THE rule is this: if the ball is oval and you throw it backwards, it is a foreign game which may not sully the Gaelic acres of Croke Park. But if it is oval and you throw it forwards, it is perfectly acceptable and may grace the hallowed turf at any time. Is there any sense in this?
Probably not, and it should not matter. But it does, simply because the anachronistic and tribal forces in the GAA decree that a "foreign" code like rugby cannot be played at Croke Park, but another code, an offspring of rugby but played by Americans, can be, is not just a matter for the GAA.
The rationalisation of sporting resources is absolutely vital; does it make any sense that the GAA still regards other forms of football played by Irish footballers as foreign, but regards as acceptable a wholly foreign form of football played by foreigners?
This anachronistic, mess is reminiscent of the apartheid laws of South Africa, and instead of making important but, embarrassingly uncaucasian foreigners honorary whites, the GAA issues temporary citizenship of The Land of the Gael to outsiders who, up until last Sunday, probably thought Dublin was something you rubbed onto your bloots.
Rugby and soccer stadiums
It wouldn't matter if urgent decisions didn't need to be made about the construction of a stadium for soccer and rugby in Dublin. From the start, all discussion on this subject has been predicated on the basis that the GAA will not co-operate with the FAI and the IRFU because they play foreign codes. So, of course, do the warriors of the US Navy and Notre Dame.
Can we not learn from that" Is there any reason why the FAI and the IRFU should not announce that henceforward they will play American football, to American football rules? All right. so a few modifications might be required here and there, maybe without letting the GAA know - remove the pointy bits from the ball, say, or insist that the scrum-half, sorry quarterback, play the ball backwards instead of hurling it the length of the pitch. It shouldn't be necessary to trouble the fine, enlightened people who run the GAA with these minor points of footballing law.
Once we have agreed that there is one Gaelic Athletic Association, and two American Football associations, one the FAI footballers American but Irish, and the IRFU - Irish Republican footballers, US-style - can the three of them not sit down and work out a stadium policy? Who knows, we might be spared the need for a second major footballing stadium in Dublin? Paris, eight times the size and probably with 20 times the resources, makes do with one stadium. Why should Dublin not?
It was no doubt beyond the cultural grasp of Lou Holtz, the Notre Dame coach, to understand the GAA's attitude to foreign codes; but he knows bad traffic management when he sees it. "I wanna tell you something, I thought New York traffic was bad. I swear to gosh, most people must live in a car." Just as we remain paralysed with indecision over the building of a new stadium for Dublin, we seem incapable of determining a plan to cope with the car problem for Dublin until it is too late.
Traffic problems
Now is too late. It wasn't just nice Lou from Notre Dame, wherever that is, who thought we've got traffic problems. The Debenham's team who have been installing the splendid new store in Mary Street have been grey-faced at the traffic problems they have seen in Dublin. And the abysmal truth is that it will get worse and worse over the coming years, while we dither and prevaricate and look for cheap options.
The worst possible scenario has been created by the offer of European Union structural funds, to be used by certain date This has given us the delusion that there is a cheap way solving this problem, namely the nice Germans. There is no cheap way. There are only expensive ways, and all of them require that we go underground.
No functioning capital in Europe has come to terms with the motor-car and modern mass-transit requirements without funnelling traffic beneath the surface. Eighteenth-century road plans cannot be adapted to carry the required population movements of the 21st century, any more than 18th-century energy systems can be employed to run computers.
It is not merely a question of scope or size. The two are in compatible. They cannot exist on the same plane. One will always destroy the other. Georgian squares will always impede, traffic flow; traffic will suffocate a Georgian city. Trying to reconcile the two is idiocy.
But, like the cheap but counter-productive roundabouts which our road-planners placed at the bottom of the motorways outside Dublin, instead of expensive but functioning clover-leafs, the illusion of inexpensiveness and the refusal to spend money with a clear, long-term seriousness of intent like grown-ups, tantalises, a magical chimera of a problem solved without spending lots of money.
Hidden Luas agenda
Hence Luas, which has the added charm of being Politically Correct; it will have navigational priority over the motor-car. Unspoken on the Luas agenda is the intention of making life so unbearable for car-users that they will abandon their cars for public transport.
Wrong. They will abandon Dublin city centre for suburban offices and shopping malls. But by that time, Dublin city centre might anyway have been dealt a death-blow merely by the construction of Luas and the horrifying traffic-jams which result. To spend the money quickly, because of the time-limit on the availability of lovely Deutschmarks, is to be bribed into doing something stupid. We will be spending money to do something which will have to be undone in 20 years' time.
There is no alternative to spending terrifying amounts of money. It requires vision and courage and the imposition of a united political will; the sorry saga of Dublin and its stadia suggest those qualities are completely beyond us.