WHEN we were young, a long time ago admittedly, it was an exciting pleasure to find that Santa Claus had delivered a small tin drum and two little wooden drumsticks on Christmas morning. An orange, a Beano or Dandy annual and a new shirt might complete the gift and a cowboy holster complete with six-gun and explosive "caps" would make for a glorious Christmas.

The tin drum produced more anxiety in a small but crowded household than was ever intended. By Little Christmas on January 6th some previously doting parent or older sibling would have punctured the drum, thus making it silent. It was not unknown for the drum to disappear completely.

In this column a similar drum has been beaten often enough to leave doting readers at a loss as to what can be done to avoid a return too frequently to the same old theme ... but here we go again.

During the week, sports lovers in this country learned that an international athletics event involving many of the top athletes in Europe, the European Cup, was to be staged in Santry Stadium this weekend.

Apparently, the rules for this competition include an agreement between the European Athletics Association and the European Broadcasting Union which stipulates that the host athletics organisation must arrange for television coverage of the event so that other countries can have access to live coverage or highlights of the event.

The unfortunate Bord Luthchleas Eireann people who, heaven knows are seldom out of the administrative limelight, were not sure of the dates of the event until last November. When they went to RTE with their request for coverage, they discovered that they were too late. RTE's busy summertime schedule was full to the brim and flowing over and coverage of the Santry event was out of the question.

BLE then realised that one of the competing countries, Finland, was demanding live coverage of the event and that several other national stations - including RTE - wanted, at least, edited high-lights. But no cameras were availably locally.

What has now emerged is that BLE has been forced by the rules of the competition to hire a German TV crew to film the event. The cost to BLE will be approximately, £45,000.

Reading about this the other day I couldn't help wondering what Billy Morton, after whom the Santry athletics complex is named would have done. He was a man who was capable of doing extraordinary deals with people in the athletics world of his day which would have put some of the "strokers" in modern Irish politics to shame.

He staged one of the most remarkable athletic meets of his day in Santry in the 1950s, with most of the top world athletes in the world involved and in which numerous world records were set.

What we must regret on his behalf is that what would have been a vast sum of money in his day, which would have been used to provide better facilities and better rewards for the competitors (money was a dirty word then), is now being drained out of Irish athletics.

It is being handed over to a German television company so that the people who claim to be the promoters of athletics can be satisfied and so that the demands of television companies can be met.

This drum about television company greed has been beaten here before, but nobody seems to want to shout stop. Nor will anyone. Unless people with power decide to do something about it, we will all soon be at the mercy of the TV companies.

When that day comes, sport of all kinds will be the loser and if you haven't got a credit card you'll see very little real sport on television.

There is some hope in the efforts which are being made to ensure that the really big traditional events will be preserved for traditional outlets such as RTE and BBC, but such is the determination of some of these vacuum cleaner companies that they will buy their way into situations where common sense and decency do not prevail.

And yet maybe, just maybe, things might work out to the advantage of the real sports supporter. From what one can gather from the GAA year to date, attendances at GAA matches, football and hurling, are climbing.

When the late P D Mehigan first started giving radio commentaries on GAA in the late 1920s and early 30s he was often accused of doing damage to the games. "You and Radio Eireann will kill the games," he was told. It was a prediction well wide of the mark.

Yet Raidio Eireann did have a genuine and even passionate commitment to all Irish cultural matters at the time. It would be very hard indeed for anyone to convince this particular little drummer boy that the television companies of today are interested in anything other than their own wealth.

For the moment, at least, we in this country still have total control of the greatest team sport in the world - namely hurling. We will always have memories and discussions on that to shorten the long nights after Samhain.

Football? Well, that's another day's drumming!