Seán Moran on GAA: What do people think of the GAA's annual congress? Probably not that many think an awful lot about it one way or the other and that would include a large number of ordinary members, occupied with club affairs whether these be administrative or coaching.

We are in the throes of preparing for this year's edition. The motions list slipped out on Monday without threatening anything wild this year. Last week saw the release of head of games Pat Daly's annual Games Overview report, which always provides interesting reading on different aspects of the games remit from championship structure to disciplinary rules.

Yesterday director general Liam Mulvihill launched his annual report, a characteristic mix of review and at times provocative theorising. Aside from the shared quality of stimulation the reports also have in common that they find it hard to influence developments, certainly in the short term. As full-time officials, Daly and Mulvihill are restricted to writing reports that occasionally suggest rule changes rather than put them firmly on the agenda.

Mulvihill's at least gets discussed but Daly can be lucky if his even gets read properly. Even the headline element of last week's report - the creation of three additional Dublin teams to represent the south, west and north of the county - was casually dismissed, including by the president Seán Kelly on RTÉ radio last weekend, as being similar to the defeated SRC proposal to divide Dublin into north and south.

In fact Daly's suggestion was to leave Dublin's first teams intact and treat the others essentially like development squads for the rest of the county in order that the vast demographic within Dublin might be better exploited in the GAA's interest.

But the irony is that whereas the full-time officials in Croke Park are probably the most expert monitors of where the association is going they are largely constrained in areas of policy and forced to hover anxiously in the background while voluntary officials formulate and advance proposals with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Every now and then there's a blockbuster issue like last year's Rule 42 amendment that for all it may be dismissed by officialdom as relatively peripheral, becomes a genuine talking point for the membership at large. Feelings run high and the debate is surrounded by anticipation more normally associated with big championship matches.

This sort of engagement is, however, rare. The main purpose of Congress is to debate rule changes. There are other functions, such as a financial report, a debate on the director general's report and a number of workshop sessions on the Friday. Saturday's debates are the day's main business but the presidential address also takes place. And that's it.

The workshop sessions are useful but tend to centre on technical areas - for example, this year's four are finance, games development, games administration and the Rule Book Task Force. Workshops were introduced in 1998 on foot of recommendations from the congress review sub-committee, one of whose members was Nickey Brennan, now the incoming president.

One advantage of last year's Rule 42 discussion was that while it featured little we hadn't heard before, at least everyone had a good idea of where they stood on the issue. It also was given an hour and a half's running time, allowing virtually everyone who wanted to contribute to do so. But generally, more than a few delegates look as if they're in the process of astral travel when the motions get even a little technical.

Last year with the playing rules discussions being overshadowed by both the Croke Park debate and the presidential election, the lack of engagement was perhaps predictable but it did the important subject matter no favours.

It would be a bit of a leap to suggest a lack of considered debate was the primary reason for the devastation wrought on motion number 10, a huge undertaking that sought to recategorise and redraft the rules on foul play. A good deal of work had gone into it and it was a superior code to the one the GAA currently has to tolerate.

Yet it got blown to smithereens. Even a last-ditch attempt to secure support for making the accumulation of yellow cards subject to suspension was rebuffed - in the face of memorably daft arguments such as the impossibility of keeping administrative track of yellow cards, as if referees' reports have to be burned after consideration of any red cards contained therein.

The last serious attempt to reform congress came in October 2002 at the special congress to consider the doomed report of the Strategic Review Committee. The SRC had made a number of proposals concerning congress. They were designed to put business on to a three-year cycle, incorporating presidential elections, detailed financial examination, reviews of sub-committees, specific club concerns, motions on administration and playing rules etc.

Four sizeable motions were lined up to give effect to this idea, which like so many others that bit the dust that day, would have been an improvement on the status quo. All were withdrawn in the face of mounting casualties apart from the proposal to hold the Youth Congress every second rather than third year.

Without doubt the environment that day had already been poisoned by the relentless negativity surrounding the SRC report but frequently lack of interest in and engagement with the issues are just as influential. When delegates aren't sufficiently stirred by debates their default setting is to vote against.

The GAA is clearly struggling to cope both with the twin demands of organisational growth and the clunky process required to update its rules. It's hard to see where congress now fits in with the pace of growth and change.

Paradoxically the otherwise advisory report of Mulvihill did contain a fairly strong inkling of where the association is going in practical terms. "One aspect that the work of the Rule Book Task Force has brought to light," he writes, "is that the association is so complex and multi-faceted today that no one set of rules can be drawn up with sufficient flexibility to govern it. Much more use will have to be made in the future of guidelines and directives approved by the Central Council for the overall good of the association.

"Directives/guidelines have the advantage that they can be amended quickly and without the cumbersome process required for rule changes, so it is likely that more and more of the association's governance will be through such instruments in the future."

Congress, in the words of the Minister for Contrition, will need to be radical or redundant.

smoran@irish-times.ie