FAI984

By John Healy 07/03/2007

Stig is a lot of things. Mainly, we try to be entertaining, because sometimes you’re watching a UCD-Pats game, and something has to be. Funny aside, we have always used the fanzine to criticize the more bizarre goings on in the league. We have never been slow to place blame where we think it is deserved, and we often think the FAI deserves it, whether it is for forgetting to appoint a referee or making sure that all licensing application are in the correct colour of pen while passing clubs with finances in such a state that they go bankrupt mid season.

That’s never been a very popular position with the FAI, but we don’t care. We don’t have to - the worst they can do to us is force us to sell outside the ground by threatening the club we support. There are others though who they can get to. One such person is an Australia-based Derry fan Kevin McDaid, known online as MariborKev. He recently published an opinion piece on the Shelbourne financial fiasco on the official Derry City website, derrycityfc.net entitled Another Fine Mess. It is well written, factually true and Stig recommends it as important reading for any league fan. The FAI blew a fuse. While the article is clearly an opinion piece, and published with a disclaimer noting that the opinions expressed on the site were not necessarily those of the club, Derry have been fined €5,000 for the article.

McDaid’s blog has since been moved to an independent site, derrycityweb.net, but the FAI have threatened a fine of €1,000 for every day that a link to it remains on the Derry City website (eleven-a-side say for every day that the article remains online, but that sounds incredible).

This is not the first time the FAI has fined people for voicing their opinion, with several managers punished in the past year. The fines are certainly having their intended chilling effect – after the FAI Cup quarter final last year, the usually outspoken UCD manager Pete Mahon declined to comment on the referee, saying that he would prefer to use the money he would be fined to take his wife out to dinner.

Ironically, the FAI’s attempt to shut up McDaid has backfired, as the media coverage of the debacle has given McDaid’s article many times the readership it would otherwise have garnered. Make it one more .