Fined for hurling on the street March 14, 2014





Antrim County Board chairman Jim Murray. INPHO Antrim County Board chairman Jim Murray. INPHO

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A young man has been fined £85 by the PSNI for hurling in a Belfast street.Twenty-year-old Thomas Thibodeau was enjoying a puck-about with a friend on Jerusalem Street on Wednesday evening when two PSNI officers intervened and issued him with a fixed penalty notice for disorderly behaviour.Antrim County Board chairman Jim Murray says the incident is reminiscent of the "dark days" in Northern Ireland: "I thought those days had gone," he states in The Irish News. "It's something we will be taking up ourselves and we will be arranging a meeting with the PSNI. It's not on and is taking us back to the dark days."A PSNI spokesman explained how hurling can be construed as disorderly behaviour: "It is the manner in which the equipment is being used or the associated behaviour and risk that this may pose to others, i.e. anti-social behaviour and criminal damage."Sinn Fein's Pat Sheehan has called for discrimination against Irish games to be stamped out immediately: "At best, there seems to be a degree of ignorance when it comes to the PSNI's attitude to gaelic games. At worst, this behaviour is a throwback to an attitude which treated all things Irish as alien."