Tyrone lost their McKenna Cup clash with Cavan this afternoon at Kingspan Breffni Park, a crowd of 4,200 watching Cavan's first win over the Ulster Champions in 17 years.
Worse than the result for Mickey Harte are the longer-term implications: Conor McAlliskey suffered a serious-looking knee injury, and Mattie Donnelly was sent off following a clash with Seanie Johnston.
After the game, Mickey Harte spoke to Oisin Langan of Newstalk, and at the end of the interview, Langan raised the issue of Harte's defender Cathal McCarron. The book McCarron released in the off season, Out of Control, proved to be highly controversial, with his relationship with an underage girl causing her family to lobby media outlets to curtail the book's publicity. The girl's father spoke to the Irish Independent, and said that "to write the book so soon after the incident and to not express any remorse. What does that tell you? It feels like he wants to cash in on what he's done".
McCarron did speak to this website, in which he responded to the above statement by denying he was cashing in on the incident, saying that he felt like a victim amid the public fallout:
I’m probably a bit of the victim in there. The one thing I was looking forward to was my book launch in Dublin. My family and friends were going to be there, and everyone who I was going to celebrate [with] and [mark] the tough times that we’ve been through, and people were flying home from London. That’s been postponed now because he made complaints.
McCarron subsequently gave an interview to Off the Ball, which became extremely tense once host Ger Gilroy raised the same issue.
Ger Gilroy: What's your response to that Cathal?
Cathal McCarron: No response. That's all I'm going to say about that.
Ger Gilroy: You've no reponse?
Cathal McCarron: I don't, no.
Ger Gilroy: You said in an interview...
Cathal McCarron: Look, I was fully investigated by the law of Ireland and there was no prosecution. There's a reason why there was no prosecution.
Ger Gilroy: Dyou know why there was no prosection?
Cathal McCarron: Why's that?
Ger Gilroy: Because of the honest mistake defence. It's our understanding that the DPP because they accepted the defence of honest mistake. But they do also accept you had sex with this girl.
Cathal McCarron: Right, okay
Ger Gilroy: That's a fact, is it?
Cathal McCarron: No, it's not a fact. I won't be commenting on it anymore.
Ger Gilroy: So, you did have sex with this girl?
Cathal McCarron: There's no comment.
Oisin Langan asked Harte whether McCarron's book was a negative, or needless from Harte's point of view? The Tyrone manager strongly disagreed:
No I don't think that at all. I think people are entitled to do what they will. I don't think a book is a negative at all, in fact, if people read the book, they will find it's a very positive story.
It's the story of a man trying to redeem himself, having found himself in something he didn't really want to be in, but found himself there. I think there is a lot of positives in that book, and if a person decides that's the right thing for them to do, who am I to challenge that?
There are a lot of people on the high moral ground, there's a wild crowd of them there, so they better be careful they don't fall off.
You can listen to the interview in full on the Newstalk website.
