PARALYMPICS:London brought a bounty that surpassed the expectations of everyone, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

It’s only when you’re told what never happened that you come to appreciate what did.

Midway through his speech at the Closing Ceremony of the London Olympics, Jacques Rogge passed what sounded like a throwaway remark. Thanking the people of the home nation for their welcome throughout the games, he said: “You have shown the world the best of British hospitality and I know that generosity of spirit will continue as we marvel at the dedication and talent of the wonderful Paralympic athletes.”

To the untrained ear it was nothing more than a piece of diplomatic box-ticking, the sort of means-nothing, offends-nobody pleasantry that is the meat and drink of these kinds of addresses. But to Liam Harbison, the CEO of Paralympics Ireland, it was seismic.

“To get a mention in the closing speech – that was the first time that’s ever happened,” he told The Irish Times the following week. “From five minutes after that Closing Ceremony, things went mad for us. Our Twitter following doubled in the next three days. Traffic to the website was ramped up, calls to the office from people looking for tickets was the same.”

The wheel spun on and on over the weeks that followed and it’s spinning yet. This was the year the Paralympic movement made its bones in this part of the world.

What had been a curio at best in previous years became a fully-formed part of the landscape, unavoidable and unignorable. When the Irish Sports Council’s overall 2013 funding was cut by 2.9 per cent rather than the expected five per cent in the recent budget, the Government made it clear that the reprieve was intended as a nod to the success of the boxers and the Paralympians. That was unimaginable even just a year ago.

London brought a bounty that surpassed the expectations of everyone.

Even allowing for Harbison’s obvious low-balling of the hoped-for medal target (a now-laughable five, which they had knocked off by the end of the opening weekend), coming home with a tally of 16 was extraordinary. Eight gold, three silver, five bronze across 10 different medallists in four different sports. The first ever cycling medals, the first ever dressage medals. All backed up by an operation of clear-eyed professionalism and inch-saving strategy wherever you looked. They made people stare and point. In a good way.

We have to be careful of making grander claims for the progress of the Paralympic movement than it deserves or needs. The weight of the rock they have to roll up the hill was never more clear than the second Friday of the games in London, when Jason Smyth and Mark Rohan both demolished their opposition to win second gold medals. Both were spectacular that day yet even as the tricolour was raised in the Olympic Stadium, the Ireland soccer team was labouring 3,500 miles to the east, just about getting out of Kazakhstan by the skin of their teeth. When Irish people talked sport the next day, Trap and Kevin Doyle dominated conversation in a way Smyth and Rohan never could.

So let’s not overstate things. In the evolution of Paralympic sport, they’re not far removed from having made it out of the oceans. Every Paralympic sport is a young sport, every gold medallist a ground-breaker. It will likely take a few more quadrennial cycles yet for those sports and those athletes to be a default part of the mainstream.

There’s no going back now though. Rohan, Smyth and Michael McKillop have all made the shortlist for the RTÉ Sports Star of the Year Award, ditto David Weir, Ellie Simmonds and Sarah Storey in the BBC equivalent. None of them will win but this is undeniable progress – four years ago, only Smyth made the Irish list and not a single Paralympian was mapped on the British one.

Whether it can be possible – as International Paralympic Committee president Phil Craven believes it can – for a Paralympic athlete to make those shortlists outside an Olympic year remains to be seen. Just now, even allowing for the strides that have been made in 2012, it feels unlikely.

But even to be having such a conversation is a step forward. As indeed were the various gripes that bubbled up and gaskets that were blown during the games.

This is the petty push-and-pull of sport and it did plenty to frame the games in a more familiar light.

So where to now? The next step forward for Paralympics Ireland is to find more athletes. A talent search day in UCD in October had 400 hopefuls turn up. If they can mine five Paralympians out of that for Rio, it will be a job well done. If they keep the other 395 playing some sort of regular sport, then you’re talking true success.

At the Paralympics Ireland awards dinner a couple of weeks back, Mark Rohan cracked a smile when he was asked about his impending role with the Westmeath football team. “Ah, I’m not a selector or anything,” he said. “I’ll just be helping them out a bit. They’re a great bunch of fellas, they just need a bit of belief.”

No better man to man to provide it. No better group of people.