Monday morning in Inchicore and Richmond Park is a centre of quiet activity. For the second time in a matter of weeks, St Patrick's Athletic has been hit by tragedy, in both cases the sudden death of a director's son, but people get on with what they must and so a dozen players, groundsmen and office staff start a new week under a cloud.

After finishing a mid-morning run out with a couple of his players, Pat Dolan sits down in the stand and reflects on the weekend, a good win in Donegal and the terrible news which awaited everyone back in Dublin. It hardly needs saying, things like this restore our sense of perspective.

Still, there is work to be done. Shelbourne are due here on Friday night, and despite it being so early in the campaign, everybody knows that it's one of the biggest games of the season. Dolan has brought the club a long way in the seven years since he arrived. First working exclusively on the commercial side and now, since he took over as team manager, guiding virtually every aspect of the club's work. Whatever was going on elsewhere, he felt, St Patrick's Athletic could be quietly, or preferably noisily, moving forward.

Now, he feels, that has changed. The club has come far and will go farther but, with each step forward, some of the rest are simply left an extra yard behind. Now that must be addressed because before St Patrick's can take the next leap towards achieving its full potential, others must be helped to achieve theirs.

In the week after the Irish team all but made certain of a World Cup play-off spot, the stadium question has been bothering Dolan, the question of which organisation can be cajoled into taking a couple of hundred thousand pounds out of Irish football when that money is "the difference between a National League club having 2,500 or 5,000 seats."

Dolan is clear: "I'm not criticising other clubs, far from it, a lot of people are doing their best to bring them on, but where is the leadership that they need, what targets are we setting for the game here, how can any organisation hope to move forward when it doesn't even have a plan?"

He is, he says, completely perplexed that, for all that has been achieved at Richmond Park, not one of the League's officials has ever picked up the phone to discuss what has been done, while the club has, he feels, been treated badly for past criticisms of the game's hierarchy. "I mean, I'm not saying that we're perfect, but they say you can't say there's a problem with the National League and we say `of course there is,' and we can't start putting it right until we admit it and identify just what it is that's wrong."

The list of blunders mentioned is not short, but one which comes up more than once is the pre-season promotion by Harp Lager which gives a discount on English clubs' shirts in return for ringpulls. "How," he marvels aloud "could it have been allowed to happen that our league's sponsor would do that?" Over the past few years, St Patrick's Athletic have, Dolan claims, achieved much of what they have done through the pursuit of difficult, but achievable targets and this is, he feels, what must be done on a national level.

"If we say, `well, every club in the Premier Division has to have 6,000 covered seats by the year 2000', then everybody, including us, is going to have to work towards that. Then it's up to the League to go to each of the club's and look at ways that they can help them get there, but at the moment, there's nothing.

Things, he feels, must start changing - and quickly. The structures must change and so must the thinking. Strangely, in the League's office, Paul Walsh said many of the same things a week ago to this paper, but Dolan reckons he's heard the words once or twice before, what he wants now is some action.