LOCKER ROOM: Increasingly newspapers in particular are happy to "cross the line" when it comes to dealing with amateur players

I REMEMBER once upon a forever ago Joe Duffy going on the wireless to defend a missile attack on Gareth Fitzgerald. Joe calmed a jumpy populace by pointing out that the missile in question was an egg and not an exocet. Perhaps Joe wasn’t actually defending the attack just trying to quell the sort of hysteria that can build on phone-in radio programmes when sententiousness get the better of common sense.

Anyway what flew at Garrett was a nice wholesome egg not a guided missile and what allegedly flew through the air in the classroom in St Brendan’s, Killarney was a duster not a doodlebug (which invites a parenthesized digression).

(When he was young the comedian Paul Merton’s stand-up act included a very funny line on London during the blitz wherein he described the serenity with which an elderly relative would greet the onset of another night’s bombing. “If I’m going to go, I’m going to go “ he would say, “there’s a bomb somewhere with my name on it and until then.” Which was a great attitude, Merton would say, but no comfort to Mr and Mrs Doodlebug from next door.)

The news that dusters can still and do still become airborne in classrooms is a matter for debate among educationalists. The duster has long since been out of favour as an educational tool or even as a disciplinary device so there are general questions.

First the duster. Has there not been a move away from the hefty but aerodynamic wood-handled model to the more modest and lightweight duster with a black plastic handle?

Second the odd but confusing sense of nostalgia which overcame those of us who grew up able to sense a flying duster coming at us from behind at 10 or 20 paces away. We were the lucky ones to whom no more serious harm was done than that. The odd duster and the occasional leathering and all last week we said things like, “by jaysus in my day you’d have been made eat the thing, then lick the blackboard clean”.

Thirdly and most importantly though does an allegedly airborne duster in a class in Killarney concern anybody more than the people directly involved? The teacher, the pupil, the parents, the principal. Does the fact that one of those people is a well known Gaelic footballer alter that?

How Paul Galvin conducts his classes is his business and the business of the school which employs him. I’ve never heard tell of him being anything other than a committed, charismatic and hugely persuasive teacher. Never heard him talk of teaching other then in terms of how energising he finds it.

Such citations as to Galvin’s excellence as a teacher would be as inappropriate coming from the slumlord of a sports column, however, as are the grave forensic details of DusterGate which have been offered us all week from marginally more salubrious areas of various newspapers.

How many tales of students being inspired, helped, encouraged, coached, amused, befriended would it take to undo the damage done to a teacher’s life by one week’s media banqueting on DusterGate?

We have a problem here. Come the summer Galvin, footballer of the year last year, will probably find himself not much inclined to talk to the newspapers. He hasn’t felt inclined to chat for some time. He has been through some of these hoops before. His girlfriend’s Bebo site was ransacked and basically reproduced in a Sunday tabloid, his parents and his siblings were all put under pressure during the long hard summer of 2008. He is deemed to be fair game.

And having seen Galvin’s fate the team which he inspired and cajoled all through the summer of 2009 are unlikely to be trespassing on the privacy of journalists and making phone calls at all hours of the day and night begging to be interviewed.

So there will be little or no access to the thoughts of the All-Ireland champions and a few newspapers will continue to think, what the hell, nothing to lose get out and see if there are any chefs on the team who burned soup, any doctors who misdiagnosed, any firemen who baulked, any DJs who played Daniel O’Donnell.

Increasingly newspapers in particular are happy to “cross the line” when it comes to dealing with amateur players.

The fact that there is an undoubted upside to being a successful county player or even a moderately well known county player doesn’t confer on the media or other bodies the right to ensure that there is a downside too. It doesn’t make any player fair game.

In recent weeks this column has heard of a girls’ secondary school being rung with an inquiry into an alleged relationship between a senior player and a girl in the school, players’ workplaces being rung and colleagues asked questions about the players, another player’s family being contacted over and over to find out what the player’s mood was like because he was going to be dropped very soon.

Some players may find it easier to get a job when their profile is high (though perhaps employers see the commitment and sacrifice of an amateur sportsperson as something well worth gambling on). Every team that stops one short of a three-in-a-row, features the apocryphal figure who declares himself relieved because he would have needed to replace his sexual organ had they won again. And there are cars and scholarships and a general sort of status. None of those things make players fair game.

The difficulty with all this is that it is a vicious circle and without regulation it will get worse. It is one of those situations that your mother told you about. All fun and games till somebody loses an eye.

Look at the situation, middle eastern in it’s tinderbox of confusions. The GAA while still an amateur body has contractual deals with high profile sponsors yet steps in behind the amateur status of its players when it comes to providing access to those players, access which would create coverage and which would cause sponsors to smile.

The media, getting to the stage where it has almost given up on access has begun burning bridges. The players won’t talk anyway so why not torch them and pillage their private lives as we go? The players, increasingly resentful and mistrustful have very little interest in exploring the big picture of promoting their games or helping the GAA compete against rugby or soccer.

The reader is unable to escape his own prurience.

Here is an area which the GPA might usefully explore. Some set of standards needs to be visible and needs to be adhered to.

The carrot would be decent access. The stick would be denial of that access to papers who seriously cross the line. The carrot would be value for sponsors and for the GAA. The stick would be the fact that in this day and age if access gets any worse the party is over for everybody. Done and dusted.

Fógra: St Brigid’s GAA Club in Blanchardstown will host an intercounty senior hurling challenge game in the evening of 13th February between Dublin and Tipperary. Hopefully a senior camogie challenge will mark the start of the evening which is being held to open the splendid new hurling wall the club has made.