Surviving the trials and tribulations of a GAA referee

Dublin referee Thomas Gleeson can empathise with the recent University of Ulster survey that showed 94 per cent of match officials registering verbal abuse in the course of their duties and 23 per cent experiencing physical abuse.

Not long into his refereeing career he was attacked after a children’s match and subsequently needed persuasion to stay involved.

“Yeah, so, probably mostly verbal,” he says of the UUJ study. “Physical abuse, it happened once when I was only after starting refereeing.

“It’s good that I had strong people around me . . . who refereed at adult level at the time, [they] got a hold of me and basically talked me through keeping refereeing rather than just giving up. Because when something like this happens, especially to a young lad who is coming through, there’s going to be severe consequences.

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“I was refereeing three years. It was an U-11s game. In Dublin GAA there are skill points awarded so after a match I said a certain club won. The manager of the other team came up and said I was wrong. He followed me all the way out to the car and basically pushed me just before I got into my friend’s car.

“That was three years into it. Since then, nothing has really happened. More verbal stuff than anything. Again, I had the right people around me, the right surroundings around me, to keep refereeing because it was something that I was really enjoying and I wanted to keep doing.

“I went back to my club co-ordinator and he went through protocols of what I had to do. So I basically wrote a letter and I know for a fact that mentor it happened with got suspended for six months.”

What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger and Gleeson – who has been hooked on Gaelic games since winning a skills competition at the age of nine when Alan Brogan presented him with a Dublin jersey and Cabra club Naomh Fionnbarra recruited him – has since moved into the elite championship panel of intercounty referees, having done his first Division One match this year.

He was one of the referees’ representatives at Thursday’s Croke Park launch of the GAA’s ‘Respect the Referee’ initiative.

On the treatment of referees, and maybe reflecting his own experience, he believes that a lot of the trouble occurs at underage level.

“Yeah, I think the problem, especially in Go Games in Dublin, is that when kids are coming to matches they need to be brought by a parent and what happens is because they are only 20- or 25-minute games, the parents will stay on the line and then one parent will start swearing and shouting and then someone else will back that parent and then it just gets a bit out of hand.

“I think at the top level you’d expect mentors and players to understand the rules that bit more so I don’t think it’s as bad at the top level. Underage is the problem that we need to target.”

He says it is particularly unfair on teenagers, who officiate at a lot of the Go Games matches.

He is a fan of the ‘silent sideline’ initiative, which requires adults to be quiet during children’s matches and says that Clontarf club Scoil Uí Chonaill, with whom he is a GPO (Games Promotion Officer) is about to institute the protocol.

“You have parents roaring and screaming from the sidelines but they don’t know the rules so the referee could be 100 per cent right and the parents could be 100 per cent wrong.”

“Definitely silent sidelines is something that the GAA overall should be looking into.”