A sizzler of a summer’s evening, couple of weeks back. It was during the heatwave and we were at an under-12 football match. The girls were red-faced after 15 minutes of chasing around and the tactical masterstroke of the night came when one of the managers whipped out a plastic bottle with a spray-nozzle-cum-fan on the top of it and started whizzing water at his players at the break.
Upon the resumption, an attack and a kick at goal. It was high, it was long, it was … a point? A wide? Three teenagers behind the posts were nominally doing umpire and when they looked at each other, it quickly became obvious they hadn’t a scooby between them. One threw his arms out for a wide, another put his hand up for a point, the third remained lost in the existential quest for self-knowledge and continued to scroll on his phone.
[ Abuse and disciplinary decisions impacting on retention of GAA refereesOpens in new window ]
The referee gave the point at first but then, seeing the confusion among the umpires, she understandably took a moment. She was young herself, in her mid-20s or thereabouts, and she was exactly the sort of referee you’d want under-12 girls to have running their game. She was strict on the contact stuff, she was clear in how she explained her frees, she was patient with the kids who didn’t necessarily know all the rules.
She trotted in to talk to Harpo, Groucho and Zeppo behind the goals and ultimately came away with her mind changed. Wide ball, no point, play on. Only to be met with a volley from the sideline of the team who had seen their score disallowed.
“No way, ref! No way! That was a point. How many umpires do you need down there?”
This was a mentor of an under-12 team, let’s not forget. Roaring at a young woman who was doing nothing less than facilitating said team in playing a game. If he had been walking down the street shouting at a woman 20 years younger than him, somebody would likely have stepped in and made sure everything was okay. But because it was a game of football, the most the rest of us did was a bit of head-shaking and quiet tutting to each other.
By pure coincidence, a couple of days later a sports psychologist at Ulster University, Dr Noel Brick, published his latest study online – “The Impact of Verbal & Physical Abuse on Distress, Mental Health, & Intentions to Quit in Sports Officials”. He and three colleagues sent surveys to over 1,500 GAA referees around the country between February and May of last year and got responses from 438 of them.
Their research found that 94.26 per cent of those referees had experienced verbal abuse at some stage in their careers. As for incidents of physical abuse, that number was 23.04 per cent. If the first figure was no massive surprise – were the other 5.74 per cent hard of hearing or something? – the second one should be front page news. The idea that almost a quarter of GAA referees can say they have been subjected to physical abuse in the course of going about their business and that somehow it isn’t a scandal is really quite weird when you think about it.
In what other walk of life would we shrug at that kind of research? If it was bar staff or postal workers or bus drivers – or basically any other group of people benignly keeping the wheels of society turning – and a quarter of them were getting roughed up for it, there’d be a national outcry. But GAA referees? Nobody cares. Sure isn’t the soccer far worse?
It’s not, as it happens. Other studies on the continent have shown that the incidents of physical violence towards soccer referees tends to level out at around 18-to-19 per cent. For upwards of 23 per cent of GAA referees to be saying that they had suffered physical abuse – defined for the purposes of the study as “assault, hitting, punching, slapping, kicking, pushing, head-butting, hair-pulling, or biting” – is an unprecedented number in this area.
The study by Brick et al showed considerable cause and effect. Just under half of the referees surveyed (48.63 per cent) either strongly agreed or agreed that episodes of abuse made them intend to quit their role. Pressed on the more specific point of whether they intended giving up refereeing in the following 12 months, just under 15 per cent of respondents said they did. The three most common reasons given for walking away were increased abuse, not enough support and no longer enjoying being a referee. The abuse caused them distress and affected their mental health.
And in case we mistake all this for idle, pointy-headed doodling, everyone involved in the sport can see the rubber meeting the road week after week, all across in the country. At its most basic level, the GAA exists to put on games. But in every county, there are matches called off all the time because of a shortage of referees.
Since a lot of them are underage matches – and often underage girls’ matches at that – it tends to go largely unnoticed and unremarked upon. But wait a couple of months for the county conventions and without fail, there will be a pleas all around the country for more referees and dark warnings of unfillable fixtures in the coming year because of the chronic shortage.
[ Seán Moran: A little respect for referees will go a long wayOpens in new window ]
Yet nobody seems to be able to join the dots between that and the abuse the existing referees take. Or at least be able to come up with a workable plan to fix one of the great cultural ills of the association.
That night a few weeks back, the ref took her opportunity while the girls were getting sprayed down during the water break. She pulled aside the mentor who had been giving out to her for the disputed point and had a discreet but firm word in his ear. Within seconds, he was holding his hands up and backing off, presumably copping on that this was not, in fact, Croke Park and we were not, in fact, in the dying seconds of an All-Ireland final.
You could only admire how she handled it all, not least in the fact that the mini-dressing down was dished out within earshot of the mentor’s young team. And in fairness to him, he took it and got on with the game. There was no more verbal abuse for the rest of the evening.
It’s a poor state of affairs when you’re grateful for such a small mercy.
