February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
And all along, we were operating under the foolish impression that hitting a fellow player off the ball, and trying to gain a chemical advantage in track were, you know, sort of bad form. Some people might even go as far as to call them examples of cheating.
“Everything John Mullane said as soon as he was put off reflected everything that is good about the association,” GAA president Sean Kelly said. “He showed honesty, integrity, accepted the rules and didn’t look for an easy fix in the sense that he would be let off to play in an All-Ireland semifinal. John takes his membership very seriously. He said, ‘That’s the rule; I offended and I put my hands up,’ so it was very commendable.”
It says much about the ridiculous culture of litigation that has enveloped Irish sport that for simply choosing to take his medicine and not drag the game into the High Court, Mullane gets applauded from on high. A guy shouldn’t be getting any credit for simply doing the right thing. Like thousands of hurlers and footballers the last 120 years, he was caught committing an on-field crime and forced to do the time. That’s the most basic tenet of sporting justice, and yet for merely adhering to it, Mullane is suddenly supposed to be considered a paragon of virtue.
Since the Tipperary midfielder Derry Foley sought a court injunction to allow him play in the 1994 Munster football final against Cork, GAA members and clubs have increasingly been beating a path to the solicitors’ offices. A couple of years ago, Tipp minor hurler John Boland went to the High Court to overturn a four-week suspension so he could play in the All-Ireland minor final against Tipperary. He’d been sent off for rough play in a club match for Toomevara and Justice Mary Finlay-Geoghegan decided the “loss of opportunity” he’d suffer was worthy of an injunction. What happened to the notion of letting a guy learn his lesson?
The GAA’s disciplinary system is a flawed entity, but that doesn’t make it right for somebody like Westmeath footballer Rory O’Connell to go to a higher court to avoid serving a ban this summer. When you join an association, surely you implicitly accept its rules and regulations. You can’t accept them when they suit you, then bring in the legal eagles when they don’t. To do so is to undermine the authority of referees on the field, and most probably create a culture where the men in black tolerate bad behavior for fear of having any adverse decision scrutinized in the Four Courts.
That the Westmeath supporters’ club were willing to spend