The GAA's Leinster Council has taken the dramatic decision to refix the controversial Carlow-Westmeath football championship match. After a long night of meetings in Croke Park, Carlow's objection to the result (Westmeath won by 2-10 to 1-8) was upheld by 19 votes to six.
Behind the objection was last Sunday's match, during which Cork referee Niall Barrett sent off six players, four from Carlow and two from Westmeath. It later emerged that a number of these decisions were viewed as "overly harsh" and that the referee had applied a more severe code of conduct than the rules prescribed. This referred to his practice of issuing yellow cards to players guilty of minor fouls without prior warning, and then producing the red for a second offence.
Much of last week was taken up with arguments about whether the match result could stand if the referee was admitting that he had applied the wrong rules. Carlow duly objected and yesterday in the GAA's Aras Daimhin headquarters, the matter was thrashed out.
Westmeath argued strenuously against a refixture, but there was an ominously homogenous tone to the comments of other delegates and it was no surprise that the verdict went Carlow's way.
The whole evening was tinged with the bizarre. Only a week after new disciplinary rules had been introduced to improve the GAA's appalling recent record in the area, the worst publicity of an already dreadful year ensued.
The new rules provide for, among other things, matters relating to referees and discipline to be dealt with centrally, and not by the provincial councils as previously was the case.
This ironically left the Leinster Council, whose chairman Seamus Aldridge had strenuously opposed this transfer of power to Croke Park, with the thorny question of whether to allow the objection.
So two committees met in the same building to consider the same match, the Games Administration Committee (GAC) to talk to Barrett and deal with his report and Leinster Council to adjudicate on the objection.
The GAC gathered at 6.30 p.m. Three hours later the Leinster Council was waiting impatiently in the hallways of Croke Park. Delegates couldn't begin their meeting until GAC had finished.
Mutiny was brewing until eventually, at 9.40 p.m., the Leinster Council finally went into session.