When I lived in New York, Mayor Ed Koch ruled the roost. He was a colourful guy and while I was living there Koch wanted to build a large municipal dump for the city. Everyone was in favour of this idea until Koch started looking for planning permission. Koch came up with a new name for the people who wanted the dump but just wanted it somewhere else. He invented the Nimby.

There is so much confusion now over disciplinary matters in the GAA that it is becoming a bit of a joke. It is hard to know how to go about solving it or simplifying it. One way might be to go back to the beginning, back to the good old days when the referee's report was sacrosanct. End of story.

Jimmy McKee had a good game on Sunday in Croke Park. In the middle of the action a referee knows what a bad foul is, what a hard foul is and what a harmless foul is and what an accidental foul is.

Every game has a life of its own, a different temperature level. McKee got that right.

If you have fellas inside in a room later looking at it all in the cold light of day it doesn't work. Especially if half the fellas in the room are lawyers. A desperate foul in one game might be part of the pattern in another game. The referee is in the middle and only he should be the arbiter.

McKee allowed things to go on Sunday that on another day in another place a fella would be sent off for. You have to take the intensity of the game, the passion of the crowd and the pressure the players are under into account. You have to let the referee do his thing. He has to gauge the situation.

McKee let things go that he could have pulled but these are amateur players playing in front of 78,000 people in the context of an age-old rivalry. You have to allow a bit of room. They aren't robots. The referee entered into the spirit of the game and helped make it the spectacle it was.

If issues arise why not let the referee take a day or two to look at the video, talk to other referees about incidents perhaps and make a value judgment then on what he missed or what he did. Give him more power back.

Referees by and large are intelligent enough and honest enough to deal with that. If there is a disciplinary issue let the referee review it first and let that be the end of it.

Once you take things out of the referee's hands and refer them to different bodies you ask for trouble.

The referee is the man in the best position to judge the severity of foul play or otherwise because only he can feel the temperature and intensity of the battle. He should be man enough and given opportunity enough to admit mistakes with the benefit of hindsight and therefore prevent unjust suspensions.

The mindset of the last few years completely undermines discipline in the GAA. Finding a lawyer who will discover loopholes in the law is now the order of the day.

Players are getting away scot-free because of technicalities. Until such time as the officials in each county buy into the spirit and take punishment on the chin chaos will reign. County officials are all for rules and regulations until it affects one of their own star players.

The new Nimbys. Not In My Back Yard, a chara.