Unsavoury scenes in Tullamore again raise wider cultural issues

By Kevin Egan

All three Offaly clubs making their exit from the Leinster club football championships should probably have been the headline story last weekend, but once Dublin referee Barry Tiernan hit the ground at Glenisk O’Connor Park, that was always going to be the big news within the county, and indeed across the country.

The incident left the Tullamore club, and one club member in particular, facing an anxious wait to hear the contents of Tiernan’s match report, while the possibility of ramifications outside the GAA world can’t be ruled out either.

At the end of a successful season for the club, the incident has changed the atmosphere completely, and the happy days of lifting the Dowling Cup feel a lot more distant now than they did before last Sunday's game.

For anyone involved in the unsavoury scenes at the end – either the individual who pushed the referee to the ground, or those who verbally remonstrated with him to varying degrees of ferocity, not those who tried to intervene to take angry people out of harm’s way – a review of the whole scenario is likely to be quite embarrassing.

On the face of it, having a potentially match-saving penalty awarded at that stage of the game, and then taken away, is bound to be frustrating in the extreme. Yet while it’s all very well to say that the referee was either misguided or else poorly led by his umpires, nobody could look back at the incident and say that a penalty was the correct call. It plainly wasn’t, since Adam Flanagan was quite clearly outside the small parallelogram when he was deemed to have handled the ball on the ground.

In Tullamore’s previous game, the county final against Ferbane, Diarmuid Egan and Jack Clancy were both red carded by referee Chris Dwyer, and after further consultation with his umpires, Dwyer realised that there had been an error in communication, and he did the right thing and undid his dismissals.

Doubling down on a bad call when he had better information would have been the wrong thing for Dwyer to do, and it would have been the wrong thing for Tiernan to do as well. But still, that sense of having the penalty taken away, no doubt exacerbated by the frustration at watching Tullamore fail to convert scores as freely as they should have for the full hour beforehand, led to the outpouring of anger at the end.

None of which is to say that the sanctions should be lenient – they should not. By rule, the maximum suspension in the GAA is 96 weeks. That’s what was imposed in the high profile case arising out of a Roscommon minor club match last year, and that’s what the individual involved should expect here.

If the various people berating Tiernan verbally can be identified, then a lengthy ban, somewhere in the three to six month territory, is likely there too.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, the cultural climate that leads these things to happen must be examined, and that doesn’t mean more platitudes about how vital referees are to our games, or more pithy slogans.

In the GAA, there is a culture of looking sheepishly at the ground when the well-known local hothead takes things way too far, whether that hothead is standing on the sideline with a bib on, or standing on the terrace with supporters.

Marketing campaigns aimed at those hotheads aren’t going to have any impact, any more than those same hotheads are thinking about whether the likely suspension is going to be two months or two years when they charge onto the field, charged with furious bile.

A culture that expects people to call out their own hotheads must be fostered instead.

In the GAA, there is a culture of contesting every suspension, of seeking every advantage, of avoiding accountability when lines are crossed. Undoubtedly this is indicative of wider Irish society and our general dislike of black and white rules, not to mention the general human condition, where people judge themselves by their intentions but judge others by their actions.

Addressing this culture, either through the mechanism of a simplified rule book, or else by overhauling the disciplinary process, will require greater insight than that with which this columnist has been endowed, but the great minds of the GAA could do worse than to try remove this millstone around our collective necks.

Finally, and perhaps most controversially, in the GAA there is a strong culture of trying to take in all the associated factors and the wider context in a disciplinary case. It’s why one of the first defences made of any individual who stands accuses of a serious offence is that “they’re not that type of player”.

On a small scale, it happens all the time. We like to assess on a case-by-case basis whether or not rules should be enforced in any given instance.

Last Sunday, the stakes were high and tension levels were higher. There was confusion around a decision, and the referee appears to have made an error, before correcting it. Absolutely none of this matters a jot. Someone pushed a referee to the ground, video evidence confirms it, and that is all.

It could be time to find our way to a culture where the disciplinary process boils down to guilt or innocence, and a set punishment for each crime. Anything else encourages people to think that this situation is different, and that in their case, the heat of the moment was even hotter than usual.