THE sound spills through the concrete wall in waves, rabid and unhinged.

Pat McEneaney sits listening, pulling hard on a cigarette. His expression conveys a sense of routine tension. Across the way, John Bannon one of his linesmen grins at the absurdity of this room in which they find themselves.

It is half-time in the 1999 Munster football final at Páirc Uí Chaoimh. The opening 35 minutes have been wild and bad-tempered. McEneaney's umpires and linesmen believe he should have sent two players to the line. ``Fists were flying,'' they chorus.

Pat leans back against the wall, wearily rolling his eyes towards the ceiling. The voices next door are growing louder. Theirs is a crude, violent dialect. This is not the kind of day teams engage in blackboard tinkering.

The noise Pat hears is jungle noise.

Eventually, a voice next door climbs towards salivating crescendo. ``There's no comparison between winning and losing lads, we have to f***ing win!'' And the roar that erupts is primal, menacing.

McEneaney gets to his feet and moves towards the door, mumbling to his colleagues ``We'll have to f***ing keep a tight rein here.''

It is a compelling image of life on the edge for the peace-keeper, one of many in the ground-breaking Blowing the Whistle documentary which will be screened on RTÉ One television next Saturday night.

In GAA-land, black has long been the colour of silence. Distant and by extension dehumanised, referees are effectively gagged by the Association from discussing their decisions in public. They are, thus, a kind of mysterious breed.

This one-hour programme goes some distance to untangling that mystery.

Made with the approval of Croke Park, it hitches a ride with McEneaney and Galway's Mick Curley through the '99 football season which in the latter's case traversed just about every emotional extremity.

Curley who would eventually referee the AllIreland final talks with some candour about that infamous assault incident at the end of a National League game at Breffni Park, as indeed does his assailant, former Wexford boss JJ Barrett.

The programme is a compelling study of humour and honesty, but above all humanity. Perhaps the most powerful words come from the wives, Rosemary McEneaney and Dympna Curley, for whom Sundays are to be endlessly endured, not savoured.

A Garda superintendent, Curley's first impulse at the end of every game is to 'phone his wife.

Dympna, ordinarily, refuses to watch her husband refereeing. She did go to Croke Park two years ago when Mick officiated at the All-Ireland minor final between Westmeath and Derry but admits ``I didn't see it. I'd say there weren't five minutes gone in the match when I got a pain in my chest and my heart was just pumping.

``I thought it would ease off, but it didn't. Then the crowd started shouting every time a fella fell `Aaah ref ... and all that'.

``I didn't stay much longer. Couldn't. My heart was just pounding. You often hear these stories of people collapsing at matches. I was terrified that I was going to collapse.''

McENEANEY is a sales rep in Monaghan, one of five brothers who still plays for his local club, Corduff. He admits that his wife would prefer it if he stopped refereeing.

``I always keep telling her, don't worry about it,'' he reveals. ``She'd be saying to me `Why don't you give it up, walk away from it? We don't need this hassle in our lives'. All this you know. I tell her she worries too much about me.''

If anything, the footage shown may serve to authenticate such worry.

Both Curley and McEneaney wear microphones during major Championship games and commendably there is no dilution of the hostility they encounter. Violence and profanity are seen to inter-twine with sometimes hilarious lightness. In that rough-house Munster final, McEneaney playfully chastises a Cork defender for trying to deceive him. ``I'm around long enough to know that now, Jesus,'' he says, grinning.

``You have to try it, you know,'' responds the Corkman impassively.

McEneaney's first Championship game of '99 is the Kildare-Offaly clash at Croke Park. At half-time, he expresses self-doubt about his decision to merely caution Glen Ryan for a ferocious frontal challenge on the Offaly wing-back Tom Coffey.

MOVING towards the dressing-room, he asks his linesmen: ``Was it a walking offence?'' Both are non-committal. McEneaney himself observes ``I was thinking of roading him. It went through the computer to road him! It could have a been a red. I'll know tonight on television when I look at it.''

Two days later, we join him at a National Referees meeting in Athlone. The meeting is chaired by Westmeath's Paddy Collins, a former front-line referee and one of the most respected figures in the Association.

Oblivious to the intrusion of cameras, Collins opens the meeting by addressing the Ryan `tackle'. He expresses his conviction that the Kildare man should have been red-carded, noting ``There are tackles that sort of make you recoil if you're 200 yards away in the stand and you sort of wonder `Will that fella get up?'''

McEneaney is filmed calmly absorbing the chairman's criticism. Afterwards, he reiterates his belief that a booking was ``adequate'' but adds: ``You've got to be able to accept that criticism and take the opinions of other people. If you're a referee who's not willing to listen, then you're going nowhere fast!''

The honesty of the exchange is impressive. But then McEneaney understands the worthlessness of hubris in a peace-keeper. Three years ago, he took charge of the infamous Meath-Mayo All-Ireland final replay which quickly erupted into a mass brawl.

Rosemary chose not to submit herself to the ``torture'' of watching, which was probably just as well.

McEneaney recalls: ``I think there was about 22 or 23 players just convened onto each other. And there was nobody really sparing themselves you know. To me, Liam McHale and John McDermott were the two men that I wanted to go.

