Garry wants action taken to stop abuse
Over the next few weeks, Ronan Garry will find himself assigned to a goalpost on championship day.
As one of David Coldrick’s umpires, he counts himself fortunate to be part of some of the biggest football days in the year.
Mind you, it’s not a job for the thin-skinned and yet it’s almost a haven for him now. It’s also the extent of his GAA officiating, having quit refereeing following a nasty experience in May last year.
Garry was refereeing a Division 3 FL game between Ratoath and Moynalvey in the former’s venue. The home team were leading by two points in the closing seconds of the game when he awarded a free to the Moynalvey corner-forward on the 13-metre line.
The free was taken but as one of the Ratoath players broke the exclusion zone before it was kicked Garry moved the free to the middle of the 13m line. He instructed the Ratoath players on the goal-line not to advance from it as to do so was a technical foul in the small square.
He reckons he warned them at least three times but when the free was taken the goalkeeper and another three players moved off it.
He awarded a penalty, which Moynalvey scored. He blew for full-time shortly afterwards.
Cue bedlam.
As he attempted to walk off the field, a pair of gloves were thrown in his direction. He was called “a c**t” among other abusive comments.
He moved quicker to the referee’s room and in an attempt to cool the situation invited the Ratoath manager in to discuss his grievances.
Garry was informed by the manager that he had got a number of decisions wrong, each of which the referee countered. The manager then left the room at Garry’s request but an uninvited person entered and proceeded to call him a “bollix” and a “fucker”. Garry asked him to leave repeatedly without success before he eventually exited.
He had no personal belongings in the room — “If I had brought my phone with me,” he later told the Meath County Board, “I would have called the Gardaí during this time.”
Worse was to follow when after approximately 20 minutes he decided to leave the room, hoping the coast was clear. “I was faced by nearly 20 or 30 people staring at me,” he recalls. “I did think I was going to have the shite kicked out of me, simple as that.”
In correspondence with the board, he articulated he was never given any protection from the Ratoath club.
“As I walked through the crowd the abuse started again,” he wrote in his match report, “where I was pushed at least once and really feared for my safety at this stage, and was relieved that I got through the other side and got into my car and left the venue.”
Arising from his account in the match report, the chairman and secretary of Ratoath were suspended. They appealed it to the Leinster Council who reverted the case back to Meath’s Competitions Control Committee last summer.
It was outstanding until recently when it was dropped because of “a lack of evidence”.
Following that evening, Garry stepped back from refereeing for three months but on learning of the outcome of the case, quit completely.
“My reasoning for highlighting this now is that I got no support from the county board, referees’ co-ordinators or committee, and I now feel that this could happen again and nothing would be done to protect me or other referees,” he states.
“In the game where the incident occurred, it was confirmed that I had made the correct decisions based on the rules, and that there was no foundation for the club’s reaction.
“The end result is that Ratoath has got away free from sanction for something which should not occur, I have stopped refereeing and it has set a precedent that Meath County Board will not protect their referees.
“Effectively this has been swept under the carpet and that is something I don’t think should happen.”
But there was another reason for Garry’s decision to retire from refereeing. When he did return he started to doubt himself after what happened.
“When there was a decision to be made I found myself thinking, ‘is it easier on me not to make the decision and to let it go?’ I just couldn’t do that anymore because I went into refereeing for the right reasons. Once that stopped, I had to stop it completely.”
Garry could only throw his eyes up to heaven recently when he heard the Meath board complain about a shortage of referees.
“When there’s no backing for referees what can you do? I’m still involved with David Coldrick as an umpire and I train kids but when people think something happened to Ratoath and I was in the wrong to me that gets to me more than anything else because I know I was right.”
The incident was the subject of much discussion board chat on a website, something which disappointed Garry. But he has no issue in putting his head above the parapet to talk about his ordeal, even if other referees aren’t as forthcoming.
“I talk to referees on a weekly basis and incidents like this happen on a monthly if not a weekly basis. What happens is referees stay refereeing because they want to referee. They’re also getting a couple of quid for it as well. They want bigger games too.
“I don’t want this to be about me, more about the way in which these things can happen. This is where the county boards want to take care of things quietly as they don’t want the bad press.
“The difference with me is that I don’t care about the politics and am happy to run around the outside.
“Refereeing has lost its magic for me anyway, which is another reason I can talk about this, and another reason most referees won’t.”
Simply put, what Garry would like to see are punishments handed down to GAA units who intimidate and abuse referees like him.
“If clubs are sanctioned properly according to the rulebook of the association people would have been suspended. If it happened every time clubs did it then they would stop doing it.”
