A word of warning for those media vultures who have spent the past few days wheeling around, excited by the scent of GAA blood in their nostrils. The focus of the feeding frenzy has been the apparently imminent shift in GAA policy with regard to the use of Croke Park. But in the clamour for a stick with which to beat the association, the figure at the centre of the furore has been all but ignored. And GAA president Sean McCague is a man you underestimate at your peril.

Anyone who has dipped even a nervous toe into the labyrinthine world of the internal workings of the GAA in Ulster would testify to that. The GAA Ulster Council is a quasi-political system so full of intrigue, hidden agendas and personality clashes that it makes the state of Florida look like a utopian model for Western democracy.

McCague is an esteemed son of this system and his rise to the highest elected GAA office has been buttressed by the solid and unwavering support he has received from within his own province. The president has spent enough long, dreary winter's evenings sitting on committees at county and provincial level to have obtained an intimate knowledge of the internal workings of his association.

Let's get one thing clear from the start. McCague was not tripped up by a clever question during the Radio Ulster interview that sparked all of this off and nor did he suddenly find himself going further than he perhaps intended to in responding to a query about the future use of Croke Park. That is not the Sean McCague way.

The decision to propel this "foreign games" debate to greater prominence in an interview with the BBC in Belfast was neither coincidental nor accidental. McCague realises that this is a potentially controversial and divisive issue within the association as a whole but that it would play worst of all in Ulster. So what better way to draw at least some of the sting from potential opponents than to open the discussion right on their doorstep?

McCague has been down this tactical road before. When the storm began to rage around Rule 21 a few years ago in the heady aftermath of the Belfast Agreement, the difficulties of selling reform or removal to Ulster delegates at Congress would have been obvious to a GAA operator with McCague's experience. A compromise, with a broad commitment to repeal of the rule when policing reforms are introduced, was duly cobbled together.

Always extremely conscious of the way in which public opinion is moving, McCague made a speech to the Monaghan county convention just before he assumed the presidency in which he said that it should be Ulster counties who lead the way towards consigning Rule 21 to history at "the appropriate time." It was a masterful piece of GAA politicking, combining a reforming zeal with a definite note of caution. All things to all GAA men.

The "seismic shift" in GAA policy which has seemingly been signalled by McCague's radio interview should be regarded in the same light. The president is an old-school GAA pragmatist and with the great Croke Park project tantalisingly unrealised he knows that the tranche of funding that will take the new stadium over the finishing line has to come from somewhere. The financial nous of those involved has already seen the GAA raising the lion's share of the money for the redevelopment itself. As a consequence and contrary to what you might have read or heard, the association doesn't "need" government support to complete the work. But if it is forthcoming, it is hardly likely to say "thanks, but no thanks".

If one or other of the proposed new stadiums fails to progress any further than the plans then there is the interesting possibility of either the FAI or the IRFU hunting around for rented accommodation. What better public relations exercise could there be than the GAA riding in on a white charger to save the day with its generosity and public spiritedness?

All of this, of course, may come to nothing at all. Eircom Park and the national stadium may both rise as promised and the two other great sporting organisations on this island will have a home of their own to match that of the GAA.

Even then, McCague's imaginative opening of a dialogue on Rule 42, which prohibits other sports being played on GAA grounds, might still have some positive spin-offs here. The wounds of a fairly savage media mauling after the GAA refused to allow fund-raising soccer matches for the Omagh bomb appeal to be played on its ground have just about healed some two years later. But the damage done to public perceptions of the association has been more long-lasting.

At a time when elsewhere in the country the GAA has been doing its level best to reinvent itself, the association is suffering from something of an image problem here. The malevolent undercurrent that surfaces every now and then in league football within a number of Ulster counties does little to help. And when Rule 21 and the whole foreign games issue are thrown into the mix the overall picture is not exactly healthy.

But with McCague at the helm there is at least the possibility of a way out of that. Slowly but steadily there are signs that a new course is being plotted but nobody knows better than the president that it is, by definition, a precarious journey.

All of this hints at a bigger picture than the screaming banner headlines about soccer and rugby internationals at Croke Park by the middle of next week might suggest. After all the furore of last weekend the prevalent wisdom might have been that the president would be keeping his head down for a few days. Not a bit of it. There he was on the radio on Monday morning playing everything with a safe pair of hands and wondering out loud about a debate that he said hadn't even started yet. McCague sounded like a man in total control.