National Public Health Emergency team officials make contact with GAA

The National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) have been in contact with the GAA about their request for information concerning the decision to put all sports events behind closed doors.

Although a meeting between the bodies has yet to be finalised, the Irish Examiner understands there have been unofficial communications between the two bodies following GAA president John Horan’s letter to acting chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn.

Horan wrote to Glynn last week following the decision by the Government on the recommendation of NPHET to ban spectators from attending games.

“We’re not looking for conflict,” Horan said last Sunday. “All we’re looking for is the data on which the decisions were made and we would like to add that to the data that we have been compiling to make better decisions on the ground and make sure we within the GAA are not letting the side down.

“We’re not looking to personally meet Ronan Glynn or Philip Nolan. We’re quite happy if somebody would supply us with the data and see where the falldown came.” 

Speaking last week, Dr Glynn said he was open to meeting sports organisations to explain why they made the behind-closed-doors proposal to the Government. Although NPHET has claimed there have been Covid-19 clusters associated with games, the GAA are unaware of any case pertaining to the playing of its games. Earlier this week, Glynn said some of the “small number of cases and clusters” were related to spectators.

The GAA are still waiting for guidance from NPHET in relation to the definition of casual and close contacts in a sports context. In the meantime, they are working off the interpretation provided by their Covid-19 advisory group, which has explained team-mates and opponents are casual contacts and therefore don’t need to self-isolate and in the event of one positive case a club needs no stand down.

That view came under scrutiny this past week when Clanna Gael Fontenoy’s request for their junior A hurling quarter-final against Ballyboden St Enda’s to be postponed was denied by the Dublin County Board and they were made to forfeit the game.

Clanna Gael did not fulfil the game as they were concerned when one of the Ballyboden players tested positive last week three days after training with his team. “We very much regret that the Dublin County Board didn’t see things this way; and our players consider they’ve unfairly paid a price for playing it safe,” said Clanna Gael chairman Bernard Barron in a statement.