THE MIDDLE THIRD:Seánie Johnston has made a difficult personal decision to switch to Kildare – we should let him get on with it and focus on more important matters in the GAA
WHEN THE Seánie Johnston affair started away back in early spring, the one thing I thought for sure about it was it would be sorted out by the time the serious stuff started. But here we are – in the last week of June, no less – and it’s still an issue.
Kildare play Meath on Sunday and, if the last few games are anything to go by, you can be sure Seánie will be there in Croke Park alongside the Kildare panel. In amongst the players he’s been training with for months now but not allowed to take his place.
At this stage of the game, that’s crazy stuff.
The first thing everyone needs to do when it comes to Johnston is to stop pretending this is the first time in the history of the GAA this has happened.
He isn’t breaking any new ground here, he’s not bending any rules that haven’t been bent and broken before. To hear some people talking, you’d swear he was going to rip every root of the GAA out of the ground before the summer is out. This isn’t a big deal – it’s a player changing his club and county to play intercounty football. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last.
I feel he deserves a lot of sympathy. Or if you can’t go as far as sympathy, then he at least deserves a bit of understanding.
Think about the decision he’s made. Peel back all the layers of it and think what it must be like for him personally to up and leave his own place and his own people to go and play for someone else when he knows it won’t be a popular move.
Whatever you think about his motives, you have to admit it’s a very brave thing to do.
Wind the tape on to Christmas time five or six years down the road when all of this is over and he’s back to being Seánie Johnston, a local teacher above in Cavan. You know and I know that when he walks into his local bar even then, there’ll be fellas going quiet in the corner having just discussed him. You think Seánie doesn’t know that as well? Of course he does, yet he has decided to be a man about it and plough on. That takes guts.
This is like a puppy – it’s not just for Christmas, it’s for life. In 10 years’ time, 20 years’ time, this is something that will be thrown back at him and maybe even at his family. So there’s no way he’d be doing it lightly, there’s no way he’d be doing it without having thought it through.
I don’t know him but I do feel sorry for him. I think there’s been a small bit of a witch-hunt against him.
I don’t understand why he’s taken such stick about it. I could maybe see it if this was him taking the easy way out but there’s nothing easy in what he’s put himself through. Look at all the hoops he’s had to jump through, look at all the committees that have had their say on his situation. He even has a rule change at Congress nicknamed in his honour! No player wants that.
The easy way out would have been to shrug his shoulders away back before Easter and say: “Ah, this is too much hassle, we’ll leave it so.” But instead he did everything the committees asked of him in changing address and getting two clubs and two county boards to sign off on the move.
On top of all that, he’s done everything Kieran McGeeney and the Kildare management have asked of him – and since they’re one of the fittest teams in the country, we can take it that wasn’t easy either.
Surely by now he has done enough to show he’s serious for the rest of us in the GAA to say: “Fair enough, lad, away you go.”
Everybody’s situation is different. For me, I could never have done it but then that’s okay for me to say because the situation never arose.
I moved to Tralee a good number of years ago and there was an hour’s driving over and back to the club but it never occurred to me to go looking for a change. I’m not holding myself up as some sort of paragon of virtue, just pointing out it was never an option. I would never have left An Ghaeltacht to go to a club in Tralee and nobody would ever have thought to bring it up with me.
Even now, I’d love to be heading back there a couple of times a week for training and for games but my time is done. Mick O’Dwyer used to be gentle with men who’d put on a few pounds over the winter by saying, “I see you’re getting strong anyway . . .”
Well, my strength is my weakness at this stage and the tight jerseys that are in vogue now have finished me off altogether. But I still go back there to watch matches and I always will.
Isn’t that the case with 99 per cent of players in the GAA? And won’t that always be the case? Fellas move away from home, they leave for work or women or whatever but the draw of home almost always brings them back.
If they want to leave to play intercounty football or hurling, then that shouldn’t be a big deal. It will only apply in a tiny number of cases because the vast, vast majority of players will want to play with the people they grew up with and the county they feel is home.
I had a conversation about this one night with P Sé. “Just out of interest,” I said. “Would you have ever moved and gone somewhere else to play?”
“Ah no,” he said. “I found it hard enough to be told I was useless by my own fellas. I would never have handled it from outsiders!”
