Problem is that both sides have a point

On Gaelic Games: You know a situation has become desperate when calls go out for GAA headquarters to make a better job of presenting the case. This has been happening in relation to the Rule 42 debate and suggests a panicky response to the roll call of counties supporting the idea of Central Council letting out Croke Park while Lansdowne Road is being re-developed.

This is in spite of the rule's repeal being by no means a fait accompli, certainly not as long as mandates are to be filtered through secret ballots on the congress floor and the inappropriateness of head-office GAA officials making any arguments in the run-up to congress. It could be that there is no better fist being made of the conservative viewpoint simply because the case is at best elusive. You either believe the GAA will suffer by opening up its main venue to other sports or you don't.

Everything else is secondary in the sense that it's hard to imagine that the goodwill, financial and neighbourly arguments would be considered compensation for inflicting actual damage on the association.

Opponents of change see disadvantages for the GAA on both cultural and practical grounds. The former are implacable arguments. There are those who genuinely believe it to be a betrayal of the past to allow rugby and soccer to be played in Croke Park.

This perspective is in a way understandable. The GAA was founded as a reaction to British sports and consumed much of its early energy arguing over the need for cultural exclusion and the separatist argument won out, setting the tone for decades of blood boiling at the very mention of foreign games and alien codes.

Rule 42 is the last of the GAA bans to remain on the books. It was formulated as a response to the abolition of the best-known ban, that on playing or attending other sports, which was repealed in 1971. Four years ago the ban on members of the Northern security forces was also lifted.

But those who still hold to the view that soccer and rugby are Trojan horses for the purpose of undermining national self-respect won't be talked around by being told that the contemporary GAA no longer sees things in such Manichean terms.

The above is, however, strictly a minority perspective and practical arguments form the bulk of the articulated case against change. There are two central planks of this platform - that soccer and rugby are competing sports and therefore should be extended no co-operation and that those games would actually benefit in some way from the use of Croke Park as opposed to the use of, say, the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.

In relation to the first point there are two obvious comments. One, neither soccer nor rugby seem to worry about the same situations in reverse and GAA clubs up and down the country are prepared to use the facilities of other sports, who happily give them.

Two, the mainstream view amongst those who work with juveniles is that increasingly sedentary lifestyles and diet - both ingeniously combined in the GAA's sponsorship deals with Playstation and McDonalds - rather than other recreational sports are the real competition.

The GAA is far more likely to recruit from already active children than it is from those who take no exercise, particularly given that kids playing more than one sport is such a common phenomenon.

Choices are ultimately made on the basis of good organisation and decent fixture programmes as well as aptitude and enjoyment. There may be parents who would prefer their children to be bad hurlers than good soccer players, but it's safe to say that they'd be in a minority.

The second point is harder to justify. Realistically the only people affected by whether Croke Park is available for soccer and rugby internationals are the followers of those matches, many of whom are also loyal supporters of Gaelic games.

The IRFU and the FAI will stage the matches in Cardiff or Manchester or wherever and sell them out easily with the huge emigrant numbers in Britain. Revenue won't be affected and exposure, primarily obtained through television audiences of hundreds of thousands, certainly won't.

Additional exposure because of the historic use of Croke Park would be little different to additional exposure because of the equally historic need to go abroad in order to play home matches.

Maybe the IRFU and FAI wouldn't want to use Croke Park. The FA in England found the Millennium Stadium more attractive than Twickenham and given the keenly competitive rates on offer in Cardiff, maybe the soccer and rugby authorities here would come to a similar conclusion. (After all, GAA Stadium Director Peter McKenna appears to have wrung top dollar out of the formidable U2 organisation so he presumably wouldn't be letting the venue go cheap to other events.)

So what? The difference then would be that going overseas would be the choice of the relevant sports body rather than at the insistence of the GAA.

With the potential disadvantage to Gaelic games so intangible, the need for substantial advantages isn't pressing. Financial incentives are, according to those opposed to change, negligible. This is undoubtedly true, but any revenue, no matter how modest, has to be welcome - better have it than not.

Anyway, financial incentive was not the battleground for the 2001 debate, which culminated in change being denied by a single vote. The majority arguments four years ago were based on welcoming other traditions to a splendid and historic venue - that it would be an act of reciprocity to sports that frequently extend a helping hand to GAA units.

The association now is a striking combination of contemporary culture and a storied past. By and large, the choice of what traditions to maintain and which ones to adapt or relinquish has been wise and progressive.

And the tradition of hostility to other sports either because of their cultural inferiority or the supposed competitive threat they pose is not one worthy of perpetuating.

smoran@irish-times.ie