Top official O’Neill urges disciplinary reform
O’Neill admitted that the GAA’s rules and regulates meant that officials could not order a replay and left national and provincial chiefs with “egg on their faces”.
According to O’Neill, a former Leinster Council chairman, radical alterations to the disciplinary system would also speed up the process of dealing with suspensions and make the procedures more transparent.
His proposal is a three-man committee that has previously been mooted by the GAA’s Head Of Games, Pat Daly. The new body would review all games every Monday and make rapid decisions on controversial incidents.
O’Neill argued: “It should be done by a three-man group where you’d have a lawyer, somebody who would know sports law; a GAA person, a former player or somebody of standing within the GAA playing community; and a neutral from a different sporting body. That body could also, if we gave them powers, look at situations like what happened (in the Leinster final) and say ‘this is just beyond what our rules can control but we must do something about it’.”
Under existing disciplinary structures, prospective suspensions can be dealt with by up to four groups beginning with the Central Competitions Control Committee and ending, in a minority of cases, with the Disputes Resolution Authority. O’Neill declared it to be a procedural nightmare that could be circumvented.
“Justice that is done swiftly is better for the player and for everyone. This thing where we drag it out for weeks doesn’t serve either the player that was accused, his county, or future opponents.”
According to O’Neill, there has been movement inside Croke Park towards a review of its procedures and the Laois official predicted that changes could come into affect soon.
O’Neill has called for a more flexible approach from the GAA in relation to all of its procedures and regulations and described as “ludicrous” the five-year moratorium on playing rules which followed last April’s Congress in Newcastle, Co Down. Handing a committee the power to order replays in exceptional circumstances would fit in with that philosophy although there were fears expressed last week that such an unprecedented course of action would somehow open the floodgates to future requests. That was labelled as “nonsense” by O’Neill who pointed to the fact that there had been only two such scenarios — Laois-Carlow in 1995 and Sarsfields-Na Fianna in 2001 — in the last 15 years at either senior club or inter-county levels.
Should he succeed Christy Cooney as president — and O’Neill is currently the only man to officially declare his candidacy — he will be handing over the Sam Maguire and Liam McCarthy Cups but it remains to be seen where those presentations will take place.
If O’Neill is to have his way, pitch invasions won’t be the only tradition to end as the days of captains starting lengthy speeches with the words ‘Tá an áthas orm an corn seo a glacadh’ will also become a thing of the past.
“Hanging around doing presentations is crazy. Do we need the person who’s given the cup to spend five minutes speaking? No. How many speeches of people presented with cups can you remember over the years? None, so that speaks for itself, doesn’t it? We need to get the cup into the hands of the captain quicker and we need to get the captain down to celebrate with his supporters quicker if there is a melee that causes a difficulty.”
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