Joe Brolly has voiced concerns over a process that could see Tyrone footballer Tiernan McCann hit with an eight-week ban for simulation.
McCann slumped to the ground after Monaghan's Darren Hughes tousled the Tyrone forward’s hair during last Saturday’s All-Ireland SFC quarter-final last Sunday, with Hughes controversially receiving a straight red card.
After a Twitter exchange with former Red Hands star Philip Jordan, Brolly revealed the reasons behind his dismay with proposed ban, telling RTÉ Sport's Game On: “In short, the law of statutory interpretation applies to any rule, and in this case the lawmaker - which is congress - has created a specific offence in rule five which is to attempt to achieve an advantage by feigning a foul or injury, and the penalty for that is a yellow card.
“So, there’s a specific offence created in the law and there’s a specific penalty for that, which is a yellow card.”
Expanding on the importance of the rulebook in the sport, Brolly said: “It has two purposes. The first, is so that we know what the rules are and the second purpose is that it prevent the lawmaker from abusing his power.
"The lawmaker can’t all of a sudden say ‘Look, in fact I don’t like that punishment for that offence, I think it should be more on this occasion and therefore we’ll use an entirely different power arbitrarily on this single occasion, simply because the punishment we believe does not fit the offence.”
The RTÉ pundit added: “There’s a specific offence of feigning injury and that’s what he’s done and the penalty is a yellow card. Congress decided that.
"So that’s the rule. I don’t like it, I must say. I think the penalty should be a red card for feigning and that the minimum ban should be eight weeks.
"But that’s not the case and however much we would like it to be that way – no one been a more trenchant critic of Tyrone’s cynicism than I’ve been over the years, I thoroughly dislike it, I thinks it's poisonous for the ethos of the game, and there’s no doubt that there’s a good moral reason why the GAA has taken this stance because it’s saying ‘enough’s enough’ but the reality is we’re all bound by the law.
“What they’ve done here, is for the first time they’ve used a very general power - ‘misconduct considered to have discredited the association’ – and they’ve used that to propose an eight-week suspension.”
Brolly believes the existing rule related to simulation has to change, saying: "There’s no doubt the laws going to be revisited because we’ve reached the stage where teams can no longer be relied upon to play in the spirit of the Gael.”
"We’ve reached the stage where teams can no longer be relied upon to play in the spirit of the Gael"
The prospect of a potential ban not having the opportunity to come before the Disputes Resolution Authority was another issue that bothered Brolly: “I’ve been to the DRA on seven or eight occasions, and the DRA itself - which is the GAA’s sort of court of appeal has faultlessly fair hearing, but the problem is to get into the DRA, and there are mechanisms.
"There are ways to prevent good cases from getting in to the DRA at all, and they’ve also been deployed against me in the past to prevent me from getting a very good case into the DRA and that’s my concern from Tyrone’s perspective - that they’ll be screwed here.”
