THE PEPPERED MOTH is one of the best known examples of rapid adaptation to a new environment. In a short span of time, darker coloured moths became dominant in industrial areas. It didn’t serve their survival chances to be any shade lighter than dark grey in polluted cities. 

And so in the winter of 2026, we see Ben O’Connor fluttering around the dirty old town of GAA post match interviews, bright and beautiful – and in great danger as a result. 

Nature’s law goes that when you arrive into a new habitat you have to change to suit it, not the other way round. Unless of course you can become the apex predator, and that is O’Connor’s best chance of enduring in the fairly bland and long-since corporatised world inter-county management.  

O’Connor will only say what he thinks: try to win every game; don’t pay attention to ignorant cabógs in the stand but do play for genuine hurling supporters who back your team in every weather; referees are being undermined by a bureaucratic system; let games flow and intervene only when things get truly out of hand. 

Some people might be slightly apprehensive when he veers into ‘and they are afraid of a bit of blood while trying to make the game safe for little Johnny’ but in the main he is well received. Most people I meet, at least, seem to think he’s right about most things.

But being right won’t save you. Already he finds himself coming up against the machine. He’s frustrated that his words are being “twisted and turned” – but then he parks his displeasure with the media to eviscerate the hierarchy of the GAA, with a critique of the practice of having referee assessors in the stand poring over refs’ performances, ticking boxes, focusing on the minutiae while disregarding their feel for the contest, experience and sound judgement. 

We all think this, it’s total madness – it’d be as stressful as having a driving tester in the car with you every time you left the house. You have to trust people; give them the authority to go with the responsibility and then act if they keep messing up. 

But ask yourself this: how will O’Connor’s points go down with the assessors, and those who appoint the assessors? And those who oversee the edifice? Will they have the humility to say, “Jez, Ben is right here, we have been undermining refs for ages now. It’s time we paid them a bit more respect and stopped all this backseat driving in an attempt to gain a level of consistency which is never possible in life, let alone a fast-paced sport where every game has its own character, its own temperature. Let’s change our whole approach.” 

Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO

Some of the decision makers may even see the sense in what he’s saying. But when it comes to following procedure in an often unthinking way, Croke Park, or the GAA, is a big organisation now, with an identity separate from its distinct parts. Steinbeck explained it well in the Grapes of Wrath. “It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it.”

O’Connor is now on something of a collision course with the GAA. He probably can’t expect favourable treatment if he strays too far from that technical area he rails against. 

In the meantime, it all makes for a fascinating clash of cultures between the GAA’s increasingly LinkedIn language and a straight-talking man who is not part of that. O’Connor has never seen a system he wants to integrate, a work-on he wants to actualise. 

Instead, he has a talent for communication. He’s like a newspaper columnist from the previous century, liked by some, disliked by some but ignored by few. Nowadays he’s the unpaid columnist of papers and websites, every word reproduced.  

O’Connor is a centred guy. He knows who he is and where he’s from. In a work sense, alongside his job as a postman, O’Connor has spent a lot of time in his family business and if you watched the excellent Laochra Gael documentary you’d get the sense that they wouldn’t need to watch their Ps and Qs around each other.

Nor would they try to make what they’re doing seem elaborate, with Bernie O’Connor saying “it isn’t rocket science to make a hurley, like” and “it’s only hard work” – when there’s a lot more to it than they let on.

They are coming from a world where you have to be productive and you have to use your resources, time and energy smartly. And you need to be autonomous because nobody is going to save you if the product doesn’t get made well and shipped. Mainly, you need to trust one another.  

It wouldn’t be a great use of time for one brother to spend his time assessing how the other was firing up the band sander, or checking if he was putting the goggles on properly – and if not explain yourself at Tuesday’s review. 

But such is the world of big business. The more an organisation expands the more it feels a need for check and balances on the people doing the checking and balancing. Sometimes that can be a necessary and even a good thing. And sometimes it can run counter to all common sense. 

Now we have someone who is prepared to point out the difference every time a microphone is put in front of him. If Cork go on to win their next, yearned for, All-Ireland this year he will be praised as their straight-talking saviour. Fail and more than a few will be in the line to say he lacked the suitable temperament to lead them to success. 

He already knows that. Winning, as he said after the game on Saturday, was the most pleasing thing about it. Everything else will fall into place if he can keep doing that. The ecosystem will adapt to his will. Brian Cody or Jim Gavin or John Kiely rarely had to challenge a narrative that their teams played on the edge.  

You’ve just got to become that apex predator.