Despite spectacularly low attendances at one or two games, crowds have generally held up - though the economic slump may suggest stasis rather than expansion for some years ahead, writes SEÁN MORAN

MAYBE IT'S time to talk things up again. In apparent synchrony with the country, the GAA season has staggered a little uncertainly through the early summer. It's a familiar phenomenon in the years when the major international soccer tournaments take place for a rash of speculation to break out in support of the diagnosis that Gaelic games are in trouble and having bad years.

Maybe, the underlying rationale suggests, people have got tired of all this and now prefer to join the homogenised world in consuming major sports on television.

This season has been different. Some attendances have been spectacularly poor and with Croke Park no longer pulling in the same numbers purely on the basis of curiosity, it's been up to the scheduled fixtures list to keep the turnstiles clicking.

Provincial chair Jimmy O'Gorman has spoken out about the Munster Council's concerns about falling numbers, and this season the province even decided to launch a few special "two-for-one" ticket offers to try to stimulate business.

Leinster hurling's final in Croke Park drew only 18,855 - the second-lowest attendance at the event in well over 50 years - amid rumblings that headquarters was now unsuitable for an event of such limited appeal and the match should, for the first time since 1961, be played elsewhere, either in Nowlan Park or Wexford Park.

So as we approach the turning point for the championship with just the Leinster and Ulster football finals left for decision it's possible to take a look at the total attendance figures for the provincial championships.

Surprisingly the news isn't all bad. In total - if we accept projections of 32,000 for the Ulster final and 80,000 for Leinster and allow that neither will go to a replay - this year's attendances are nearly 128,118 off last year's total of 900,439.

On the face of it that represents a serious-enough slump of 14 per cent but that's before a number of relevant factors are taken into account. The largest element in the whole decline can be ascribed to Leinster football, where the total drop runs well into six figures, 104,198, but this year's championship had three fewer matches because of draws - including the bumper 82,206 Dublin-Meath replay in June of last year.

Leinster hurling actually attracted bigger crowds, 49,545 as against 36,600 in 2007, but there were extra matches this year because of the Dublin-Wexford replay and the admission of Westmeath to the provincial championship. In terms of averages, last year's Leinster hurling matches ran slightly higher at 9,150 as against this season's 8,258.

(For purposes of getting complete figures the crowds at double bills of hurling and football matches have been broken down and allocated to either championship. For example, last month's 25,555 at the Wexford-Dublin hurling and Wexford-Laois football semi-finals was distributed 10,000 to the former and 15,555 to the latter.)

But elsewhere in the country the returns were quite encouraging. The Connacht and Ulster football championships were up this year and the Munster championships performed satisfactorily.

There was, naturally, a decrease in the Munster hurling championship because in 2007 Limerick and Tipperary met on three occasions before their semi-final was resolved. But although this year's aggregate is 55,688 down, the average crowd was actually bigger than last year's - 34,216 against 32,092.

The province's football championship figures fell marginally short of the 2007 mark - 42,835 against 44,457 - but Daniel Nelligan of the Munster Council was happy enough.

"I think we would have exceeded the overall numbers but for the rain on the day of the Munster final," he said. "That probably put off a few thousand. But we were very happy that the average attendance at the hurling championship rose by seven per cent."

Reacting to complaints about the council's promotional "two- for-one" scheme, Nelligan - who up until March of this year ran Croke Park's ticketing operations - said it was a trial run, intended as much as anything to advertise the matches.

"It was no different from the running of any promotion by any other business. The idea was that if you were prepared to buy the tickets early there would be discounts for a limited number.

"This is used in rugby by Leinster and Munster. Leinster have gone to the top of the table in terms of Celtic League attendances so we decided to go with it on a trial basis."

This caused disgruntlement among ordinary club members buying tickets at full price, but Nelligan says it is hoped to expand the scope of the promotions.

"Hopefully when we can complete the database of all members in the province these sort of offers can be made over the internet and sent directly to members."

Football attendances in the province have suffered in recent years with Cork-Kerry matches not pulling in as many as in the past.

This probably reflects the familiarity between the counties after four meetings in All-Ireland semi-finals and last year's final in the past six seasons.

The decline of Limerick as potential winners has also hit attendances; the county were viable contenders in 2003 and 2004, reaching the final in both years and forcing a replay four years ago.

Connacht also experienced a rise in attendances. This was largely because the biggest draw in the province, Galway-Mayo, was played in this year's final and not, as 12 months ago, in the first round. But other matches were also relatively well attended.

Provincial secretary John Prenty points out that many of the 11,571 who attended last year's Leitrim-Galway semi-final were partly attracted by the opening of the new stand in Carrick-on-Shannon and were unlikely to make the trip to Salthill this season - contributing to the drop of around 4,000 in that fixture alone.

If the current figures are holding reasonably well, there's not huge optimism that, regardless of intensified promotion, attendances have the potential to rise by much in the years ahead.

As Prenty puts it: "In the present economic climate I think we'll be holding on it for a couple of years."