Relief for Mary I trio as ban fears allayed

HIGHER Education GAA Chairman Michael Mallie last night revealed that any proposed suspensions for Mary Immaculate College hurling trio Shane McGrath, Jamie Nagle and Darragh Egan will only pertain to third-level competitions.

Mary Immaculate College last week withdrew from the secondary hurling competition, the Ryan Cup, granting a walkover to quarter-final opponents IT Tralee after third-level authorities informed them that Tipperary duo McGrath and Egan, and Waterford senior Nagle were ineligible to play as they did not have sufficient course credits.

There were suggestions over the weekend they were set to be slapped with 12-week bans which would have ruled them out of all GAA action.

But Mallie insists that is not the case and cites a recent ruling on Cork goalkeeper Anthony Nash as setting a precedent that third-level suspensions be tied just to those competitions.

“Mary Immaculate withdrew from the competition when we pointed out to them that these players were ineligible. Those guys are doing an 18 months teaching course that only gives you 90 credits. You need 60 credits every year to play third-level. The rule is you can decide to play one of the two years and last year those three guys played in their successful Ryan Cup win, so they didn’t have enough credits to play this year. Mary Immaculate appealed that to the appeals committee in Croke Park, and subsequently lost which proves we were correct in our ruling. We did not suspend them and could have done that. I know that they did play illegally in the earlier round and we may look into the matter later. But the key thing is that at this stage it only concerns college competitions.

“The Croke Park appeals committee recently ruled in the case of Anthony Nash of UCC that his suspension should only affect competitions under the college’s jurisdiction.”

Mallie also promised that they are set to establish a committee in the next month to tackle the issue of third-level eligibility, insisting they ‘will be successful’ in eradicating the controversies of recent years.

“The eligibility issue has come up a lot and we’re trying to get it sorted. We’re going to look at it over the next month. We’ve set up a committee to look at the whole scenario of eligibility in colleges. It’s a small minority of colleges who get players in and see it as a big thing to raise their profile by winning these competitions. But the general majority are great colleges. These are things that not nice to be doing but you have to take a stand to be honest. We’re doing our best to keep the whole thing above board. We’re warning colleges about eligibility but these things keep coming up. Colleges are getting in elite sportsman that are intercounty players on a scholarship to do a course. We’re trying to eradicate that. It’s a slow process but I think we will be successful.”