IN DISCIPLINARY cases, in all sports, your response is shaped to some degree by your emotional investment in the outcome. There was no outrage in Ireland, for example, when Sean O’Brien received just a one-match suspension for striking a French player in the World Cup last Sunday, but there was a distinctly different response in other parts of the greater rugby community, emotionally distant from O’Brien’s case and its consequences for Ireland.
Now, black-and-white incidents with apparently black-and-white consequences are not a deterrent to defendants and their learned teams. O’Brien hit Pascal Pape. The television cameras captured it. You saw it. Yet the citing commissioner took a couple of days to clear his throat and the disciplinary procedure took eight hours to unfold; by Friday Ireland still hadn’t absolutely ruled out an appeal. In disciplinary cases, it seems, grey is the new black-and-white.
The GAA are no different. Late in the summer the GAA’s disciplinary procedures took a hit in two high-profile cases: a red card issued to Mayo’s Kevin Keane for clearly striking Donegal’s Michael Murphy was overturned by the Central Hearings Committee (CHC); a couple of weeks later Diarmuid Connolly was cleared to play in Dublin’s All-Ireland semi-final replay by the Disputes Resolution Authority (DRA) after a week of extraordinary engagement between Dublin and the GAA’s disciplinary processes.
Both cases were black-and-white. The television cameras captured them. The referee in Keane’s case and the linesman in Connolly’s case witnessed them in real time. The referee in both cases was correct to issue a red card. Yet neither player served a suspension.
So, where should our outrage be directed? At Mayo and Dublin for having the brazen neck to challenge decisions that were plainly correct, or at the disciplinary system for failing to uphold the coherent judgement of the match-day officials in both cases?
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Now that the dust has settled on the season and the fuss has cooled there are a few points to be made about this. When the system works we pay very little attention; often, no attention at all. In 2014, 269 suspensions were proposed by the Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) and just eight of them were overturned on appeal; this year the CCCC proposed 339 suspensions, 17 of which failed to stick. Connolly is the only inter-county player in the last five years to have his suspension overturned by the DRA.
By any standards that is an impressive strike rate. Referees make mistakes. Television pundits feast on slow-motion replays of referee errors. For so many of their red-card decisions to be unchallenged or upheld on appeal is a tribute to their judgement and to the strength of the process.
In these cases it fell down. Why? There has been no public explanation for the CHC decision in the Keane case but there has been a stern informal review in Croke Park and the members of the CHC responsible for that cock-eyed decision have had their cards marked.
The Connolly case is different because the DRA publish their findings on their website. In this instance the judgement runs to 46 pages and nearly 20,000 words, inflated by a withering and utterly convincing dissenting judgement issued by Brian Rennick, one of two solicitors empanelled for this case and the minority view in a 2-1 outcome. If you claim to have any interest in how the GAA’s disciplinary system works this is essential: stiffen your concentration, plough through the quasi-legal idiom and educate yourself.
Dublin went to extreme lengths. They carpet-bombed the process, at all stages, with objections — 14 at one point down to 11 when they reached the DRA. By any objective reading some of them were outlandishly spurious. Yet one of them stuck. He was released to play on a technicality that Rennick forensically dismantled in his dissenting judgement. But it wasn’t about right and wrong: it was about winning and losing.
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You will hear people say that taking a case like this and pursing it in this manner is against the spirit of the GAA but how can we say that with sincerity? The everyday reality is that clubs all over the country will do anything in their power to spring players for big matches. The greatest challenge to disciplinary processes at every level of the GAA is naked self-interest. Dublin were shameless in their pursuit of a victory in the Connolly case. They don’t care what people think.
The system, though, is good. The DRA have been a success for 10 solid years. The Connolly case was an extraordinary lapse of judgement. Something like that is unlikely to ever happen again. There is comfort in that.