A friend of mine texted last Friday night with a one-liner: “The Dublin lads are in the wrong sport.”
“I can see a soccer game from my back window. How is it ok for them to play on as usual while the Dubs are in all sorts of trouble for training?”
“Because – inconsistent or not – those are the rules.”
His house overlooks Stradbrook, home to Cabinteely, who hosted Cork City in the League of Ireland on Friday as part of a 10-match weekend schedule across Premier and First Division. Quite a few of the games involved long travel.
So too did Enda Kenny’s trip from Mayo to appear on Friday’s Late Late Show. All legit, of course, since participating on TV and radio shows is somehow deemed ‘essential’, while driving six kilometres to visit parents or grandparents is not. Welcome to the land of inconsistency.
Enda was unhappy with Dublin’s regulation-busting activities last week and suggested that a suspension of “eight to 10 weeks” (actually it’s 12 weeks for Dessie Farrell) while there are no games is of little real impact.
He wasn’t asked if a 12-week ban was adequate for the three members of his native county’s backroom team who broke regulations to get into Croke Park for the All-Ireland final last December.
They entered in a kit van and, having been rumbled by CCTV, were banned for three months by the Mayo County Board. There have been no games since then.
Their stowaway antics might have appeared trivial – comical even – at the time but it may have come against the GAA later on.
It certainly played into the hands of those in power who didn’t want Gaelic games categorised as elite for the reopening of sport last year. They could now point to a flagrant breach of protocol by the elite of the elite – All-Ireland finalists.
Four months on, the six-in-a-row champions were found to have broken other rules, further embarrassing the GAA at a sensitive time in the return-to-play cycle.
Dublin have been rightly criticised for their rule-breaking and one suspects that many other counties are breathing a sigh of relief that they haven’t been rumbled.
It was always likely to happen for a number of reasons, one of which relates to the way inter-county (men’s, ladies football and camogie) was removed from the early return-to-play list whereas League of Ireland (men and women) was cleared for action.
This brings us to one of the main problems with many of the Covid regulations – inconsistency. Add in the lack of clear explanations for the rationale behind decisions and it increases the likelihood of breaches.
How can League of Ireland soccer be deemed more elite than inter-county GAA? Government didn’t explain that when announcing their decision because there was no logical basis in pure sporting terms.
Now, if they pointed out that as a professional (or semi-professional in many cases) sport, they wanted to allow players earn money, it would have been a starting point.
Alternatively, they could have quoted figures, which show that allowing inter-county (men and women) to return early in the year would have involved around 6,000 people (players and backroom) coming together a few times per week.
That’s considerably more than in soccer where the top tiers (men and women) have 29 clubs between them. Government didn’t point that out, instead opting for the unconvincing explanation that inter-county’s elite status lapsed after the All-Ireland finals.
Why? If it’s elite in December, why not in January? That lack of consistency fuels the temptation to break rules, especially at a time when the public see other blatant high-profile violations (Beacon and Coombe hospitals being typical examples).
Let’s stick with Dublin. The All-Ireland champions are being pilloried for an early-morning session, yet five Dublin soccer clubs can train as often as they like and fulfil weekly (sometimes more often) engagements in the League of Ireland. Covid doesn’t recognise the difference between soccer and GAA games, yet Government effectively asked us to believe it did through their return-to-play protocols earlier in the year.
None of this excuses Dublin, but it needs to be seen against a background where the regulations for sport are ridiculously inconsistent.
Of course, the GAA itself isn’t blameless either. Their failure to crack down harder on training ban violations in the past created an environment where they weren’t seen as being remotely important.
Dublin (footballers) and Wexford (hurlers) escaped sanctions for what appeared to be clear breaches involving overseas trips to Belgium and Portugal respectively in 2018.
Armagh, Laois and Waterford were all punished that year, the latter two for undertaking weekend get-togethers in Ireland.
We’re back to inconsistency again. Whether in sporting organisations or Government decisions it seems to be a national trait. It’s serving us especially badly in these difficult times.
1971 Congress had other good ideas
The 50th anniversary this week of the removal of ‘The Ban’ (note to younger readers: it stipulated that a GAA member who played or even publicly supported soccer, rugby, hockey or other ‘foreign’ games be suspended) is getting lots of coverage and rightly so.
It desecrated every sporting principle before being wiped from the rule book at Congress 1971. There was no debate as counties had decided in advance that change was overdue.
Its removal attracted all the headlines, but that Congress also discussed issues which suggested the GAA were moving towards dropping another long-time core practice. A proposal by Meath and Down to introduce an open-draw football championship won a simple majority but needed two-thirds to change the rule.
It looked as if the days of the provincial championships as the All-Ireland basis were numbered but 50 years on they still retain their privileged position. Congress 1971, clearly a progressive assembly, would never have expected that.
RIP to Leitrim legend McGarty
I never saw Packie McGarty play for Leitrim, but as a youngster growing up in Galway in the 1960s, I quickly learned he was something special.
That was through his exploits with Connacht teams in the Railway Cup where he was a regular on the inter-provincial circuit for a long stretch in the 1950s-’60s. Galway, Mayo and Roscommon usually dominated the Connacht team but McGarty and Cathal Flynn ensured that Leitrim were regularly represented in attack.
Selected in the GAA’s Centenary Year (1984) on the best team comprised of players who didn’t win All-Ireland senior medals, McGarty featured in four successive Connacht finals in 1957-’60, all of which Leitrim lost to Galway.
Newspaper reports from the time show how influential he was, especially in the 1958 final where his performance in a two-point defeat was described in the Irish Independent as his ‘greatest ever’.
A Leitrim legend – may he rest in peace.
