Wexford GAA secretary Aoife Parle has said the abuse of referees has become so bad that there's been incidents of officials' children being harrassed at school over decisions made in games.
At Wexford's annual county convention on Monday night, Parle highlighted an increase in incidents that she says is making it harder and harder to recruit referees.
In their five-year strategic plan for 2026 to 2031, Wexford intend to dedicate a section to the challenges facing refs, but the issue is a growing concern.
"Abuse from the sidelines, from mentors, from players on the sideline, at referees for a decision basically," Parle told RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland when asked about some of the problems being encountered.
"Profanities... intimidating behaviour, screaming during and after the match. Years ago I remember going to matches and the match would be going on and the mentors might be having arguments with the referee but at the end they would shake hands.
"You'd see quite often now even on the telly that we would have to get referees, they would come off with either stewards or guards because it would be that volatile a situation."
In October 2022, Wexford GAA handed down a 96-week suspension to a club mentor involved in an alleged assault on the referee and an umpire following a Junior A club football championship game.
"It follows you home and it affects your family, it affects everyone around them really."
Parle said there is a system in place to deal with incidents and stressed they are working to "combat the culture".
"We have a process in Wexford where the referee, anything he notes in his report would be sent to our discipline committee and they would follow the process from there," she added.
"So I would 100% stand behind any decisions our discipline committee have made this year. We've been giving long bans, we've been giving fines to clubs for this type of behaviour just to combat the culture really.
"Last year we had a rigorous programme with our clubs on abuse towards referees and treating referees with respect. The incidents did go down. They did go up a little bit this year again. So that's something where at the moment we're working on our strategic plan, which is from 2026 to 2031.
"There's seven different headings and referees are one of the headings because at the moment trying to get referees to sign on is a huge, huge problem.
"Last year, our referees officiated over two and a half thousand games. This was just underage and adult GAA in Wexford.
"Trying to recruit referees at the moment is a hard job. We're doing our best now at the moment to try and get them on board because look, if we don't have referees, we don't have games. I understand a referee is human at the end of the day. Every call is not going to be right, but it's just a fact now if it's even one call, it's on social media. You see people with their phones out. It's being put up online."
Highlighting the wider impact of the intense criticism some referees are subjected to, Parle revealed: "We've had an incident where a referee made a decision. It was up online and there were loads of people commenting online and it was reported back to us then that his son went into school and got abused in school because of a decision he had made.
"So you don't just leave things at a game now. It follows you home and it affects your family, it affects everyone around them really.
"A referee is there and there's 15 players in each team, there's supporters, there's sidelines. A lot of the time he can be on his own against all of those people. So we're trying our best now to have linesmen at knockout games or any high-stakes games. We try our best to have 90% of our games in pitches that might have a surround so it's safer for the referee.
"It's not something we should have to look at or do, but it's something we need to do now."
