Just look at the state we're in

In an age in which Irish sporting achievement is being defined by an ability to beat the system or work it to some financial advantage, Tom Humphries argues that something has to give

In the corridors of Croke Park there must have been feelings of wistfulness this week. The association saw a young man bearing two All-Ireland medals and one of the most distinguished surnames in Gaelic football being convicted of assaulting a rival player in a non-competitive game.

Kenny Larkin's case against James McCartan brings distinct challenges to an organisation which tends to whinny and neigh when asked to implement its own rule book with consistency and vigour. The case created precedents and ramifications for all physical contact sports.

Normally, such a development in any fold of GAA life would be sufficient to draw down upon the association the enthusiastic opprobrium of that passel of general opinion writers who enjoy nothing better than picking over the entrails of a 'GAA GONE BAD' story. There'd be that plus a few belts of the crozier from His Eminence, the Archbishop of Liveline - as well as the considered pieties of his telephonic flock.

Instead, all is relatively quiet. The story (even if you add the column inches it annexed to those consumed by news of the cruel abduction of another Ó hAilpín brother) has received no more coverage than a common or garden referee lynching in Co Wicklow might get.

There is too much diversion elsewhere. The world of Irish sport has seldom been in such a glorious state of chassis. The FAI purging season is upon us and yet again drawing the attention of the anti-blood sports crowd. Yet even the coursing of Fran Rooney struggles for the attention of a jaded public which has become inured to such scenes of internecine slaughter. Anyway what FAI scandal could compete with the freshness and novelty of the Cian O'Connor Affair, a lightly scripted farce full of comedic twists?

What a slow burn story. It was less fun watching Cian O'Connor when he won his medal than watching the process of him slowly losing it. Being frank, his victory in Athens elicited no more than a general shrug and a nod to the body of a nation which thought showjumping had been abolished sometime around the time we tried to hold the World Equestrian Games and then had to pull out, the equivalent of a refusal.

How wrong can one be? They kept going. There's been a whole world of infighting and cheating going on among the horsey set that we never dreamed of. Even the Army are in on it, bless them. (Who knew? The Army have horses? What for exactly? Are they too hard of hearing? What is their success rate in facing down tanks with dressage?) Even for hardened students of doping cases the Cian O'Connor story is a riveting spectacle, a riches-to-rags story which has somehow distracted us from performing a rigorous analysis of our Olympic failures.

There are those of us who thought Irish sport would never again see something quite so bizarre and memorable as the entire Michelle de Bruin whisky in the jar kerfuffle with its jarringly intimate details and its showcase press conferences complete with that cast of robustly defiant central figures.

We figured (well let's pretend we did) that when, post Atlanta 1996 (the first modern Games of true national embarrassment), the Government set about manacling Pat Hickey with the creation of the Irish Sports Council that dignity and efficiency was about to break out all over.

The Council has been a qualified success, proving that even from a battle ground of spite and bloody-mindedness something worthwhile can be created. Grants are better and more efficiently dispersed to elite athletes, skirmishes and outbreaks of full-scale war are fewer and there is a (still, mainly aspirational due to parsimonious Government funding) commitment to the development of regional and local sports.

There are still problems, of course. Athletics is in a state of disarray and although Sonia O'Sullivan hasn't quite gone, her slight withdrawal has given us a glimpse of the barren future without her. Our swimmers occupy a small fraction of the hours they insisted they needed in the 50-metre pool in Blanchardstown which they craved.

And there is still the difficulty in that we identify sporting success only with the performance and proliferation of our elite athletes. Being an elite athlete or creating an elite athlete is deemed to be the index of our sporting wellbeing.

We'd rather whine that some no hoper with a B standard Olympic qualification be sent along to an Olympics for the bragging rights which supersede the ignominy of early exit than put that money into structures beneath. The best excuse offered for our post-Sydney failure has been that which berates the GAA for being too successful.

The national stadium farce has rumbled on for many years now, with all the major associations involved having their turn at being treated shoddily by the Government. The IRFU have been handed the soiled end of the stick again, coughing up the land and the convincing demeanour for the Lansdowne Road project but having to see the FAI promoted from tenant status to partners in the project.

Then there is the difficulty of ethics. Even the most wishful thinking, still-in-denial, Pollyanna type (and a big hello at this point to Jimmy Magee) must concede that, at the very least, our last four Olympic gold medals are tarnished.

The Irish Sports Council has worked effectively with the world's leading testing agency in the matter of stepping up the random drug testing presence around athletes but the theory John Treacy once cherished (being honest, he wasn't alone) that Irish athletes were more reluctant to cheat because this is a small, intimate society and the shame would be too great, that theory has been blown apart.

Cathal Lombard cheated on his clubmate Mark Carroll, taking a record of Carroll's away while mail ordering drugs. The difficulty we face now is that as a society we never addressed the de Bruin scandal in any collective or organised way. The waters got muddy, the truth poured out, most people looked away. There was a body of glib, smart boy opinion, which still prevails, that if everyone else was doing it sure why wouldn't we be doing it? This argument shouldn't have run any further than an exposition of the tragedies which went with East German swimming success and a question about whether this was what we wanted for our daughters. It did though. We were too busy getting the bunting out for the next olé, olé, olé occasion to care.

