Suicide attempts, the Gardaí and the cowards – Online abuse in the GAA

“I took a lot of abuse on Twitter after the county final that affected me badly,” he told the Meath Chronicle.

“I don’t remember sending it. My friend, who had a key, came around, found me on the bathroom floor. I was out basically cold. I was taken to Navan Hospital.”

Two-time All-Ireland winner Colm O'Rourke called on An Garda Siochána to intervene in 2015 when his nephew Paddy O'Rourke received a torrent of abuse after he was red-carded during Meath's Leinster semi-final loss to Westmeath.

“Where people are saying things which are incitement to violence or incitement to hatred, I think the gardaí need to intervene in these sort of things,” O’Rourke said. “People are getting away with far too much of this online abuse. “I even had a situation where my own name was being used on Twitter by somebody else to abuse people. "But I think it’s time that all decent people realised what’s going on: players don’t deserve this, after all the efforts that they put in, they shouldn’t be open to this sort of abuse after a defeat.”

Then there's former Donegal All-Ireland winning captain Anthony Molloy blasting online abusers as 'cowards'. There's Sean Potts, the GPA's communcations chief, claiming that online abuse is 'beneath contempt'. There's former Clare county board chairman Michael McDonagh predicting that online abuse will eventually lead to a tragedy in the GAA. Then there's Cork goalkeeper Anthony Casey, who said that players 'don't deserve to be slaughtered by someone sitting behind a phone or a computer for showing the guts to play for their county' and that 'there are football players in the Premier League on millions that don't get the abuse that we get'. Kick It Out, football’s equality and inclusion organisation, highlighted in a 2015 study that an abusive message is directed at a Premier League club, or one of their players, every 2.6 minutes, with 134,400 derogatory messages identified in just seven months across Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social media. It's entirely possible that Casey was exaggerating his point by comparing online abuse in the GAA to online abuse in the Premier League, but nevertheless, it's an increasing problem for all sports, exasperated only by an increase in the number of social platforms. Grant Becht, Director of Insight Elite Performance Psychology, told the Huffington Post in 2015 that how an athlete deals with online abuse can depend largely on their personality traits.

"Elite athletes can be under enormous stress competing day after day at a very high level, and the resulting stresses and emotional 'hits' from social media posts can be too much for some," Brecht said. "Much also depends on the personality characteristics of the athlete in question. While some can cope with the attacks, others are less equipped to deal with the emotional hit they take when social media posts are particularly vindictive and cruel. "Quite a few athletes suffer from their own quite severe mental health concerns such as depression and anxiety, and the negativity of some of the social media postings can heighten the feelings of distress and uncertainty felt by these athletes. "Family and friends often get caught up in trying to assist the athlete to cope with social media attacks. However, they themselves can often fall victim to their own heightened anxiety and anger over the unfairness of it all."

If it is a problem of increasing prevalence, how has the issue been approached by the relevant authorities? A Sky Sports study by Amy Lewis revealed that 44 cases of online abuse of professional football players in England and Scotland had been reported to police in 2014, but that clubs claimed that hundreds of cases went unreported because players didn't speak out. They said that the abuse is often racist, anti-Semitic and threatening - sent by fans as young as 13. Detective Inspector Duncan Sales from Hertfordshire Constabulary told the broadcaster: "Often we can identify who has actually sent the message but it is then more difficult to identify an address for them because a lot of social media sites are based outside of the UK and have no obligation to give us the information to track them down." But what about Ireland? How is online abuse handled by the GAA, An Garda Síochána and the Government? The GAA have a 28-page social media policy and guidelines booklet that covers best practice, privacy and implications of improper use of social media. Under the latter, the booklet reads -

"To publicly ridicule someone on the internet and social media – also known as viral shaming – is an increasingly common phenomenon, and one that can have pretty devastating consequences for the individual(s) involved. This should not be tolerated on any official GAA platforms and should it come to your attention that such behaviour is affecting a member of your club you should seek to support them to the best of your capacity. These are difficult situations to control as once material is released into the online world it cannot be easily retrieved, if at all. The internet is forever."

If a club or individual report an incident to the Gardai, the general assurance is:

"All incidents of a criminal nature reported to gardaí are fully investigated."

However, the gardaí have recently become inundated with complaints relating to social media which means that the sizable backlog has created a scenario where investigations are delayed and where some cases have even been dropped. If gardaí want to pursue the investigation, they have to write an affidavit and then the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) & Chief State Solicitors Office outline in a legal document what the offences are. The offences are then sent to the local district attorney where the head office of these social networks are located, and they then go to court for the gardaí to get the order to preserve the information if they are satisfied with the supporting documentation. This then has to be renewed every 90 days on a rolling basis, which inevitably leads to a delayed process. A source told SportsJOE that the gardaí may try to bypass this process by using initial posts to try and force the perpetrator of the abuse to admit to the act, but that is where they know the identity of the person responsible. Also, the garda computer system Pulse does not permit access to social network sites like Facebook making it difficult to investigate cases. As for the Government, in April, Brendan Howlin TD, published the Harassment, Harmful Communications and Related Offences Bill that aims to modernise Ireland’s existing harassment legislation to safeguard people against all forms of harassment, including stalking, cyber- bullying and so-called 'revenge porn'. The bill looks to consolidate and reform the criminal law concerning harassment and harmful communications, to repeal certain provisions of the Post Office (Amendment) Act 1951 and the Non-Fatal Offences Against the Person Act 1997, and to provide for related matters. The Bill went before Dáil Éireann in May where it was agreed that the Bill would be taken in Private Members' time, which, on the Oireachtas website reads as - 'the vast majority of cases Private Members' Bills do not succeed in progressing beyond the Second Stage debate'. And so we wait for the Second Stage debate. As such, it looks as though it really was just your da talking.