‘It is kick-starting a campaign to try and change the culture of the organisation’

GAA president Larry McCarthy can’t be accused of being late to the issue, as he’s been speaking out on the subject of referees all year between his address to annual congress and interviews at the time of the national five-year strategic plan launch.

Thursday’s unveiling of the association’s ‘Respect the Referee’ initiative, to take place on the weekend of October 22nd and 23rd, focused on valuing match officials and punishing transgressions against them. The context was obviously the high-profile misbehaviour at several club matches in recent weeks and McCarthy called for a sea change in attitudes.

The launch was, he said at a later press call, “very important because it is kick-starting a campaign to try and change the culture of the organisation. Obviously what has happened in the last couple of weeks is absolutely and utterly unacceptable.”

The Cork-born New York administrator, who became the first overseas president on his election in 2020, reached for an example from an American sport.

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“There’s another way of looking at it as well. There could be an instantaneous response to this. Basketball have a very good way of doing things. So if the coach says something to a referee, all of a sudden the coach gets penalised, the team get penalised with free throws against them and they lose possession of the ball.

“Is there something in there that we could do so that if you start verbally abusing a referee, he stops and gives you a warning. The next time it might be a 21-yard free or a penalty. Not only are you going to get a card for doing what you did, but the team is going to be punished as well. That’s something we might look at in terms of implementing a rule and changing the overall culture.”

At the Croke Park launch, there were also inputs from Seán Martin, chair of the National Referees’ Development Committee, Donal Smyth, Croke Park’s match officials manager and Dr Noel Brick of UUJ whose survey of the effect on referees’ mental health of verbal and physical abuse were published last month.

Smyth pointed out that respect for referees was reflected in many things besides deliberate misbehaviour directed at them. He said that, for example, one official was in his changing room when someone barged in past him to use the toilet, asking the audience to imagine the same individual invading a team dressingroom.

Dr Brick’s findings are well known at this stage but included the fact that virtually half of the 483 referees surveyed felt that they hadn’t received adequate training to deal with abuse.

Whereas there was satisfaction that 450 new referees had been recruited, the problem was retention, with younger match officials feeling the heat to a greater extent than their more senior colleagues.

Disciplinary enforcement is an issue bubbling under the obvious surface-level problems of attacks on referees – situations where red cards are shown to players, who then challenge the decision and all too easily have the sending-off overturned. McCarthy was asked about how this might be addressed.

“Disciplinary committees are very important: that the right punishment is handed down and then it is held; it stands up.

“We need at one level to help referees to write reports which will stand up to scrutiny, but there is a whole clutter of things that we need to do in terms of supporting referees.

“It’s not just stopping the abuse on the sideline.”

Would it be an idea for the GAA to have oversight of any decisions by county administrators to rescind red cards, for instance, as this is something referees feel impacts on the respect they are shown?

“Ideally yes we’d love to have it,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ve the bandwidth to do that, to have a disciplinary tsar looking over each county and each red card that’s applied. We are dependent on the county committees to apply the rules. We need to support them from a simple position to do that.

“We should look at some of the rules as well, particularly when they are applied at a local level. To a certain extent they are well applied at a national level, but when it gets to a local level the systems are different.”

He also said that the problems of verbal abuse had become deeply ingrained – “in terms of verbal abuse towards referees it’s a cultural thing.”

Cultural change is notoriously hard to implement, he agreed.

“Extremely difficult – and it’s a long, slow process of changing culture. It’s not going to be instantaneous. But all of the things we’re talking about and what Donal was talking about supporting the referee, disciplinary processes, putting out the messages we’re going to be putting out next week are all part and parcel of it. But this is only a once-off.

“This is the start. We have to keep going and doing it.”