We stand chastened now, of course. As this little island metamorphoses into the Cuba of Cheating we are spoiled for choice in judging our favourite scandal. Geraldine Hendricken was good value certainly in terms of the unlikely improvements in one so elderly and in the waspish plaintiveness of her denials.

Cathal Lombard was better, a real story for our times, getting his speed sent to him by snail mail but unsuspectingly providing the details to a journalist via a series of text messages.

And now Cian O'Connor. The heartwarming story of a struggling young fella with just a big Audi and some very expensive horses to his name. A survivor of the Civil Wars in Irish Equestrianism, a man shrouded in ugly rumour but blessed with a fabulously wealthy godfather and a fond grandfather, both of them rugby heroes in their time.

There have been the leaks, first from the horse into the jar (how do they do that by the way?) and then from the shady group, who might be termed the Enemies of Cian, to the media. The disclosures. The break in. The great urine heist. A dripping trail from Ratoath to Athens to Hong Kong to New York. Charlie Bird sniffing it all out. It's an airport novel.

Not since the old Irish Amateur Swimming Association had to deal, over a short period of time, with a tarnished Olympian, two child abusers and one double murderer has there been such a series of unfortunate events visited upon one sport.

Well, with the exception of soccer, of course. At the best of times another day at the office for FAI staff has been a day working under the shadow of a rumbling volcano of infighting and bile. There's been the Merrion Square heist, there have been nights of long knives, there's been Saipan and Euro 2008 and a few delirious evenings when the FAI has gotten the good old-time religion and told us all about it. Most soccer journalists still have sitting on their desks those floppy disks which they were made to accept in the Burlington two years ago. They contain the detail of the Genesis report.

Look, the blazers were saying that night, 'we have sinned but, oh lordee, we have seen the light. This is the good book, brother. On floppy disk, brother'.

'Yeah, whatever', we said.

Never in the history of sporting endeavour have the aspirations of so many been frustrated by so few. Press a button on the Lexus-Nexus search engine which newspapers use for looking through archives and you get so many stories which contain both the letters "FAI" and the word "shambles" that the frequency of application and usage demands an alteration to the dictionary definition of "shambles".

The words "fiasco" and "farce" get tossed about in almost as many FAI stories but the earliest traceable accusation of "shambles" concerns a 1965 World Cup play-off when the FAI sold to Spain the right to pick the venue for the game.

There have been quaint moments and moments that the public has never got to hear about. The exchange a few years ago when Roy Keane complained of the Irish squad's Dublin training ground as being a shambles before pointing to the oddness of the seating arrangements on team flights, was greeted by a baffled Bernard O'Byrne, speaking presumably from the inhumanly cramped aisles of first class where the blazers were packed in one to a seat.

"This is the first time there has ever been a query about the travel arrangements and I am certain if any of the officials were aware there was a problem every one of them would have offered to switch seats."

And then there was the quiet business a few weeks ago of a current officer of the association attempting to badger former internationals into a speaking engagement behind the West Stand at Lansdowne before the Faroe Islands game.

His quota of tickets having been exhausted the officer saw the chance of an additional one hundred tickets and a few extra quid if the audience were provided with tickets when they paid their lump to hear the player speak.

The ramifications of it all are too depressing. The Government, keen to lead the FAI horse to water, is pretty determined this time to make it drink. They may indeed force the blazers to advertise for a new chief executive in the near future.

Whether or not that advertisement advises that taking the job will be akin to being the makeweight in a transfer deal between Faust and Mephistopheles remains to be seen. That's what it is though.

The next person to go into the FAI can't go in alone, unless it as some form of judicial punishment for having lived a bad life. The right person should be picked and should then assist in the staffing of the four subsidiary positions and perhaps a few more staff before being allowed to ride in (perhaps on redundant Irish Army horses) and deployed as a unit with numerical advantage and Government backing.

Otherwise, the extraordinary work the FAI does on the ground in terms of coaching for kids and working in schools, all that is in danger of being lost. And the work there is good. Mainly it is volunteer driven but even worthwhile stuff, like the credit for Packie Bonnar's Technical Programme, has been appropriated and used by blazers with agendas.

The FAI farce and the unfolding Cian O'Connor business also place undue pressure on John Treacy as head of the Sports Council. These things are happening, or continuing to happen, on his watch. That he hasn't the power to stop them happening is irrelevant to the gathering enemies, some of whom will either fancy his job or have already been have promised that particular plum.

It would be a pity and an injustice to lose John Treacy. He is no politician and is uncomfortable both in the limelight and in going in to the places where the pulling needs to be hard and six inches over the ball.

He doesn't enjoy the politics of shafting but he works hard and doggedly and despite everything retains an idealism about sport which seems becoming for a man in such a position. He needs to be given a few enforcers and not to be pressurised by shallow opportunists.

