While most will remember the recent Waterford Tipperary hurling match for the dramatic late goal by Kevin Mahony which saw Waterford snatch a draw after being 11 points down at half time, it was another clash that became the focus of a discussion in the Dáil.
During the discussion of the long-term effects of repetitive head injuries in retired athletes, a collision between two players in the All-Ireland Senior Munster Championship was highlighted as not being treated as seriously as it would have been in rugby.
Posing questions to the professors present, Labour TD Alan Kelly suggested he was concerned by the way a potential head injury was treated with water being splashed on their faces, before they rejoined the game.
“I was at the Waterford versus Tipperary match at the weekend and there was a collision between a Waterford player and a Tipperary player. I think Bryan O'Mara was involved,” explained TD Kelly.
“I was in the stand and I could hear it. They were both running at an incredible pace and ran straight into each other. Both of them ended up on the floor and took at least 30 seconds to get up.
“There was a bit of water splashed on their faces, they drank a bit of water and off they went again. There was a very different response. If that had been rugby, even though rugby gets a lot of negativity, they both would have been taken off and would not have come back on.”
TD Kelly went on to ask if new safety measures have resulted in better safety outcomes for athletes.
“It is too early because some of the protocols put in, such as the dose reduction and the reduction in contact during training as seen in rugby, are too new to say,” replied Professor Colin Doherty.
The professor went on to explain that safety measures can sometimes come to be nullified by the increased capacity of the athletes as they continue to get faster and more powerful.
“One factor against the improvement has been the equal and incredible development of the speed and power of the athletes, if the committee knows what I mean. These are very different games to the ones we were watching 20 years ago,” the professor said.
“If look at the GAA, these guys are professionals in every sense of the word except they do not get paid a salary for playing. That is a worry. This is why we need an ongoing process because things change and we need to be agile to the changes.
“The speed and power of players have mitigated some of the things we have rightly done,” added Prof. Doherty.
AARON KENT
Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
