LockerRoom: So here we go again, all together down the big long slide. Wheeee! And straight into the brown stuff at the bottom. Splash!
If you thought the sight of the GAA "stifling" debate on Rule 42 was unedifying, hang around folks. Biff! Wait till you see the debate. POW! RTÉ said it was now the time for persuading hearts and minds. The tabs got all happy clappy about Keano and Briano playing footer and rugger in Croker. Great and grandiloquent were those who spoke of the winds of change, and a tide in the affairs of fíor gaels.
Wrong too. There is no tide. No change. Any motion on Rule 42 will surely be defeated. Back in 2001 the run-in to the debate was muted and civilised. Close, but no cigar. Since then, attitudes have hardened and narrowed like a fat man's arteries.
With 11 counties submitting motions this year - each of which in some way reflecting a desire for change - it would be forgiveable if the casual observer got a little bit too casual and decided that the walls were about to come tumbling down. Don't get your glasnost t-shirts printed just yet though.
Firstly, all 11 counties virtually comprised the vanguard of the failed putsch back in 2001. All 11 voted in favour. Dublin had a messy mandate problem because of the £60 million which fell into the GAA's lap the previous day.
(For the record: Kerry voted 9-0 in favour, Cavan 7-0, Sligo 5-0, Roscommon 6-0, Wicklow 7-0, Longford 6-0, Wexford 11-0, Offaly 8-0, Laois 9-0, Kilkenny 5-0 and Dublin 7-4). It was all so close. 176 votes for. 89 votes against. Forty-four delegates stuck in a lift or trapped in a toilet or something. One vote the other way would have given the Rule 42 motion the necessary two thirds majority and we'd be over the worst of it by now. The Clare folk who looked at the narrowness of the defeat and copied the motion and put it forward the next year were optimists. Sadly, the mood had changed when they weren't looking. The vote was now 197 against 106 for.
Since then, we haven't seen hardliners going down to the river singing alleluiah and washing the scales from their eyes, have we? Where are the born-again ecumenists? Where are the counties who have seen the error of their ways only to become zealous reformists? Will Antrim, who surprised even themselves by voting 7-0 in favour back in 2001, still be feeling so radical? What about the three Armagh delegates who broke ranks with their fellows? There's no logic left in the debate. No sense. This column has always felt that what the GAA does with Croke Park is the GAA's own business.
It owes nothing to other sports. It doesn't deserve to be browbeaten or embarrassed into handing out its facilities. There is some lingering absurdity in two of the greatest professional sports in the world apparently queuing at the door to get into the house of an amateur organisation.
No, the GAA shouldn't be embarrassed into an open house situation. The GAA should stop embarrassing itself and it's members, however. Back in 2001, when Cathal Lynch spoke on behalf of the European Board, he mentioned that the activities of the board included playing games in a cricket pitch in Guernsey, a soccer pitch in Luxembourg, a rugby pitch in The Hague. It was a potent point.
How many county teams have trained under lights or on former sod in the premises of a 'rival code'? How many of the games played by All Stars in far flung such as Argentina and Hong Kong take place on fields consecrated in the GAA?
How many clubs have TV screens in their bar which don't show soccer and rugby matches? How many clubs have a membership that is pristine pure in the matter of not having 'bad thoughts' about other sports? How many GAA members wouldn't feel some form of mortification if the national soccer team were forced in their martyrdom to trudge off to Cardiff or Manchester to play a major game.
How many of those unmortified, unabashed souls think that the scenario just outlined would do the GAA no harm, that if the game had to be played in Britain the young people of Ireland would lose faith in soccer, turn off their TVs , make a pyre of their replica shirts and come in their droves back to the arms of the GAA fundamentalist who stood firm and who banished those soccer snakes from our shores. How many? Just asking.
Back in 2001, the £60 million which arrived the day before the debate certainly succeeded in marginalising the argument about fiscal pragmatism. A few years on, with the Governmental chequebook having been re-opened and with corporate and premium levels on the Cusask Stand side of the stadium being resold, the money argument still won't have centre stage - which is a pity.
A few years ago the Meath County Board, no backwoodsmen but no freethinking radicals either, passed a motion which suggested that any revenues taken from renting Croke Park should be passed on to county boards for disbursement. The trickledown proposal has huge merits.
The GAA is like a castle in the air. In Ireland, if you want to have a row with a soccer bigot (easily as numerous and certainly more venomous than the big bluff GAA bigot) you need only enter into a comparative discussion of facilities.
Soccer is ramshackle from top to bottom with a few exceptions. The GAA has forced its way not only into the centre of most communities hearts but into the physical centre of those communities too. Club houses and sports centres and fields.
"Yeah," the soccer bigot will hiss, "sure ye don't pay your players". It's more than that though. It's a tradition of volunteerism and free effort which provides so much energy and drive that most clubs are able to engage in a constant double act of fundraising and team training. It's draining and it's waning though. Just running a team costs more these days than ever before. Pro sports people get tax breaks. GAA players don't. The kid who walks through the gate holding a hurley and a helmet to start paying in mini leagues - surely the most distinctively cultural act left to us on this homogenised island - that kid's parents get no tax break on the hurley, helmet or sliotar, nothing to redress the constant bombardment of Sky soccer hype and glamour.
Games are expensive to run, clubhouses and dressingrooms are expensive to keep going. Volunteers are harder and harder to find. The GAA is in danger of turning into this big inert organisation of prawn sandwich eaters, filled with sated people who enjoy getting the lift to their box or their premium seat, but who won't sit on committees or take teams or even give lifts.
Forget about whether Croke Park's mortgage needs servicing, the rent money would give the grassroots volunteers a bit of a break, a little jump-start to lift them out of the shadow of debt, a chance to channel their energies back into the games they love. Maybe it would put coaches into schools, maybe it would build hurling walls in clubs that need them, maybe it would resurface a few pitches.
We can argue forever over whether your grandfather or my grandfather would be spinning clockwise or anti-clockwise if David Beckham ever played in Croke Park. The true GAA person will be just quietly getting on with it, slightly embarrassed to look certain friends in the eye, slightly disheartened that the gradient ain't getting any less steep.
Now, when those people finally lose faith and walk away, that will be truly unedifying.
