February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
O Se caused uproar recently when he called Kerry’s passionate football supporters “animals.”
The fallout from the comments resulted in O Se issuing an apology to the county’s supporters and Kerry coach John O’Keeffe.
Neither O Se nor O’Keeffe were at the press conference intended to bring closure to the brouhaha, but GAA officials were anxious to get the word out that the affair was now closed as far as they were concerned.
O’Keeffe, for one, has accepted O Se’s apology. The reaction of Kerry fans might take longer to assess.
Kerry County Board chairman Sean Walsh told reporters gathered at the press conference, held at Austin Stack Park in Tralee, that from now on there would be a lot less talk and a lot more football in the county.
He asked the press to accept that the “animals” affair had now passed into county lore.
“Put it to bed tonight,” Walsh said.
The press conference followed a few days after O Se’s actual apology, delivered from South Africa, where he was on vacation with a number of county players.
Amid calls for his resignation as manager, O Se had apologized to the county’s supporters following remarks he made in a newspaper interview.
O Se had referred to the Kerry fans as the “roughest type of bleeping animals you could ever deal with.”
Some of the heat was taken out of the situation when the reporter who had interviewed O Se said that the comment had been made in an exuberant and light-hearted manner and had been delivered in jest.
Separately in the interview, O Se came across as being critical of O’Keeffe, hence the separate apology to the coach.