Enduring appeal of club championships

On GAA: Not wishing in the current climate, or to be fair to myself at any stage, to give religious offence I'll confine this memory to observation.

In the mid-afternoon of a Good Friday back in the early 1980s I spotted three number 17 buses passing through Dundrum. As the then (and for all I know, still) most elusive bus in the world, its triple appearance whereas obviously not on a par with the skies suddenly darkening or the cracking asunder of the Temple (although the shopping centre didn't at that stage exist) was a notable occurrence.

Nonetheless it's not unknown for a number of notable occurrences to pop up in quick succession. This is the 35th anniversary of one of the most eventful years in GAA history, which featured no less than four landmark developments for the association: the report of the Commission on the GAA, the abolition of the old ban on the playing of "foreign games", the first All-Ireland club championships and the foundation of the modern All Stars scheme.

It could be argued that the McNamee Commission, published in December 1971 and the first major investigation into the affairs of the association, is more a matter of primarily historical significance given many of its recommendations were consigned to dusty shelves. But as well as providing a fascinating insight into the thinking within the organisation at the time, the commission report did influence the administrative shape of the GAA for what were arguably the decades of greatest change in its history.

On the other side of the coin there's a case to be made that the abolition of the ban on "foreign games" wasn't as significant as it is sometimes represented, for the simple reason that the rule was never going to survive indefinitely.

Rather like the Lemass years in political and economic terms, abolition marked the GAA's moving away from cultural protectionism, a movement that saw the eventual removal and relaxation of other bans - on British security forces and the use of Croke Park by other sports.

Today there remains ambivalence about the role played by these exclusions. Were they necessary protections for the GAA's development, contributing to the view of a prominent Irish soccer personality - expressed at indiscreet volume during a function in Croke Park - that the new stadium was "built on bigotry".

This is unlikely for two reasons. Firstly the GAA's unique structure created its own loyalties. The parish is local and based on community and fed into the concept of county loyalty, the growth and intensification of which is one of the GAA's most distinctive side-effects.

Other field sports, specifically rugby and soccer, came with received structures based on the British public schools where they initially thrived. At first they were clubs in the enclosed sense, often associations of former pupils from different schools or else work-based. Neither example in general terms had the sort of community roots that so strengthened the growth of Gaelic games.

Secondly the popularisation of soccer in particular and rugby to some extent was the result of television. It's surely no coincidence the first ban had disappeared within 10 years of the establishment of RTÉ and within five years of the 1966 World Cup, the first to achieve any significant penetration in Ireland.

There has been disappointment within the GAA that other sports didn't open up in reciprocity, principally a reference to rugby playing schools but this has made little real difference. Irish rugby has historically been based to a disproportionate extent on the schools. For a long time - and even now this extent is a matter of contention - that network was the primary youth sector whereas in Gaelic games the club was and is the main allegiance. For all the concerns that rugby schools haven't embraced Gaelic games, it hasn't stopped crossover patterns developing between those schools and intercounty minor teams. And with rugby offering fewer adult recreational outlets since the advent of professionalism, there has been ample opportunity for the GAA to benefit in recruitment terms.

The All Stars has been a high-profile awards scheme with, it could be said, little greater resonance than that but it has also been advanced as a factor in the decline of the Railway Cups, offering as it has over three and a half decades an alternative means of recognition for players who aren't in a position to challenge for major honours (allowing this isn't a great year to stand that one up, given the current selection exclusively features the last three All-Ireland winners).

More commonly associated with the displacement of the Railway Cup is the All-Ireland club championship, even down to the St Patrick's finals. But it has been in many ways the most consistently satisfying of the 1971 innovations.

This and last weekend have seen the logical extension of that championship - the staging at Croke Park of the junior and intermediate club finals, a memorable outing for players, their families and members of the four finalists, which attracted about 6,000. This might be a modest crowd in the context of a super stadium but it's slightly more than the 5,000 or so the senior hurling semi-final between Portumna and James Stephens attracted.

Anyway crowds - albeit that a steady 40,000 turn up on St Patrick's Day - are to some extent irrelevant in a competition, which even at senior level creates a showcase for ordinary players and gives them a shot at appearing in Croke Park and so underlines the concept of the stadium as a facility for all members. There is an enduring attraction about well-known players lining out with their brothers and friends. Even an urban powerhouse like Kilmacud Crokes, where parochial intimacy isn't an obvious feature, could have three sets of brothers playing in next Sunday's football semi-final.

At a time when the club-county interface has become a frequent source of friction, the whole-heartedness of the club championships, helped by their regularly changing list of protagonists, is a highlight of the fixtures calendar and proof good things can - even within the GAA - arrive in clusters.