On Wednesday night on the northside of Dublin, the referees shouted stop. They came from all across the city to St Vincent’s clubhouse and set about forming a Gaelic Referees’ Union. They don’t know where it will all end up or what the life of a GAA referee will look like 10 years from now. They only know it can’t be this.
One ref stood up and told the story of needing a Garda escort to get off a pitch after a club match. The next day at work, his boss noticed he was in bad form. More than that, he was, in his own words, “having a quasi-meltdown” and was “completely unable to function”. He spoke of how the company took it upon themselves to provide him with counselling and support services.
His place of work was his support system. Not the GAA at central level. Not the Dublin County Board. Not the man’s club, nor (obviously) either of the clubs involved in the game he had just refereed. No, a private company with no connection to Gaelic games undertook to help this referee through the trauma he was feeling as a result of an evening spent on his hobby.
“The reality is that there will be a tragedy,” says referee and group organiser Conor Galvin. “Somewhere along the way, everyone is going to have blood on their hands. And it won’t be until then that everybody goes, ‘Okay, this has gone too far.’
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“There is a mental health crisis in refereeing. No question about that. One guy talked about how it was causing trouble in his relationship. Several spoke about how they would never and will never bring their family to any game they’re refereeing. One of them told about how his kid had got threatened standing on the sideline, a guy told him he’d punch his face in. The rap sheet goes on and on and on.”
There were 22 referees in the room on Wednesday night. They have upwards of 170 in the WhatsApp group. They have no official mandate from anybody only themselves but they’re working on it. Ideally, they’d be part of a nationwide network and maybe that’s down the line. For now, these are baby steps.
They look at something like the GPA and puff their cheeks. Every intercounty player in the country has access to a support system, to wellness programmes and leadership courses. As an organisation, they make player welfare their top priority, zeroing in on everything from travel expenses to addiction services. Who does any of that for referees? Who does anything for them?
Even when you go down to club level, even at the most basic, sea-bed level of the association, the whole set-up is a constant reminder of the referee’s lowly place on the totem pole. If a player has a bad experience in a game, there’s a natural, immediate support structure available in the shape of a dressing room and a group of teammates, coaches and mentors. A referee who has had a bad experience has nothing other than the imperative to get into his car and get out of dodge.
But of course, you know all of this. Anyone who goes to matches at any level would have been surprised by precisely nothing that was said in St Vincent’s on Wednesday night. The blanket lack of respect for referees in the GAA is one of the deepest stains on the association and yet everybody just tends to look at it and shrug. David Gough got booed after the All-Ireland final and the only comeback from the association was a gentle chide of “Now-now, now-now” from Larry McCarthy.
A couple of weeks back, at the trial of Evin Bennett and a Portarlington minor player for the assault of Laois referee Michael Tarpey, one of the witnesses said something telling. Portarlington selector Thomas Smith was describing the scene wherein he saw Tarpey take a swing at Bennett. The judge ultimately found that this swing was in response to a headbutt from Bennett and convicted Bennett of assault. But in his effort to back his clubman, Smith said he was shocked to see the ref strike out.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Smith said from the witness box. “Normally the referee is obviously the person who is sort of taking the abuse, verbal – if it is verbal – and so on and so forth.”
Could anybody possibly disagree? Would anyone ever try to make the argument against this being fundamentally how referees are seen in the GAA? We all just accept that if there’s abuse flying around, then obviously a referee’s role is to be on the receiving end of it. It’s a bedrock norm of the association. The only surprise is that it’s taken this long for them to collectively decide that it shouldn’t be.
“Referees need empowerment to improve the standards of refereeing,” says Galvin. “There should be psychological training to actually cope with real-life pressure-cooker situations. We need counselling, support services. We need a referee’s welfare hotline for when things go badly wrong, so that we know there is somebody there that we can turn to.
“But this is all tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Fundamentally, referees need to generate respect. Nobody even pretends that there’s respect for the badge at the minute. We are coming together to say the whole thing needs an overhaul. We are bringing it to the county board and if we’re not listened to, we will have to start talking about a withdrawal of services.”
Galvin says he’s heard of similar conversations taking place among refereeing groups in other counties and that the situation is close to nuclear in some of them. Maybe this all goes nowhere. Or maybe the Dublin refs established a model and it goes everywhere.
One way or the other, it can’t go on like this.
