RTÉ GAELIC FOOTBALL pundit Joe Brolly insists the controversy sparked by Armagh’s claims of racist and personal abuse today is merely ‘a storm in a tea-cup’.

Orchard County GAA officials last night issued a statement in which they alleged their players were the subject of ‘partitionist provocation’ during their league defeat to Laois at O’Moore Park on Sunday.

“It sounds like a bit of a storm in a tea-cup really,” Brolly told Darragh Maloney on morning Ireland today.  ”There’s always been the odd remark here and there but the idea of overt racism is just a bit … I mean with Armagh there’s just a bit of desperation as they’re slipping out the relegation trap door.

“The Joe Duffy show, the two Liveline shows devoted to whenever Dromid played Derrytresk , you know women with killer umbrellas and deadly handbags provided by the KGB, [that] certainly gave the perception, up north, of simmering sectarianism but I just don’t see that really.

“I mean, chanting God Save The Queen? There’s really not that much to it. Those types of comments aren’t great but you don’t want to get too precious about this stuff.”

This morning, a spokesperson for Laois told TheScore: “We have no proof of that. We hadn’t heard anything about it until we read it in the paper.”

He added that the county would conduct their own internal inquiry into the matter saying, “We’ll look into it. We certainly wouldn’t condone any such chants.”

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