GAA President elect Jarlath Burns has told RTÉ Sport that he would be in favour of more diligent tracking of club player and supporter behaviour in order to cut down on the abuse of match officials.
Burns, who was speaking at the BOX-IT Athletic Grounds ahead of a charity skydive next weekend, has said that he would like to see an addition to a referee's report where both teams as well as their supporters are given grades across the season with potential sanctions to be applied as a result.
"I would like to see a situation where on a referee's report there is an index, one to five, of how the home team, opposing team and supporters behaved so then we will be dealing with data," he said.
"At each county board meeting you’d be able to say which is club is consistently the club that is abusing referees because there is a lot of irrational abuse going on for our referees.
"Most of the games I go to, going as a neutral or going to cover for TG4, you say to yourself 'I think the referee actually had a fine game there, I thought he did well.’ Then you talk to people on both sides and they’ll say 'I thought the referee was terrible’.
"When we become emotionally involved in a game we lose sense of rationality and logic and I think that we need to focus on the worst culprits at club in particular who are abusing referees and causing referees not to want to continue to be referees."
Listen to the RTÉ GAA Podcast on the RTÉ Radio Player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Armagh native, who will replace current President Larry McCarthy in 2024, also stated his frustration that Motion 48 was defeated at this year’s Congress.
Submitted by the GAA's Ard Chomhairle, it had stated that "when a defending party requests a hearing, the Hearings Committee can double the originally proposed penalty, if unsuccessful and considered to have been frivolous or vexatious and not solely based on procedural or technical arguments."
"The other thing I would like to do is to get referees to understand how to fill in the referee’s report to make sure that if you send a player off that that player remains sent off. To make it harder for that player to get off [from a suspension]," said Burns.
"I was a wee bit disappointed at Congress that the proposal [was defeated] that if you carry out a spurious hearing on a loophole that’s really a hiding to nothing, that the power exists within the committee in charge have the power to double the suspension.
"When we become emotionally involved in a game we lose sense of rationality and logic and I think that we need to focus on the worst culprits at club in particular"
"As having sat on the Ulster Hearings Committee this last four years and the DRA for the last 20 years, I would be fully in the support of that.
"I also think that our rules need to be easier to read, to understand and to apply. We need to maybe classify rules rather than have them categorised."
"You have category one, category two and category three infractions, I would like to change those to very general terms," Burns added. "To, for example, rough play, unsporting play, dangerous play, that sort of thing that makes it slightly vague but that really puts the power differential back to the referee."
Burns said that a culture change in the GAA towards match officials was imperative, but also accepted that such changes will require long-term planning.
"Momentum builds up within a club of 'we have to get this player off, if there's a way to get him off we have to get him off’ and it’s not a good way to do our business.
"I speak to so many referees who have given up refereeing because they send a player off on a Tuesday for let’s say abuse of a referee and they throw the ball up on the following Tuesday he is there because he got off on hearings through some technicality.
"That is a very, very difficult culture to change which is why I thought the doubling of a spurious appeal, the sanction, might turn people away from doing it.
"Culture changes very, very slowly and an awful lot of what we do in the culture of the GAA, and I'm not just talking promotion of Irish culture, I’m talking the cultural GAA, is really good – the way we promote our amateur status and the way we promote inclusion and how we are community and volunteer led.
"We don’t want to want to do away with all parts of our culture, but culture can be a good thing and culture can be a bad thing. That part of our culture really annoys me."
Jarlath Burns is representing Armagh in the Ulster GAA skydive on 12 March alongside the likes of Down’s Benny Coulter, Monaghan’s Dessie Mone and Antrim’s Jane Adams to raise money for both the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Reasearch at Queen’s University Belfast and the Ambulance NI service. More information here.
