Some weeks ago this column ventured opinions concerning the problems besetting Irish rugby. Not very sophisticated stuff, but worth restating occasionally. The dogs in the street howl that Irish rugby is too comfortably middle class for its own well-being.

Among the disenfranchised, the consequence has been (at best) a complete indifference to the fate of Irish rugby. Rugby emotionally engages far fewer people on this island than it should. That is a sad state of affairs for any sport.

The response to the column was pleasing. Letters and phone calls from those who don't give a fig for rugby outnumbered the epistles of outrage by about 2:1. Given that outrage or disagreement prompts most letters to papers, this column triumphantly decreed that a chord had been struck.

Several rugby people called or wrote expressing the wish that the people who ran Irish rugby might wake up from their hundred years sleep and smell the coffee. There was a baffling batch acknowledging the problem, but expressing disappointment that reference to it should have appeared in this paper Then there was the sheaf of hostile letters larded with ersatz sympathy, strained sarcasm or pure spite. These are so toxic that my doctors only allow me to pick them up using tongs.

The logic was pat and smug. To criticise a sport for its own crippling exclusivity and footshuffling inertia is to suffer oneself from debilitating chips on the shoulder. Aren't you middle class yourself, several letters asked, as if there had been a treacherous breach of solidarity involved. Stoically, I await my expulsion from the lodge.

Then there were two letters and one call which advised me to take my friends in the GAA and stick them where the sun don't shine and the argument lurched off the rails and into bile. It struck me, not for the first time, that there are few viruses as difficult to shake off as that which besets the anti-GAA bigot.

There is no other sporting body in the country, indeed few other institutions, which reduce people to such cartoon caricatures of boiling resentment and hostility.

It is high time for the GAA to change that. Let's start in an obvious place.

This past weekend has represented a small unspoken embarrassment for the GAA. The glacially-progressing politics of the north have moved ahead of the politics of our largest sporting body. Those who have suffered the most have compromised a little before the GAA has moved an inch. Examined in the cold light of day, that is a shameful embarrassment. It should have been the other way around.

It nearly was. A few years ago in Dublin, a much anticipated congress debate on Rule 21, that which bars people who wear certain uniforms from membership of the GAA, was shelved and added to the queue in a holding pattern of "special" congresses. That special congress has yet to hit the runway.

As one who has stood with defiant club secretaries in the charred rubble of burned-out clubhouses, who has seen murdered GAA men buried in coffins with jersies draped over them, who has heard the stories of intimidation and harassment that GAA people in the north have been subjected to, this column has always been a little reluctant to issue oracular statements on the status of Rule 21.

From the warm comfort of a Dublin newspaper office it is easy to talk tough about Rule 21. It is a marketing disaster surely, an old anachronism which has survived because of historical circumstance and fear. An organisation whose members were once exhorted "to join the volunteers to learn how to shoot straight" was always going to have difficulty sloughing off its past.

Rule 21 has been a comfort blanket for GAA people in the north who know well that its removal won't result in a run of county championships for the local garrison, but who feel alienated from the institutions which Rule 21 deliberately shuts out of the GAA.

Rule 21 is not a positive or constructive thing. It is a weapon of the stand-off and the siege. Nose to nose, toe to toe, one community's eyes boring into the other community's eyes, the retention of Rule 21 is a push in the chest, a slap in the face, a hissed expletive, a stance.

The GAA has shied away from debating Rule 21 on a Saturday afternoon in a Dublin hotel because to do so would expose the great canyon of understanding which exists between the GAA north and south of the border. There has been no way of debating the issue without ending up with blood on the floor and all over the walls.

Yet, it is high time to have that argument and put the issue to bed. It is to be hoped that the impetus for this will come from the Ulster counties because it is not too late for the GAA to play a constructive part in changing the world we live in.

To look northwards this Monday morning, at hassled David Trimble and poor old Ian Paisley in his grand old Duke of York outfit, is to realise that the impetus of change is against partition. Change not so much as represented by the document which was born on Good Friday, but in the demographics of the north and the relentlessly expanding influence of the EU which makes all borders less and less visible.

Yet, if the country is ever to be as united as its simple island geography would suggest it should be, we must engage culturally with each other. Sport is the most accessible arena for such engagement.

It is time for the GAA to walk forward with the self-confidence that befits the largest sporting organisation in the country. It won't take five years or 10 years to erode the suspicion which non-nationalists in the north feel towards the GAA. It will take longer than that, but if the GAA is to be pro-active as a cultural persuader than it must be done.

Politics, as the north teaches us, and class, as rugby teaches us, will always create walls between people. Just as rugby needs to reach out across the class divide, the time has come for the GAA to start unconditionally reaching out across the political divide.

On this Easter Monday morning, nothing could be more compatible with the aspirations of the association than the daydream of kids on the Shankill Road playing hurling without any political baggage on their backs. Nothing would represent a bigger step towards the cultural unity which is the necessary (and peaceful) precondition for anything more formal or ambitious.

The GAA can no longer exist with their old president Dan McCarthy's hope that "when the time comes the hurlers will cast away the caman for the steel that will drive the Saxon from our land".