Warring Gaels should think of Lean years

Locker Room: We are on the edge of something here and it's best if everyone just takes a breath before drawing sabres.

Coming out into the morning light after the psychedelic party that were the Celtic Tiger years it's hard not to notice with sour, hungover regret that we have no real legacy to hand on. No spangling health service, no great buildings, no great Irish dream.

We have the GAA though. It's an unlikely cultural treasure but all the more worth clinging to in these times where the world gets a little smaller and a little more homogenised every time Starbucks annexes a new territory. And now the GAA is talking about strike! A friend once told me a story, possibly apocryphal, about when David Lean came to Ireland scouting locations for the filming of Ryan's Daughter. By, one supposes, the simple means of throwing a stone and seeing where it landed, he happened upon a pub out West Kerry way. Having inspected its dark, wooden counters and splintered clientele Lean decided this was a perfect location. So he summoned up fear an tí and handed him a fine, hefty wad of notes as deposit for the exclusive use of the place for filming the next summer.

And when Lean and the film crew came back the following year ready for the lights, camera, action stuff they found the pub had changed utterly. It had been recast in leatherette and formica and kitted out with all manner of glitter and tack. A jukebox issued a sodium glow from a darkened corner and freckled local youths with fags dangling from their lips leaned earnestly over the balls on the new pool table.

The story predates the Celtic Tiger but prefigures our reaction to being handed a hefty wad of money. The only difference between ourselves and the rest of the formica-laid First World is that we still hope there is a difference. And perhaps all that hope resides in the GAA and its stubborn insistence that all true passions are local, its bizarre, almost socialist, belief that a major sport can still be more about what everyone can give than about what everyone can take.

Time, the good time just past, has altered the GAA and the circumstances of players have changed too. Most of the change has been necessary. If the association is to survive, for instance, it needs professional people to run it. That the GAA is about to lose the greatest sports administrator the country has seen would be more widely appreciated perhaps if Liam Mulvihill had not thrived by being so discreet about reading his tribe's pulse and so understated when prescribing for its needs.

A large and disparate body of people needs professional guidance. If we have a native distrust of corporatism and the language needed to attract the corporate bees to our pollen, well we perhaps spend too little time appreciating the extraordinary infrastructure of the GAA, examples of which are generally closer to us than even the nearest Starbucks. Compare it to what we all grew up with. The GAA has come a long way.

The GPA (or a version thereof) was always going to be a part of the world we ended up in. The GAA couldn't continue to live with the pretence it was still 1953. Croke Park couldn't have been rebuilt without holding hands with some men in sharp suits. The modern media age couldn't have been embraced without letting some executives squeeze the knees of some true Gaels. And somewhere along the line the people who play in front of the full houses were going to ask, "Where's mine?"

When emotive words like "strike" are used it is easy to respond with emotion. In clubhouses much of the response this week has been visceral: If players don't like it why not withdraw permanently? It's voluntary, isn't it?

There is a lot that goes with being an intercounty player, from the sense of achievement and well-being to the endorsements and scholarships to more.

The hostile reaction is understandable and not entirely unreasonable from people who put in the same number of hours in committee rooms and fundraising drives and mentoring kids. There is a feeling in clubhouses too that it is the colour and the county we pay to see, not the players.

Part of the attraction of GAA stars is their lack of remoteness from us, their complete absence of star quality. What we pay in for is the feeling of connection. We don't come to worship, we come to share.

Talk of strike and stipends and rights scares us. We know in our hearts though that the world has changed and we have all been agents of that change.

A more subtle part of the attraction of a day out in Croke Park is vicarious. We look around and, lacking any other frame of reference, say to ourselves that this is as good as Old Trafford. Part of the fetish we have with intercounty training is in savouring the myth our players are as fit as any full-time professional athletes.

Part of the deal with such heavy broadcasting of the GAA summer is our sneaking self-regard when we compare the coverage and the seriousness thereof to what soccer gets. We couldn't have all that for ourselves and hope to leave the minds of our best young players uncontaminated.

Of course players are going to inhale the wafting scent of the roast-beef sandwiches from corporate level; of course they will take the calls of the men who tell them they should be making a bob or two here and now; of course they measure their sacrifices and income against those of the stars they share the sports pages with.

And of course players should be well looked after. When you get two plates rubbing up against each other as do the GPA and the GAA the friction dictates the outcome. The GPA's youthful brashness and the GAA's surly suspicion set the tone for relations. There is a lesson for both bodies when this finishes, as it will soon.

The realpolitik of the situation is that GAA players will get grants. The GPA needs to be in a position to say that the grants were won by the GPA. The GAA should offer up that credit as part of the endgame.

And when the grants have been won and the dust has died down the GAA and the GPA should cease to see each other as natural adversaries.

The problem both need to address is the feeling among ordinary members - stakeholders, if you like - that they are the helpless third parties in all of this, that they are watching a battle being fought out by two bodies neither of which they feel part of.

It's increasingly possible to spend a lifetime working and volunteering in a club and still feel that what happens in Croke Park isn't supposed to be your business. And it's just as possible to look at the intercounty players whose form and style course through your conversation as being something equally alien.

There will be no strike, which is good because what most GAA people want is for players to be happy and rewarded to the point where the goodwill toward them isn't eroded and the connection we feel to them as being of ourselves is as strong as ever - and for all talk of pay for play to be shelved until after we are all dead.

But when it is done and everything gets back to normal the GPA and the GAA need to appreciate that this was different from, say, Rule 42 or Rule 21 or any of the other bunfights in that many members just felt excluded and threatened by the process.

We have all the leatherette and formica we need just now, thanks. And the freckle-faced lads are leering over the pool table. David Lean took a wad of money and converted the little pub in Kerry back to what it had been. We'd all happily buy into a similar bit of make-believe when this is over.