For there is work to do, tons of it and a little idealism just now will serve us better than any sharpie street fighter who knows how to sink a knife between a pair of shoulder blades.

There is urgent need for an inquiry into drug use across the panoply of Irish sport. What are the levels of use and what are the prevailing attitudes among elite athletes? There is need for classroom education in the ethics and ideals of sport, for sport to be included as an enjoyable, relatively stress-free part of education and as part of national health planning. We need for disillusioned teachers to be paid, maybe the price of a decent holiday, per annum for re-immersing themselves in coaching and development.

And we have to look at the entire business of sports administration.

Part of the ongoing problem is unavoidable. It's a difficulty of scale and intimacy and structure. In bigger countries the administration of any particular sport is a large operation remote, in the logistical sense, from the quotidian happenings on the ground. People move up and down the executive ladder according the merit and experience. Irish sport, however, is small and intimate and survives largely on volunteerism and the political advantages which go with local and historical knowledge.

There is a feeling that volunteering your time somehow politically enfranchises you to contribute opinion and prejudice to the general babel. Either that or to attempt to run that organisation by oneself.

Almost everybody who comes to sports administration in Ireland comes to it underqualified for the job but arrives with excess baggage. How good were you when you played? Who did you play for? How long did you play? Where are you from? What county, what club, what parish? Is it true what they say about you? Who are your friends? Whose nest will you be feathering first?

The quiet administrative expertise of Liam Mulvihill of the GAA or Phillip Browne of the IRFU is replicated nowhere else and it is no coincidence perhaps that neither were high profile with their sport before being appointed to their positions.

It's a criticism often made of the GAA that the games lack an international dimension as if external approval was the measure of a sport's value. Should we not be fretful now of those sports which actually provide us with an international dimension? Out image is a tender thing.

Twenty-five years ago Eamon Coghlan first graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in the US. Beside a picture of him running in shamrocked singlet was the large point exclamation: "Begorrah!" We haven't had anyone on the cover since but what we are known for today is the tura-lura-lura of cheating and chaos.

We are the leading exponents of a flexible ethical code which has involved asking Sonia to strip off just before an Olympic race, of the feting of Michelle de Bruin, the grand opera of Saipan and the blockbusting Cian O'Connor affair.

We have produced a series of anecdotes which cause the nations of the earth to smirk whenever they see the Tricolour fluttering bravely in the breeze. All over town there must be publishers waving their chequebooks and commissioning the Bumper Big Book of Irish Sporting Scandals, a potential bestseller with possibilities for updates every year.

In the meantime the innocence, the idealism and the fun is gone and the boys are still playing with knives.

John Treacy on the state of Irish sport

To what extent are the current controversies a distraction from the main business of Irish sport?

They reflect very badly.There is a lot of good work going on but the negative issues impact heavily on all sport. We see a lot of good done by various people on the ground, even by the FAI in terms of their Technical Development Programme for grassroots level but what's happening on the big stage reflects badly on sport generally.

There have been a proliferation of cheating scandals. Do you still feel that Irish society makes it harder for an Irish athlete to cheat?

To some extent I still do. I think given the size of the country it's harder to cheat. We're not a grey, anonymous eastern European country yet. If there is a drug story in Ireland we'll all know about it quickly. There's a big social price. As regards Cian O'Connor there's a process in place and we have to respect that but generally any negative drug stories reflect poorly. It's also harder to cheat here because we have put into place over the last few years a very robust anti-drugs policy. If somebody wants to cheat they will but there is a high price to pay and a high chance of getting caught if you do so in Ireland.

Has enough been done in terms of the issues of educating about ethics and ideals in sport?

We've made a start. There is a lot more to do. Young people are very influenced by their coaches and we've started to create the right ethos there. We've had sessions around the country targeting young people and coaches.

Unfortunately, the turnouts are poor. Anti-doping isn't a topic that draws them in but given a few high profile stories there is a good chance that every competitor should know that they will be tested rigorously and if there is any suspicion about them they will be targeted for repeated testing.

What about educating through the school system?

Totally right. There is lots more that needs to be done and it all starts in the schools. It's a huge area. We need the emphasis there on enjoying sport and appreciating it, participating and having fun. And we have to work out how to keep young people involved and stop this fall-off which appears to happen after the age of 16. There has to be a way of keeping them within sport.

What can be done about the standard of sports administration in Ireland?

We need more professional people involved. This is something we have addressed in the past couple of years, helping bodies who have put in place a strategy for better administration and recognised it as the way forward. But we still deal largely with voluntary organisations and every year two or three will blow off course.

Does a series of controversies such as we have experienced leave you feeling politically vulnerable?

Of course. Absolutely. First it's a distraction. We do good work but people don't know about it. When something goes off the rails it's a big story. We have to put our heads down and work with the organisations. I acknowledge, though, that these things reflect badly on the whole of sport. Personally I keep my head down and keep on with my business. The last thing I'll do is lose a night's sleep over the politics.