Davy Fitzgerald made some pretty startling revelations about the social habits of the Clare panel before he took over as manager at a seminar in LIT yesterday.
The Banner boss gave an address to hundreds of students at a mental and physical health seminar in Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) yesterday, where he made some frank revelations about his experiences of bullying as a child and also about the pitfalls of alcohol and drugs for young people.
It was while he was addressing the latter topics that he shed light on the culture that existed in the Clare panel prior to his appointment in 2011, telling the audience that drink and even drugs were considered a problem amongst the panel before Fitzgerald and his backroom team drew a line in the sand.
“We brought in a code of discipline,” Fitzgerald is quoted as saying in The Irish Times.
“From the mid-2000s, in Clare, my feeling was that Clare was a social team. I know some of them were even taking harder stuff than drink. I couldn’t understand this. To me I play to win, and if you are doing stuff like that, you’re wasting your time.”
“I questioned them and I said do we really need alcohol and do you need to take substances that will make you feel better,” he added.
“We teased it out, we spent three hours out in Bunratty teasing it out. We decided we were going to stand up and draw a line under it and say: ‘No.’ We decided we were going to come to training and enjoy ourselves and were going to communicate with each other. We want to enjoy what we do.”
Considering the amount of people that play Gaelic Football and Hurling in the country, it is not the first time that drugs and the GAA have been mentioned in the same sentence, but because the comments are coming from someone as high profile as Fitzgerald, they are likely to raise an eyebrow or two in GAA circles around the country.
You can read more on Fitzgerald’s address at the LIT seminar in The Irish Times here.
