Exorcising racial demons

Yesterday was a difficult day for the GAA. The effective suspension of a leading player combined with the toxic release of controversy into an environment in which everyone should have been focusing on today's first test. Then there was the added tension and strain on relationships within the touring party.

Bad and all as it was, it would have been catastrophic but for the intervention of GAA president Joe McDonagh who - not for the first time in his term of office - showed a lot of leadership and a fair bit of courage in making sure the GAA did what was right rather than what they could get away with.

Being an essential part of such a culturally homogenous society as Ireland's, the GAA can be allowed the fact that issues of racial discrimination and racial insult are largely unmapped territory. Yet the cartographers are already needed.

Aside from the perennial scandal of how the travelling community is casually stereoptyped, there are growing immigrant communities and the certainty that in the new millennium the GAA will have to start adapting to and catering for a multi-cultural society.

Into such a multi-cultural society the Irish footballers arrived this week. Australian Rules football has been trying to exorcise its own demons within the last decade by successfully rearranging the climate of what is acceptable. As a result, there has been a change of the attitudes governing the sort of abuse hitherto casually dished out to Aborigine players.

For an Irish player to insult an opponent - leaving aside that the victim was a 17-year-old in a practice match - on grounds of race would almost make you weep in frustration. There may be a lot of guff talked about the great community of sport but the coming together of two of the world's great indigenous games remains an exciting project.

That in the midst of this attempt at finding unity within cultural diversity, a player should be thoughtlessly insulted because of his own identity and racial origins demeans the series as surely as it shocked the Australians.

No one believes that Graham Geraghty, for all his evident immaturity, is a racist but he is the product of a sporting environment which has encouraged the belief that there are no frontiers when it comes to verbal abuse.

Generally speaking, football and hurling don't provide many opportunities for racial abuse but both Sean O hAilpin and Jason Sherlock - to name two recent All-Ireland medallists - know that some Gaels aren't inhibited by the lack of practice.

There is no doubt that Geraghty didn't fully understand the consequences of his action but it was nevertheless necessary to discipline the player beyond the privacy of the dressing-room door and the apology he promptly offered Damien Cupido after the practice match.

The non-compliance of star performers with the rulebook has become endemic in the GAA. Incidents and offences are routinely fudged or brushed under the carpet to the extent that by organisational standards, there is a very low respect for rules within the association.

It would have been easy to dismiss the Geraghty incident as a heedless act, not designed to give a fraction of the offence which it actually gave. The Australians and the Cupido family have been magnanimous in accepting the apology but to advance that as a reason for not taking official action would have been a miserable mistake.

Joe McDonagh grasped the fact that the matter went beyond the relations between Geraghty and Cupido and beyond the relations between the GAA and the AFL. It was about how the GAA sees itself in the last year of the century. Not to take action of some sort might not have condoned racism but it would have demonstrated a insensitivity to the issue.

Unfortunately such insensitivity was on full view yesterday. Ireland manager Colm O'Rourke genuinely couldn't see the bigger issue beyond his natural concern for a player in trouble.

That bigger issue was the inevitable fight against racism in Ireland in the years ahead. Within a fast-evolving society, the GAA has to be to the forefront of such a fight.

Yesterday the association had to take the unhappy decision to drop a top player - not to assuage the Australian hosts but to make a statement about how it sees its own attitudes at home in Ireland.

Thankfully Joe McDonagh saw the broad picture and acted accordingly.