The former Limerick hurler and now RTE pundit Shane Dowling was writing in his column with RTÉ this week and called out the abuse he received online from some angry viewers watching The Sunday Game.

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“As I sit down to discuss this weekend’s quarter-finals, the news has just broken about all three lads being cleared to play…

It’s the elephant in the room now so I may as well speak about it and get it out of the way. The reality here is, no matter what I say or write about it, there is a certain cohort of people who will not believe me, and also just continue to abuse me and that’s fine, if that’s what people want to do.

I have never experienced the levels of online abuse that I have been subjected to over the last ten days, but obviously that is where society is gone…

If I am nothing else since I started work on The Sunday Game, I am most certainly pro players. Not being long out of the game I know full well what players do, and what they want.

Whenever a chance has presented itself, in recent times or times ahead, if it makes sense I will back players more so than anybody else. Seeing the lads get cited, followed by proposed bans and suspensions, gave me absolutely zero satisfaction, and I mean that…

The only thing I’ll say on the matter is The Sunday Game has always shown talking points, long before I ever was with them. Just go back to last year’s Munster final night-time show, when the lads in studio highlighted just two incidents from the game, looking at Aaron Gillane and Seamus Flanagan and debating whether they should have been sent off or not.

And of course there are many more. The lads have now gotten off on a technicality, and more power to their legal team, or whoever it was spotted whatever could be done. We can now look forward to both games, full panels of players, and no excuses.”