Congress 2023: Challenging a GAA culture that facilitates unacceptable behaviour

This weekend’s annual GAA Congress will debate a number of motions that hope to address that hardiest perennial, the GAA’s ‘culture of indiscipline’.

The motions have been aired over the past few months but the overview can get lost in detail.

Matt Shaw is one of the professional lawyers who volunteer a significant amount of time to the administration of discipline within the association.

Currently chair of the Central Appeals Committee (CAC), he has served in a number of official roles, including secretary of the DRA (Disputes Resolution Authority); he has the added perspective of still being a referee in Westmeath.

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Speaking to The Irish Times earlier this week, Shaw outlined the genesis of the motions listed for debate as well the thinking behind them. Contrary to what many people might reasonably think, the proposals were not prompted by the disgraceful scenes at club matches last autumn but by a general concern for match officials.

“We actually met last June before those club incidents,” he says.

“Uachtarán Larry McCarthy wanted us to take a look at anything that might improve discipline. We had the chair of the CCCC (Central Competitions Control Committee), Derek Kent, the chair of the hearings committee Brian Rennick, myself and Liam Keane from rules advisory (RAC). Feargal McGill, the GAA’s director of games administration, sat in and Larry attended them all.

“We wanted to change the culture around match officials. We have a recruitment and retention problem, primarily to do with the fact that when they are starting out, the sort of stuff thrown at them means it’s not for everybody. We can’t expect young referees to be as thick-skinned as someone doing it for 15 years.”

How do you challenge a culture that facilitates abusive behaviour by tolerating it during matches and then failing to punish it when reported?

He refers to a couple of proposals and their intended effect. It has been well established that public cultures of misbehaviour are best confronted by escalating penalties to the point where miscreants are forced to question their actions.

One of the most troubling examples is abusive conduct at under-age and juvenile matches.

“Firstly, for a team official, mentor or supporter misbehaving at an under-age game, the minimum penalty will be twice the applicable penalty at adult level. We’re trying to change the culture at those age groups by making it twice as serious a matter. We hope that it will get support at Congress because at present our rules aren’t saying that.

“The second thing is we’re changing the categories around suspension by lifting them all. Category III infractions will be treated as current category IV and in relation to very serious infractions, like assaults on referees – they are going to be dealt with centrally.

“We think that parties will grasp the seriousness of this behaviour by virtue that it’s being dealt with at Croke Park level.”

Another of the measures he emphasises is penalising vexatious challenges to proposed suspensions. As he points out, there is no incentive for a player to accept the penalty proposed by the match committee on foot of a referee’s report.

“Take the custom and practice of challenging every decision. A player is no worse off if he seeks a hearing. He either escapes, gets a reduction or at worst, is no worse off than when he started so he might as well shake the tree and see what falls out of it.”

To counter this, the hearings committee will be obliged to double the suspension for anyone seeking a hearing based on purely procedural grounds, frequently by interrogating the referee’s report rather than arguing the infraction didn’t happen or was not deliberate.

“If you look at penalty points for motoring offences,” says Shaw, “you can accept or reject that but if you take it to court and don’t succeed, your penalty points are doubled. That’s what we’re doing – introducing an element of jeopardy to all applications for hearings.”

Other motions tighten up the penalties for team managers or coaches, who are guilty of unacceptable behaviour to match officials. For a long time, the full rigours of suspension were not enforced.

Should these proposals succeed, any team official who fails to observe the full extent of his suspension will place the club chair and secretary under pain of a bigger suspension than their manager or coach. This spreading of responsibility was previously used with success to address the issue of unauthorised players.

The heat is also to be turned up on match committees like county CCCs. If they decide that an infraction is “not proven,” a formal account of its decision would be required.

“I’ve often said it going into DRA cases,” says Shaw, “when there is a certain sympathy for the player involved, ‘there may be sentiment here that tilts a particular way but try writing that up’!”