Ya, thats a very fair point. I suppose its the girl nadmitting it more than anything that is about much proof as we are going to get outside of court.
For the GAA its an issue like it is with any sport or organisation. The GAA is very strong on the guidelines and i know you have to get Garda clearence and must work in groups with kids and most clubs i know police this well. The parents are very aware of this.
Whats a sad reflection on our society is almost everyone who gets involved with an underage team now is a “suspect” and trust has gone out the window.
I’d say she’ll be chomping at the bit to get a piece of this case, or at least having a small chuckle to herself.
With regards to this and its effects on the GAA, having been involved in the Garda veting process it just goes to show no matter how hard you work, how tight you make guidelines, its impossible to cover every base entirely. The GAA have made great steps to ensure against something like this over the last decade, and for it to be someone who was viewed as a friend of the association at a high profile level, well its some hammerblow no matter how you dress it up.
Its because thrawreen probably liked him as a jounro and is struggling to come to terms that a hero of his is a scumbag.
Its always disappointing when one of your own (in this case a fellow GAA person) steps out of line like this, but he did it, so fuck him. I hope he suffers for it.
It’s not exactly Fr. Brendan Smyth we’re dealing with here though is it? It’s not even Bill Wyman and it ain’t Jerry Lee Lewis either. While I did think “goodness, gracious” to myself when I found out who it was, the way some of these 14 year olds tart themselves up nowadays would give even the most sensible middle aged man great balls of fire.
Sid, It is easy to believe that a mistake can be made when you are down the nightclub, with the way the young ladies dress nowadays, but you cant claim a mistake if you are managing the under 14 girls team and you start having it away with one of them.
This will set the reportage of underage camoige back years. Only wimmin journo’s will go anywhere near it now.
In fact, no male journo will ever be seen at an underage female sporting event in Ireland again.
The boring over emphasis on the Dublin underage camoige scene in his columns in the last few years should have been a warning sign to us all. Well, it was in a way, because he was becoming progressively more tedious and had lost a lot of the originality that marked his previous work. Pity.
As Bandage has pointed out, a charge, trial and sentence still has not occurred, however, a 14 year old girl, no matter how sophisticated she tells the world she is, is a child. Both morally and in common law.
This is the biggest thing for me. The guy is in a position of trust and he’s exploited it. Whenever it became apparent to him that he was having feelings like this he should have immediately walked way.
Thrawneen does have a point with regard to his mental health though. For a person of such intelligence and profile it seems mad to think that he couldn’t have foretold that nothing good was going to come out of the situation.
Fitzy, it will set womens sports back a few years. No man is going to want to run any sort of underage girls team. I know myself I wouldn’t do it on my own, the only way I would do it is if there is another person or two with me and one of those would need to be a woman and I know there is no way at any stage would I be looking to be on my own at any stage with any members of the team. I think clubs of all codes not just GAA ones need to make sure that proper procedures are in place around coaching underage teams.
You’re shouting it at me like she was a foetus or something. There’s 14 year old girls giving blowjobs and riding these days, plenty of them, and I don’t see how it’s ok if the guy is 17 but if he’s 47 he should rot in jail or hang. The law is the law, yes, and I believe he should be punished. But there’s some seriously OTT reactions, imo.
I believe Tom Humphries is a good man who became mentally ill. I’ve been reading him a long time, like most people. It’s a cliché of course, but you would feel you almost know him at this stage. He’s pals with many people who are generally considered alright sorts, and NCC has commented before on how sound he is/was. If the full investigation shows him to be a vile and evil man for many years who had a dark life behind his public persona then I will forever maintain that you just can’t tell what people are really like behind closed doors…but I don’t think that’ll be the case.