Ahead of this weekend's 'Respect the Ref’ campaign, Kilkenny camogie star Grace Walsh concedes that GAA officials are sometimes the easiest scapegoat when a team fails to win.
Last week GAA president Larry McCarthy said that the recent high-profile incidents regarding the abuse, physical and verbal, of officials "have undoubtedly cast a shadow over the entire association".
Speaking at the launch of the Planet Games in Kenya next month, Walsh says that while she has never witnessed anything remotely close to physical abuse of a referee on the camogie pitch, verbal abuse still needs to be stamped out.
"Referees are there to do their best," she said. "They love the sport as much as we do and are as passionate about it. They are trying to make the right calls. Sometimes they don’t make the right calls, but they are only human. You have to learn to bite your tongue as a player sometimes.
"I’ll hold my hand up and say I haven’t done that all the time. As you get a bit older, you learn to do that."
Among the frustrations within the game over the years has been both the rules governing the game, and indeed the application of them.
The Tullaroan woman however is slow to point the finger at officials, stating that the result can skew perceptions around decision making.
"In our championship, it was pretty consistent," Walsh said. "It definitely can change a little bit, but I think that comes from the person themselves, what they see as a free and what they don't maybe.
"Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a game in particular where I thought, 'that was terrible’, but it does happen.
"It's whether you win or lose, whether you zone in or not on the referee. Sometimes when we lose a game we are looking for, not excuses, but reasons why, and that can be why we look towards the referee’s decisions."
Walsh has become a mainstay in the Kilkenny team over the years, with recent seasons in stark contrast to the start of her inter-county career.
Having missed the 2016 loss to Cork, she was part of a Cats set-up that lost three successive finals. In contrast, the likes of Mary O’Connell and Katie Nolan appeared in their first final in the Covid campaign of 2020 and have two winners medals in three years.
"They were all very excited, and some of us older ones were warning them because, some of them are in since 2020 and have two All-Irelands out of there," she added. "
"We were saying, it doesn’t come that easy.We see the younger ones coming in, and the difference in them from the first to second year has been incredible. People on the outside don’t see that, but we see what they are doing in training and how easy it has been for them to settle in."
Grace Walsh is taking part in Plant For The Planet Games this November in Kenya. Each player participating in the games has committed to raising €10,000 with funds raised going to Self Help Africa to support the planting of trees.
