There is a wonderful, incidental scene midway through RTE's Blowing the Whistle which captures all of the GAA's fundamental elements. At half time of last summer's Munster final, referee Pat McEnaney retires to the officials' room, sodden and concerned.
The first 35 minutes were roughshod and he wonders aloud if he ought to have sent off two particular players. His moment of crisis isn't eased any by the colleague who breezily assures him that everyone else in the room had agreed that they would certainly have dismissed the offenders in question.
Pat, the picture of Monaghan dolefulness, slumps against the wall and draws gratefully on a cigarette. As the camera pans in, all you can hear is a ferocious volley of roars from the team in the adjacent dressing-room, swears mixed with prayers, all vowing blue murder. McEnaney stares solemnly ahead. "Let's f****n' hold a tight rein here," he grimly advises before heading back out into the maelstrom. The moment is part existential revelation, part d'Unbelievables.
Blowing the Whistle is a vivid and charming examination of the much maligned and often parodied role of the referee within the GAA. As well as being pacily produced, it works because of the personality of its two subjects. McEnaney is full of wry mid-Ulster observations while Mick Curley, the Galway official, is a more placid individual who is deeply and evidently passionate about his role as an official. "He loves it," says his wife Dympna, with a shrug.
But both men are humourous, honest, self-deprecating and sympathetic towards the players. Adrian McCarthy's film follows them on their sojourns around Ireland's Gaelic fields last summer and succeeds in showing that referees aren't, as people often inform Des Cahill on Sportscall, just "tossers with whistles".
Indeed, during yesterday's screening at RTE, McEnaney could be found shaking with laughter after observing one caller inform Cahill that while no offence was intended to the Monaghan man's family, "he shouldn't be allowed attend a bloody match, let alone referee one".
Guys like Curley and McEnaney just accept the criticism and do their best to laugh it off. Comes with the territory. And as the cameras portray them on their training regimes and visits them at home, they cut happy figures and it makes for fine viewing.
The most arresting aspect of Blowing the Whistle though, is that the underlying ambivalence within the GAA towards violence is clearly discernible. Hence, outbreaks of unruliness, violence and nastiness continue to cloud the landscape of Gaelic football. While the two stars of this film are very highly regarded within the GAA, they each became embroiled in extremely high profile cases of Gaelic football violence. McEnaney was referee when the brawl broke out during the 1996 All-Ireland final replay between Mayo and Meath. Curley was the official who was struck by Wexford manager JJ Barrett at the close of a vital league game.
These two incidents are examined in the documentary along with other minor infractions which occurred during last year's championship. That Pat McEnaney admitted that any one of 20 players could have gone after the replay brawl is irrelevant at this stage and of scant consolation to Mayo's Liam McHale, a player with an impeccable record whose dismissal arguably sank his team's aspirations.
McEnaney was presented with a street fight and had the thankless task of choosing the scapegoats. At yesterday's screening, there was some laughter at the now familiar images of both teams flaking away at each other, but it might have been pointed out that "the fight" has become one of the most enduring Gaelic football images of the 1990s. For antiGAA factions, it serves as a very emblem of the games.
And while the Barrett-Curley incident was an isolated case of a seemingly decent man succumbing to a flash of insanity, the film demonstrates the natural upset caused to the official's family and the shame felt by the manager. But as Barrett himself points out, the elasticity and inconsistency of the rules can bring frustrated participants to the point of sheer rage. By highlighting the constant fouls which McEnaney, Curley and their colleagues are asked to judge upon every Sunday, this film hammers home the fact that Gaelic football treads a fine line between high-octane aggression and pure violence. The former is seen as an indelible part of the sport but, too often, the latter is treated with tacit approval by the wider GAA community.
It is within this culture that modern referees are asked to operate in return for, as Dympna Curley points out, 30 pence a mile and a maximum of £15 for a bite to eat.
Blowing the Whistle is as valuable an evaluation of the GAA as the ground breaking 1998 film, A Season of Sundays. Like Pat Comer's documentary, it confirms that GAA environs are peppered with fascinating men who curse incessantly, that the games are sustained by a unique spirit, that ordinary, everyday people simply love them and feel privileged to serve them. And that, at their best, they are thrilling.
These fine elements are at the heart of this welcome and vivid insight but, most importantly, the film communicates the sense that Gaelic football needs to establish a clearer definition of itself before one of these fine days it simply combusts.
