Jimmy Geoghegan: The referee who brought a gun to a club match to keep law and order

The last two years or so have proved to be strange times indeed. Very strange, the pesky pandemic making sure of that - and sport, as we know, didn't escape the fall-out.

Yet imagine what it must have been like in 1922 when the world (at least our little corner of the world) was in a state of chassis as Joxer Daly might say.

Recently we witnessed how events were held to mark the Dail debate and vote on the Treaty in early 1922. The Treaty efffectively brought to an end the War of Independence but it was also the spark that ignited the bitter Civil War that followed.

The GAA wasn't immune to it all the turmoil of course. On the playing fields of Meath there were some strange goings on a hundred years ago. Take the mysterious case of the referee who brandished a gun, to keep a lid on matters. These days referees have red and yellow cards to maintain the rule of law. Back then they had to take sterner measures.

Like the fledgling nation itself, football in Meath was in a state of turmoil. The 1921 championship spilled into the following year and one of the senior football championship matches that had to be decided was a contest between Rathkenny and Navan Harps - and as recorded by former Meath and Walterstown coach Mick O'Brien in his fine book 'Royal and Loyal' - things got a little out of hand. Just a little.

The game was played in March 1922 and during the contest one of the Rathkenny players, Thomas Hickey, was deemed to have struck an opponent and was duly sent to the line by the match official, "a Mr O'Hanlon from Dublin."

The game was restarted but Hickey then, the referee reported, came back onto the pitch and "made a deliberate attack on me." The referee then called the game off. Another, somewhat different account of what happened - recorded in the 'Rathkenny GAA History' written by Mick Mongey, Tom Mongey and Damien McBride - recounted how following "a scrimmage" that had broken out among the players the referee had ordered Hickey off the field but the player refused to go.

Then the match official went for the nuclear option. He took a gun out and again ordered the player off the field of play. Cue more mayhem. Eventually the referee, who may have feared for his own safety in the 'foreign' territory of the Royal County, abandoned the game.

The fact that a referee was carrying a weapon was an indication, as Mick O'Brien pointed out, of the kind of tension that was in the country at the time - and of course later in the year the Civil War erupted. The incident not only underlined the disturbed nature of the times but highlighted the deep-rooted passions football specifically, and sport in general, could arouse - and, of course, still can arouse.

Navan Harps eventually went on to win the 1921 SFC title defeating Navan Gaels in the final which was played in April '22. The Chronicle reporter at the match certainly wasn't impressed by the quality of football served up. He (and presumably it was a he) predicted that because the football was so poor "the county will be at the bottom in the provincial championship."

Such fears proved all too justified. At the start of the year a notice was put in the Meath Chronicle asking players who had taken part in previous campaigns to put themselves forward again for the 1922 Leinter championship.

Later in the year Meath crashed out of the championship at the first hurdle. They were trashed, 4-4 to 1-2, by, wait for it, Kilkenny. It was certainly not Meath football's finest day during what was Ireland's darkest hour.