On Gaelic Games:The national GAA scene is at present a bit like a fish out of water. The big events have drained away with all the big intercounty All-Irelands now concluded, writes Seán Moran.

For the first time since National League matches disappeared from the autumn schedules with the introduction of the calendar year in football at the start of the decade there is no International Rules series to create a bit of diversion. It promises to be a long few weeks until the provincial club championships kick into serious action.

As has regularly become the case in recent years though, there is the prospect of a special congress to create a bit of interest. The GAA has increasingly used this time of year to sort out administrative issues and on Saturday a couple of significant matters will be aired, as next year's hurling championship seeks a format and association president Nickey Brennan reads the riot act on what has been a disastrous season for on-field discipline and its off-field enforcement.

Brennan is rightly vexed about the litany of embarrassing incidents, indiscipline and lack of restraint effectively encouraged by officials' over-arching desire to get the miscreants off, which in its turn is encouraged by some outrageously bad decision-making within the Croke Park committee structures. Although he didn't want to get into the details of what he's going to say and propose, it's clear that the president wants changes both in attitude and perhaps even in administration.

This should be the case. Back in June, as he smarted from the unwillingness of Cork and Clare to accept suspensions despite crystal-clear breaches of rule in the Semple Stadium fracas, Brennan addressed Central Council to try to achieve consensus on the need to accept respect for the rule book.

Instead the season just got worse. The Cork and Clare suspensions became a nostalgic golden age, near enough the only occasion on which the GAA addressed a controversy and followed through with suspensions despite being taken all the way to the Disputes Resolution Authority (DRA).

The Peadar Carton case - when despite another plainly merited suspension the Dublin player appeared in an under-21 Leinster final, All-Ireland semi-final and final - put the tin hat on it. And this is accepted within Croke Park as being the final straw that brought about the imminent presidential intervention.

The underlying problem isn't so much the structures but the personnel who serve on them. In an intensely political, voluntary organisation there are always distracting considerations when the time comes to do the right thing and make the hard call. Committee members don't want to antagonise other counties by coming on like Judge Dredd when disciplinary matters arise.

There is the "there but for the grace of God" philosophy of infraction and punishment. Some of your own county's star players might find themselves in an "awkward" situation. Let him without sin etc. Then there is a whole calendar's worth of other considerations: county grounds that might get a tasty qualifier match, your own next move when the great migration of committee members takes place every three years. In short it's no way to run a tight unit charged with taking what are frequently unpopular decisions.

As to solutions, GAA director general Liam Mulvihill was blunt and to the point in this year's annual report: "My own opinion is that we should take discipline at intercounty level out of the hands of the present administrators entirely and bring in a three-person legal commission to deal with all offences on the field of play.

"I would retain the DRA to hear appeals against decisions of the commission and in this way the whole system would be administered more quickly and in a more balanced, even-handed fashion. If we could clean up the games at central level and have justice and fair play administered in a consistent, timely and even-handed manner at that level, we could then tackle the situation at other levels."

There are similarities with the national hurling competitions in the sense that the present system is far from ideal and despite an awareness of what the best solution would be, there is also an acceptance that its implementation is politically unachievable in the immediate term.

Ned Quinn, chair of the Hurling Development Committee, was honest in his appraisal of the problems that have led to two distinct proposals for next year's championship - the first of which, passed by congress last April, will never see the light of day.

He made the point that since the introduction of the original second-chance system 10 years ago, allowing defeated Munster and Leinster finalists re-enter the championship, there have been several tweakings of the format but that a flawed system can't be effectively "tweaked" into a satisfactory one.

His advocacy, albeit in a personal capacity, of a champions' league format addressed the central reality of championship hurling, that because of the small number of competing counties there has to be a greater range of fixtures. He acknowledged that getting rid of the Munster championship, although desirable in the overall context, is not likely to gain imminent acceptance and so this Saturday's congress will agree the latest tweaking.

An interesting suggestion, based on the champions league format - teams arranged into round-robin groups of four - submitted by a reader, who modestly wishes to remain anonymous, involved seeding out the 12 MacCarthy Cup teams into three levels with a team from each level going into the various groups.

The fourth level would comprise the intercounty equivalent of divisional teams, selections based on: a Western conference of Connacht counties less Galway but including Kerry; Ulster less Antrim; North and Mid-Leinster, Meath, Westmeath, Longford, Louth; South-East Leinster, Kildare, Carlow and Wicklow.

This would mean that every talented hurler in the country could aspire to playing in the MacCarthy Cup but equally be free to contest the Ring and Rackard competitions with their own county although these formats would have to be rationalised to prevent fixture over-load.

As an idea it's been successful in relation to the Dublin Colleges, whose amalgamated team has clocked up an All-Ireland.

It is of course another proposal that would take time to materialise. In the meantime there's some interesting work to be done this weekend.