``And my linesman, Kevin Walsh from Clare, said `Colm Coyle has to go Pat, he's after dropping about five fellas'.

``Francie McMahon, my umpire, said `Pat, Colm Coyle has to go!' I said `Right, Liam McHale and Colm Coyle.' And nobody said anything.

``To say both men were unlucky to get sent off, I have to accept that. To me, there was 20 other players very lucky to stay on the field.''

Rosemary McEneaney describes the family as being ``flabbergasted'' by the media eruption that followed. Pat himself concedes that the coverage immediately after did effect him ``big-time.'' But the death of his father just two months later enabled him apply a lighter perspective.

``When he died, you know the whole world could have ended as far as I was concerned,'' he says.

ROSEMARY goes further, revealing: ``He took the death very, very bad. It actually pushed the All-Ireland completely out of his head. He actually said `This is life. The death of my father is life. Football. Refereeing. That's been, it's gone. Let's move on'.''

Curley's Championship journey in '99 begins in Ballybofey where he fights a running battle with Armagh officials to stay off the field of play during their game with Donegal. ``That's the rule, it's not my fault lads,'' he pleads. The referee's civility is striking, given the proximity of his experience at Breffni Park with JJ Barrett.

Dympna recalls his 'phone-call that spring evening. Her routine ``how did it go?'' greeting. His routine ``fine'' response. But then a hesitation. Cavan had been leading Wexford comfortably at half-time but Barrett's positional switches ignited a startling turnaround.

Curley recalls: ``Wexford started coming back and coming back and coming back.''

BARRETT: ``If we won that last match against Cavan, we thought we would be into Division One football. And that would have been a great achievement for our players. They really had put a lot of hard work into it.''

CURLEY: ``One of the backs committed a foul on one of the Cavan midfielders inside the square and I gave a penalty to Cavan.''

BARRETT: ``One of our players was downed with a fist into the back of the head. He was driven out on his face. And Mick had moved on, he hadn't seen it. But he has two linesmen and four umpires. The ball travelled to the wing and came back into the centre of the pitch. And the player who had been downed he had received a heavy blow now had recovered very quickly and run back into his position. Now he was the one accused of giving away this penalty, which I don't think should ever have been given at that stage of the game.''

CURLEY: ``Ronan Carolan scored it and that put Cavan into the lead and the game was over at that stage.''

BARRETT: ``Now we were deprived of that win by that penalty.''

CURLEY: ``To put this diplomatically, he didn't say I was a very nice fella. He didn't say I was a good referee. He didn't say that the penalty was justified.''

BARRETT: ``I said `Mick, if this costs me five years, you're a f***ing disgrace.' They were the words I used. And Mick just turned away from me. I think it was probably the way he went to go from me, that he didn't say `Look, I'm sorry, you know, ye played well' or something ... If he even spoke to me, I think nothing would have happened.''

CURLEY: ``But, as he was going away, he just let fly. And he hit me on the side of the face. That shook me I can tell you. Not so much the blow that he hit me, but I never expected it. I never expected him to do it. And I never experienced anything like it before.''

BARRETT: ``I would protect referees completely. I think their position is sacrosanct. What I did was madness. And it should be a lesson for anybody in what not to do in the future. But that is the type of stuff that can drive one to doing it. I had to resign my position and then I was suspended by the Games' Administration Committee for two years. So I'd say that put an end to my managerial career. (Smiling)''

CURLEY: ``I know it had an effect on the family. I know it really upset the whole lot of them. Something like that. Because that, as I say, never happened me in the length of time I've been refereeing. And it brought an element into it that they didn't expect. Particularly Dympna didn't expect that I would actually get hit in a match. But we talked about it a good bit and I think that probably settled the nerves. (Smiling)''

The journey, thus, continues, revealing Curley's self-disgust at missing a critical foul during the Meath-Offaly Leinster semi-final and a comical exchange with Ciarán McManus in which the Offaly man claims to have been held by a particularly sensitive part of his anatomy.

McEneaney reveals a ``little family joke'' in which he scratches his head just prior to throwing the ball in for big Championship games, knowing that his father-in-law in America invariably has a ten-dollar wager with his mates that he will do so.

THE popular, stone-faced (excepting Dickie Murphy, of course) caricature of referees as somehow dull, pre-programmed, rather humourless people is refreshingly dismantled. Both men emerge as hugely likeable, laid-back, human figures.

The documentary offers no judgments, just a portrait.

It ends in Croke Park on All-Ireland final day with Dympna Curley pacing beneath the old Hogan Stand while out on the field her husband fulfils his life's ambition. ``Just my legs are shaking,'' she says. ``I find it so hard to watch it and enjoy it. I can't enjoy it. I'd rather actually be out here. At least, you don't know what's happening.''

Unpaid and largely unappreciated, the plight of the referee is unzipped with remarkable wit and sensitivity in this documentary. It brings us on a journey never previously taken, exposes us to voices never previously heard.

It opens a window that ought never be closed again.

* Blowing the Whistle, a Wildfire Films Production, will be screened on RTÉ One next Saturday at 9.20pm.