IT’S NOT OFTEN that the Tyrone Ladies football board have to sit down to draft a statement for the national media, certainly not one that appeals to the media to “refrain from contacting our members in any way”.
But what happened at the end of last Friday night’s county senior football final was so unpleasant that you can forgive them for feeling like Dorothy in the whirlwind for a while. When not one but two men are lying spark out on the ground – one of them a referee and the other the top women’s football official in the county – a cooling-off period is understandable.
As far as can be ascertained, the facts are these. The Tyrone Ladies county final between Carrickmore and St Macartan’s of Augher was coming to a tense conclusion in Beragh, near Omagh, when 43-year-old referee Simon Brady blew for a free in to St Macartan’s. With the scores level, the free swung the match in St Macartan’s favour as it was converted for the winning point.
Brady blew the full-time whistle about 30 seconds later and was checking his notebook on the pitch when he got a tap on the shoulder and then was knocked out by a punch. When Martin Conway, the chairman of the Tyrone Ladies county board, tried to intervene, he was knocked out as well. An ambulance was called and both men were treated for concussion. By Monday night, the board had launched an investigation; the results are expected in the coming fortnight. The PSNI has also said it is investigating a complaint.
GAA president Christy Cooney was quick to point out during the week that the incident did not fall under the GAA’s umbrella. The Ladies Gaelic Football Association is separate from the GAA, although it does receive support from Croke Park. “It would be unfair for me to comment on another association, but we abhor anything like that in our own association,” said Cooney.
He is technically correct, of course. But at the same time, it’s a little disingenuous to pretend that what happened in Beragh had nothing to do with the GAA. Take a straw poll of the people who attended the women’s county final in Tyrone and you would struggle to find many who didn’t think they were at a GAA event. The people of Carrickmore and Augher are GAA people, and whoever knocked Daly and Conway out would doubtless describe themselves as such.
The normal GAA response to something like this is to say that such incidents are far less common now than they used to be, and that they receive more media coverage these days. There is no empirical evidence for this one way or the other.
What we do have, however, is an undeniable culture of disdain for referees in the GAA that often spills over into threats and occasionally into violence. It happens in club matches countrywide – and is often captured on mobile phones – and makes it on to the national stage with wearying regularity.
To be fair to Cooney, there isn’t an awful lot the folks at the top of the association can do to prevent an attack on a referee. The GAA is a huge, unwieldy organisation with so many matches played at so many levels each weekend that to suggest something like personal security for each of them would be ludicrous. Anyway, isolated incidents aren’t the real problem, shocking and all as they seem.
The real problem is the laser-like focus on the performance of referees throughout the association, match after match, weekend after weekend. Referees get decisions wrong in every sport in the world, and supporters and managers complain about them in every sport in the world.
But when it comes to the GAA, we seem never to be able to let it go. There is no allowance for the facts that (a) the referee may have been right and (b) even if he was wrong, it was an honest mistake. All week, Kildare supporters have been screaming bloody murder about the late free that handed Bernard Brogan the game-winning point for Dublin last Sunday, yet when you ask them if Dublin were the better side, they generally shrug and agree that they were. This is classic fan thinking, and of itself it’s pretty harmless. But it trickles down.
If it becomes okay to blame the referee as a reflex, then it’s only a matter of degree before it becomes okay to confront him after the game. And from there, we get to where we started, with a referee lying out cold in the middle of the pitch.
You can’t blame the GAA for what happened to Simon Brady and Martin Conway. But GAA culture? That deserves at least a small portion of the responsibility.
