After years unspoken, will we see action?

Identities are still protected under the statute of limitations, but the story bears retelling.

The location was one of the great stadia in the high summer, and the precise time was half an hour or so after a keenly-contested inter-county championship game.

The dramatis personae in the story are significant: there was a stand-off between an accredited drug tester and a player because the latter believed that he had chemicals rushing in his bloodstream, to use that old David Gray line. According to the legend, they weren’t anabolic steroids but recreational substances, and the player wasn’t interested in having his play-time chemical of choice named for all to see.

The stand-off ended with the withdrawal of the frustrated tester.

So the legend goes, anyway, and that’s one of the big issues with discussing substance use in sport. You have to skirt around naming names or you risk tarring everybody with the same brush.

Until Davy Fitzgerald made his comments during the week about the alleged social habits among former Clare senior hurling panellists, that is.

It didn’t amount to naming names before an Oireachtas committee either, but it still caused a minor sensation yesterday.

At first it, didn’t quite add up. The Banner manager told an audience at a mental health symposium at Limerick IT: “In the mid-2000s in Clare we had a problem with drink and other harder substances. My feeling was that Clare was a social team at the time.”

Yet the record books show that Clare reached an All-Ireland semi-final in 2005, and came within a late point of overturning Cork to make the decider itself. The year before that, they brought Kilkenny to a replay at the All-Ireland quarter-final stage and might have snatched the drawn game; the year afterwards, 2006, they beat Wexford by 12 points in the quarter-final before going out to Kilkenny, the eventual champions, at the All-Ireland semi-final stage.

A “social team” would hardly have achieved those heights: typical Fitzgerald hyperbole, you say, before sharpening the pencil for a pointed riposte. An experienced media operator like the Clare manager has to know that dropping a verbal hand grenade into his presentation as he did is bound to draw headlines like a magnet pulls in metal. If you’re trying to convey a particular message, in this case about mental health, then it hardly helps to create a furore about another, far more lurid issue altogether.

Hold on, though. Elsewhere in this newspaper today Mike McNamara, a former Clare senior hurling manager, backs up those claims, that those allegations were not only true, but had to be confronted by him in his tenure.

Not so handy when planning to let your prejudices free rein, maybe, but is it more constructive in the long run to have those allegations supported?

One of the more significant developments — or advances — in recent years has been a general acknowledgement in sporting circles of the dangers of excessive drinking to participants and fans alike. Even allowing for the occasional inconsistency, like the major role alcohol sponsorship plays in keeping elite sport functioning here, there’s less and less tolerance for boozing along the lines of, say, Darren Clarke sinking a pint for the crowds after the Ryder Cup in 2006. It’s hard to imagine that scene viewed quite as indulgently today, for instance.

But admitting there was a problem in the first place was the initial step in recognising something had to be done about the drink culture in sport.

Fitzgerald and McNamara may have set us on a similar road when it comes to such ‘harder’ substances with their comments in recent days, but is there an appetite for action?