‘Cancer’ must be eradicated, says Dunne

The GAA’s former games administration chief Jimmy Dunne has described indiscipline at club level as seen in O’Moore Park on Sunday as “a cancer that needs to be eradicated”.

The Wicklow man, who chaired the GAA’s Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) in the mid-Noughties, also said patrons and substitutes who entered the field of play and found to have behaved violently in Portlaoise should be dealt with by authorities higher than the GAA.

Dunne was speaking in relation to Sunday’s ill-tempered All-Ireland semi-final between Tyrone’s Derrytresk and Kerry’s Dromid Pearses.

“It’s a cancer that has to be eradicated,” he said. “That it happened in an All-Ireland semi-final, to have that kind of behaviour going on at that stage of the competition is very serious.”

Dunne intimated that those who encroached the pitch during the melee and acted in a violent manner should be answerable to the law.

“There is no excuse, none whatsoever, for patrons coming in off the line. They should be dealt with at a different level outside of the association. Substitutes have no authority to enter the field of play either. If people want to play football you’ll have no trouble but if people go out determined to cause problems there’s not much you can do. There’s no place for it in our association.”

As the current CCCC consider issuing punishments arising from video footage of the game, Dunne expressed his sympathy for the onerous process they are undertaking.

“The big concern in all of this is that it’s very difficult for any committee to pick out the culprits. All things have to be considered — whether a player was trying to defend himself or defend a teammate, etc. The committee have to determine the rules of each guy in the middle of it. Some are easy to pick out but you have to study the videos forensically, almost frame by frame to identify culprits. I don’t envy the people trying to deal with the matter.”