was scheduled to start earlier?

As O'Keeffe and his committee will probably discover, such anomalies are like water and always find a way of leaking out at the least opportune moments.