In The Press, his fine and sometimes coruscating study of the fourth estate, the late AJ Liebling defined three writers of news and ranked them in "inverse order of worldly consideration".

First came the Reporter, who writes what he sees. Second came the Interpretative Reporter, who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning. Third, the Expert, writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn't seen.

No organisation attracts as many Experts as does the GAA. They come like filings to a magnet. Regardless of the economic philosophy of our ruling political party, the GAA will always be held in public ownership. Every oul hack and hoor has an opinion to which everyone else is richly entitled. News of heated words swapped in a dressing-room in Dingle will draw oracular pronouncements from lounge lizards in Dublin before the sun is down. Rumours of fisticuffs have sermonisers dusting down the pulpits before the victim's bruises have started to show.

It is a tiresome if necessary business, made all the more tedious by the constant assertions that poor behaviour is a cancerous feature of the modern game and that (all bow) from the time of Cusack to the time of colour television there was never a dirty blow thrown or a loose curse uttered on a GAA pitch.

The problem of the browbeating experts is compounded by the defiant resentment of Croke Park, and the resultant defensiveness is paralysing. Nobody condones what happened to Dermot Ryan last week, and if the perpetrator is uncovered he shouldn't play football again this century, at least. But do the annual orgies of self-righteousness over a number of incidents mean that the GAA is in a worse state than it has ever been, or that we are even scratching the surface of the problems which truly concern players? This column was standing in a field recently with Sean Stack, Tony Considine and Ger Loughnane, spiritual administrators to the Clare hurlers. Those three, in the mood to reminisce, were united in their assertion that all the lunatics were virtually gone from the game. The near criminal deeds of great knuckle-dragging lugs of yesteryear were recalled with a shudder.

We were standing on the plain in Crusheen and it was noted that, once upon a time, the local hurlers there were inclined to the view that rivals would look better without a head on them. One of the company remembered a county championship game in which two players of dark disposition ended up marking each other. One was wearing a cap. The first ball that fell between them set them to flaying wildly. The ball was forgotten about. The cap fell into the dust and the cartoonish violence continued as they both pulled passionately on it. The battle flared dramatically when the cap's owner lost a few knuckles while bending to recover his millenary.

Stories followed of grown men crawling out under the goal netting to escape beatings from psychopaths, of players goading spectators to step over the sideline and sort it out like men, of mentors throwing in hurleys to players who were breaking other sticks over the backs of their opponents. That was how they lived back then, of course.

Consideration of the gimlet-eyed gunslingers and hatchet men of yore provides no absolution, of course, for what happened to Dermot Ryan, who had his cheekbone fractured last week; it merely tells us what we really know. In explosive, man-to-man marking games like football or hurling, tempers will always be fragile and bones will always get broken. Though the numbers of experts and purveyors of outrage may grow exponentially, it will always be so.

Counties meet each other again and again. Players nurse grudges in the interim. There is nothing finishes an inter-county career more quickly than having the brand "chicken" burned onto your backside. Even if he is going to lose a few feathers in the process, a player will do his utmost to avoid charges of cowardice. What GAA journalist hasn't shaken his head sympathetically with a team manager when an inquiry about some talent who has gone missing is met with the one word response: "Windy"?

What needs changing, and what is virtually unchangeable, is the culture of the GAA. The tradition of omerta, from John Finn's jaw broken in front of a full house in Croke Park to Dermot Ryan's cheekbone broken in a tunnel in Mullingar, the tradition of silent suffering, remains unbroken.

Then there are the practices of management. What team, given the choice of fielding six extraordinarily skilled defenders or four skilled defenders and two adequate ones who might scare the bejeezes out of somebody, wouldn't opt for the latter? What expert will draw the precise line between foul play and the business of "letting him know you are there"? Or fault the logic, from the management point of view, of one in all in? While the GAA continues to operate a disciplinary system as vague and porous as that currently in operation, all these problems - the annual windfall of broken bones and fisticuffs and tunnel incidents - will come our way. The fuss and shrill indignation and talk show theatrics will continue to be the tiresome side-show.

It is wrong that Dermot Ryan couldn't go about his work last week. But any number of other things could have befallen him causing an identical absence. He plays a rough, intensely physical sport wherein broken legs, snapped ligaments, debilitated fingers, etc., are part of the currency. If we sincerely want to improve the lot of players, we will deal with that issue first.

Scarcely a summer goes by without reporters encountering some player who has fallen foul of the GAA's Accident Injury Scheme, which provides just over six months of safety net for an injured player. A meagre safety net, too: the allowance of £100 a week doesn't go far, especially for a self-employed player suddenly deprived of his full health.

Injured players, especially injured players who are self-employed, turn with arms outstretched towards county boards every year, having assumed all along that they had been playing under the auspices of some sort of watertight insurance scheme. They haven't, and bitterness and disillusionment usually follow.

The GAA will eventually get its disciplinary system sorted out. Even then, though, bones will be broken and fists will be thrown. That is a risk which most players accept reluctantly, along with that of accidental injury and lost earnings through training.

We will have done them all a favour, however, when we have a centrally subsidised insurance scheme which players can avail of.

Not as sexy or as easy as swooning over the news of another dowdy fight, but more practical nonetheless.