We can sometimes be too paranoid about what the GAA can and can’t offer. We should be more confident about it and instead of focusing on the tiny minority of cases where fellas move, we should leave them off and let them enjoy the experience.
This won’t open the floodgates, purely because the tradition is so strong and the pull of the place you grew up doesn’t leave most people.
It’s like when people go mad worrying about losing young fellas to rugby or soccer or Aussie Rules. When I hear people calling it a crisis, I just think we should stand up for ourselves a bit more and have a bit more faith in what we have to offer. I remember when I was a teenager coming through and playing for the club, I had the novelty of playing against Currow and marking Mick Galwey, with him just back from a Lions tour.
Even these days, if Currow are having a fund-raiser and they ask Mick down to help out, he’s the first man through the door. The GAA lost him to rugby along the way but we never really lost him at all.
Long after Seánie Johnston has finished playing, long after the rest of us have forgotten about the whole saga, the GAA will still thrive and most players will still tog out in the same dressingrooms they grew up in.
With all the attention his case has got and all the predictions about the floodgates opening if he ends up a Kildare player, you’d think there must be hundreds of applications going to the GAA every year from fellas in the same situation as him. There aren’t.
People do move clubs all the time and they go through far less hassle than Seánie has. I was in Croke Park a couple of weeks ago and I ran into Colm Parkinson.
It was soon after he was on The Sunday Game that night when they’d been talking about the Seánie Johnston case.
I thought he was great on the show and they should have him on a lot more often because he’s at least some way honest about what he sees on the pitch and he’s not afraid of offending people. But when it came to what he was saying about Seánie, I was killed laughing.
“You’re some boy to be giving out,” I said. “Of all people. You left your own club and went to play for one in Dublin, when Portlaoise is less than an hour down the road. And you’re cribbing about Seánie Johnston going and hour and a half down the country? Give a guy a break.”
I know Colm was living and working in Dublin at the time and I wasn’t saying he was breaking any rules or anything like that. But surely a bit of sympathy for Johnston’s situation wasn’t too much to ask for?
Let’s be honest about this. If Johnston had moved to Longford or Leitrim, there wouldn’t be one word said about it. It might have made the papers for a week or two in the winter and nobody would have passed any remarks. Just like nobody minded too much when Austin O’Malley and Thomas Walsh went to Wicklow or when Billy Joe Padden went to Armagh. But because he moved to Kildare, people are up in arms.
If Johnston had looked to transfer to Kildare five years ago, it wouldn’t have been a big deal either. But the fact Kildare are very close to making a breakthrough has given them a bigger profile and it has put some noses out of joint. He’s been made trudge down every last avenue in search of this thing, just to make an example out of him.
People forget there’s a person involved here trying to live his life.
You can bang on about protecting the integrity of the GAA all you like but at the heart of this is a very good footballer who has had to make big changes in his living arrangements and commuting habits just to try to play for an intercounty team.
He didn’t dream this up in the back of a taxi on the way home from a disco – he has done everything that’s been asked of him. For him to then take flak from all quarters as if he was a threat to the GAA is way over the top. We have loads of things to worry about in the GAA these days. Seánie Johnston shouldn’t be one of them. I wish him well.
ACCOUNTABILITY FOR REFEREES? Duffy on duty again this weekend
Whatever about Seánie Johnston, now for one of the actual real issues that we should be worrying about.
Michael Duffy’s performance as referee in the Down v Monaghan game on Sunday was something that is far more serious when it comes to the day-to-day life of the GAA. I know Pat McEnaney has said Duffy holds his hand up over Tommy Freeman’s goal but that’s all very well at this stage, seeing as Down came back and won the match.
Imagine if Monaghan had gone through. Imagine the fall-out.
And what happens? Nothing. Duffy gets another game six days later – Longford v Derry in the qualifiers on Saturday evening. How can that be right? How can there be no price to pay for such a huge mistake? If a player made a howler like that, he’d be for the bench and rightly so. But referees carry on as if there are no consequences.
The standard of refereeing is the shabbiest part of our association, purely because we don’t take it seriously. We wave it off and say they have a hard job to do but we don’t support them in doing it. Of course they have a hard job, which is why I think they should be paid.
I’ve been saying it for ages – no player would have a problem with a referee getting paid if it meant they were better at the job. They’re such a crucial part of the game and we’re far too blasé about it.
