Who’d be a referee? Booed from the stands, criticised from the dugouts – and if you make a particularly contentious call, somebodymight even feel they should run on to the pitch, the better to communicate their displeasure – as happened after the Meath v Louth Leinster final in 2010.
The statistics are grim. Research by Ulster University reveals 96 per cent of GAA refs have received verbal abuse, while a full 20 per cent reported instances of physical assault. That scourge of abuse of match officials is the subject of Gráinne McElwain’s documentary Réiteoir! (RTÉ One, Thursday), a fascinating, albeit occasionally muddled, investigation into attitudes towards referees in hurling and football.
The story is told through the experiences of two experienced referees – Siobhán Coyle from Donegal and David Gough from Meath – and an up-and-comer, Eoghan Ó Muircheartaigh, from Kerry and a grandnephew of the late Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, the iconic match commentator whose loquacious style, heard from a parked car or a grandparent’s radio, was for decades the unofficial soundtrack to the Irish summer.
Gough is the highest profile of the three, having been involved in several controversial matches. In the 2016 All-Ireland football semi-final, he didn’t spot a foul on a Kerry player, which allowed Dublin to proceed up the pitch and notch up a crucial point. Just last year, in the Connacht final, he erroneously awarded Galway a match-winning free in injury time over Mayo. Gough doesn’t deny making mistakes – but the backlash was traumatising and much of the vitriol was homophobic in nature.
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“After 2016, I think it really affected my mental health. It took me a long time to come back to refereeing after that game. It was terrible walking from the pitch that day. There were programmes and bottles being thrown from the Cusack Stand,” he says of the Dublin v Kerry game. “I was worried about going on to the pitch. I knew I had made a huge mistake and maybe people didn’t have the same confidence in my refereeing any longer and that was very difficult for me.”
You can empathise with him, but rather than dig deeper into subject of match abuse, the documentary, like a naive team up against a blanket defence, is a little bit all over the map. In Donegal, Coyle talked about the sacrifices required to be a ref. The scenes featuring rookie Eoghan Ó Muircheartaigh, for their part, seem to come from an entirely different documentary about the long road to becoming an inter-county referee. There are references in passing to how club games are sometimes more challenging to referee than inter-county matches – but the subject is not fully explored. We hear nothing from supporters, who are responsible for the bulk of the abuse.
McElwain, who grew up in a GAA family in Monaghan, is passionate about the sport and shows great empathy when interviewing Gough. But this new documentary also risks being seen to focus too much on the negatives of GAA rather than celebrating the positives of hurling and football – and is in contrast to the constant cheerleading of the Premier League soccer in the UK by English pundits, even though the sport has far more significant issues than any facing the GAA. Also, can you imagine an RTÉ documentary painting a negative picture of rugby, the pastime of our betters? It would be binned faster than you could order two Heinos and shout “heaave”.
That isn’t to minimise the scourge of abuse of match officials. But this is a problem in other sports too and not confined to the GAA (to her credit, at the top of the film, McElwain says that her focus will be on GAA). Réiteoir! is a timely film, but its emphasis on the GAA is surely too narrow, and it is oddly reluctant to get to grips with the core issue of the attitude of players, coaches and, especially, match-goers towards referees.
