Speaking<\/a> on Dalo\u2019s Hurling Show on the Irish Examiner, Liam Sheedy was appalled by the actions of sections of the Cork supporters.<\/p>\n“It\u2019s unacceptable,\u201d said Sheedy. \u201cIt has no part in our games. It has to stop. I think the GAA need to be really strong on this. There is no honest GAA person who would accept that\u2019s the environment we want our games to be played in.”<\/p>\n
Unfortunately though, that environment is become too common in GAA, where more players are being booed, jeered and pilloried than ever before.<\/p>\n
That conduct certainly extends far further than just some Cork supporters but last Saturday wasn\u2019t the first time that they were fingered for behaviour deemed unfitting for a county of Cork\u2019s proud sporting history and heritage.<\/p>\n
After the 2024 All-Ireland semi-final, Aine Fitzgerald, managing editor of the Limerick Leader newspaper and Limerick Live website, wrote a piece about a trend which she\u2019d first noticed in the Cork-Limerick round robin clash two months earlier.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe booing by the Cork team\u2019s supporters (for the All-Ireland semi-final) was ugly,\u201d wrote Fitzgerald.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs Limerick supporters we got our first taste of it down in SuperValu P\u00e1irc U\u00ed Chaoimh on May 11 (2024)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe booing by some Cork fans when Limerick players went to take a free left a bitter aftertaste on the lonely road home. Fast forward to July 7 and it was about to get worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The persistent booing by Cork fans when Diarmaid Byrnes and Aaron Gillane went to take a free was just not cool. It wasn\u2019t all Cork supporters but it was a lot of them.<\/p>\n
\n Cork don\u2019t need these cheap wins to get over the line. Their players are good enough in their own right.\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
“The booing tarnishes all the fans – many of whom were no doubt scarlet at the goings-on. Let’s preserve the dignity of the game by calling booing out for what it is – cheap, childish, nasty and uncalled for.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cork supporters could have accused Fitzgerald of sour grapes, or pointed to examples of Limerick fans applying similar verbal heat to Cork players. But that\u2019s not the point. Fitzgerald is right \u2013 booing is cheap and nasty and has no place in the game.<\/p>\n
Boorishness has become too common a theme at sporting events and, while booing a young GAA player is on a completely different scale to the kind of vitriolic abuse hurled at Europe\u2019s golfers at last year\u2019s Ryder Cup, accepted codes of crowd behaviour at GAA matches have still changed too much from what they should be.<\/p>\n
Supporters reflect modern society and increasing belligerence and aggression is becoming too apparent and latent at GAA matches.<\/p>\n
Writing on psychology in The Guardian back in October, Rory Carroll pointed to how some theorists of crowd psychology attribute aggression to \u201cdeindividuation\u201d, whereby a sense of anonymity and sensory overload untether people from their sense of individual identity and they do things they ordinarily would not.<\/p>\n
Other theorists posit \u201cconvergence\u201d, in which the crowd dynamic unleashes individuals\u2019 inner beliefs and values. Either way, the results can be ugly.<\/p>\n
Increasing public toxicity can also be linked to repulsive social media feeds, which has added to a climate of normalising unacceptable behaviour. As well as reaffirming the new world against the old, that modern climate has also reconfigured the meaning of success into triumphalism and an absolute win-at-all-costs even amongst supporters.<\/p>\n
\n Modern sport is more cut-throat now than ever but that doesn\u2019t mean that everybody with an association to a particular team or county can\u2019t show more respect to the opposition on match days.\n <\/p>\n
Supporters in most counties now are engaging in behaviour that completely goes against the spirit of what the GAA should be about.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As well as setting a terrible example for kids, booing, especially persistent booing, tarnishes all fans.<\/p>\n
There are ways and means of trying to improve crowd behaviour such as making an example of the worst offenders by ejecting them from the stadium. Yet stewards and officials can only do so much when the chorus is deafening.<\/p>\n
That places more personal responsibility on supporters to either desist from what the mob is doing, or to call out booing for what it is \u2013 cheap, childish, nasty and uncalled for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Colm Parkinson from \u2018 Smaller Fish GAA\u2019 spoke to Liam Cahill after the Cork-Tipperary match in P\u00e1irc…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295510,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1965,1964,61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-295509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-hurling","9":"tag-cork-gaa","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Darragh](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/4964390_5_articleinlinemobile_3193467_1_.jpg\" "\\"Darragh")
Darragh McCarthy of Tipperary prepares to strike a free against Cork at Croke Park. Picture: Ray McManus\/Sportsfile<\/p>\n