After a certain point, sums of money become so unreal that they lose their meaning for most people. To put into perspective the £60 million the Taoiseach is giving the GAA for the development of Croke Park over the next three years, and the £130 million he is giving it over the next 10 years a few comparisons are necessary.

A contrast with other areas of Government spending shows that even in these times of State bounty the GAA is a much higher priority than basic services for some of our most vulnerable citizens.

The £60 million for Croke Park is, for example, almost twice what Charlie McCreevy allocated to increasing child benefit in his last Budget. It is twice his new allocation for people with intellectual disabilities, a group whose basic educational needs the Government is currently seeking to deny in its Supreme Court appeal in the Sinnott case.

It is three times the full-year cost of extra funds for those who are caring for physically and intellectually disabled people in their own homes. Five times as much as the budget allocated to an initiative to tackle the scandalous waiting lists for public hospital treatment.

Sixty times the money being spent this year on trying to improve the health of Travellers, a group whose life expectancy remains at Third World levels. Seventy times the extra grants to tackle educational disadvantage in primary schools.

Even by comparison with other spending which goes through Jim McDaid's sport and recreation budget, the sums involving the GAA are massive. The National Drugs Strategy, for example, was allocated £17 million this year. The funding allocated for the Sports Council's entire "New Era in Irish Sport" strategy is £2.5 million for 2001, £5 million for 2002 and £7.5 million for 2003: just a quarter in total of what the GAA will get for Croke Park in the same period.

When it comes to identifying the sense of priorities which lies behind Government decisions, these figures speak for themselves. Even so, the massive allocations to the GAA might make sense in their own terms if they were not being given in such an incoherent and contradictory manner.

The GAA is in many ways a fantastic organisation. Its presence in rural and urban communities all over the island is immensely valuable. Its achievement in keeping amateur sports going at astonishingly high levels of skill in this age of commercialism is quite remarkable.

The problem is that the Government's generosity is not reciprocated. Government policy is to take sectarianism out of Irish culture. In return for a huge injection of public money, the very least the GAA ought to be obliged to do is to drop the blatantly sectarian Rule 21, which ostracises anyone associated in any way with the British armed forces or the RUC, and to open Croke Park to other sports.

Instead, the money was promised in a way which massively strengthened the hand of the GAA's powerful reactionary minority and set back the cause of change.

The decision to announce the funding on the eve of the GAA's vote on opening up Croke Park was either extraordinarily stupid or extraordinarily cynical. If Bertie Ahern actually wanted the GAA to open up Croke Park, the announcement was stupid because it demolished the most persuasive argument for change: that the GAA would go broke if it didn't start to make money from Croke Park.

AS Sean Moran revealed in The Irish Times this week, the defeat of the motion for change was directly attributable to the announcement of the funding. Members of the Dublin delegation, for example, changed their intended votes directly because of the announcement.

According to county secretary John Costello "some of the delegation decided that the money made a difference to the way they should vote". The motion barely failed to secure the necessary two-thirds majority because Dublin, instead of voting 11-0 in favour, went only 7-4.

There is another possibility, of course: that the announcement was not ham-fisted but the result of sly calculation. Objectively, Bertie Ahern had a direct interest in Croke Park not being open to other sports because if it is it destroys whatever rationale exists for his own pet project, Stadium Ireland.

The Labour leader, Ruairi Quinn, claimed on Tuesday that "the timing of the announcement of the grant was designed to bring about the rejection of the motion put forward by the Roscommon County Board to open up Croke Park".

In the Dail, the Taoiseach disdainfully replied that Mr Quinn's view "of why I would try to influence a GAA conference is so off-the-wall I should not bother replying to it". So much else about this affair is off-the-wall, however, that a reply to the allegation does not seem so obviously superfluous.

It doesn't make sense that a Government which can't afford to give autistic children a proper education or to stop people dying on hospital waiting lists can conjure up from nowhere vast sums of money for the GAA.

It doesn't make sense that the Tanaiste would be kept out of the loop on what was always going to be a high-profile Government decision. It doesn't make sense that massive amounts of public money would be committed with no strings attached.

But then, it doesn't make sense that a city of Dublin's size should need two 80,000-seater sports stadia and that doesn't seem to bother the Taoiseach either.

fotoole@irish-times.ie