GAA president Liam O’Neill keen to strengthen sanction against sectarian abuse

GAA president Liam O’Neill has described as “beyond regrettable” the latest incident of alleged sectarian abuse on the playing field – and also promised an immediate change to the penalty of applying match-bans specific to that competition.

O’Neill was responding to an incident in the Dr McKenna Cup earlier this month. Cavan midfielder Gearóid McKiernan was handed a two-match ban (which he didn’t appeal) for alleged verbal abuse on Monaghan’s Drew Wylie, although the ban won’t apply until next year’s McKenna Cup.

While McKiernan has personally apologised to Wylie, O’Neill says there is an urgent need to amend the current rule on match-bans specific to the competition and says a motion to that effect will be brought before next month’s Congress.

Ethnic origin

“We always abhor any form of abuse of our players, whether it be racial or sectarian or on body size or anything that somebody can’t change,” said O’Neill.

“You can’t change your religion, you can’t change your ethnic origin and sometimes you can’t change your body size. Any insult like that is reprehensible. It was beyond regrettable. We regret it terribly.

“The difficulty here is we decided, for ordinary level abuse, our black card deals with that, whether it’s player to player, or player to referees. And it’s a red card for an incident of racist or sectarian abuse and the referee correctly applied the rule in this case.

“The rule at the moment is also competition specific, and it’s time specific and so applied perfectly by Ulster Council. But we now accept that it’s not adequate, and we’re going to deal with it immediately.”

What O’Neill is planning – in what is likely to be his last act as GAA president–- is help frame a motion where any ban for alleged sectarian abuse is not competition specific, but instead involves a far greater level of punishment.

“I don’t know whether it’s possible or not but I feel that when a player says something of this nature he should have to go on some sort of a programme, human relations or racial relations or whatever sort of programme you’d call it, where he would learn how to behave towards other people.

“I don’t think it’s acceptable that anybody should be abused in this manner and I think there should be a re-education process. ”