Bit early to panic about rugby take-over

On Gaelic Games: 'Nothing is more conducive to the spread of a movement than the discussions arising out of the efforts of a capable opponent to refute its principles.' - James Connolly (Labour, Nationality and Religion, 1910)

It's stretching things to characterise the current relations between Gaelic games and rugby as that between contending ideologies or convictions. But in boxing parlance, it's good to be able to take your opponent's best shot.

Connolly's above pamphlet was a response to the Lenten discourses against socialism, delivered by Fr Robert Kane SJ, at the Jesuit parish church in Gardiner Street.

In that same year of 1910, the Jesuits in nearby Belvedere College bought about four acres of Croke Park from Frank Dineen, the journalist who, on his own initiative (!), had bought the ground for the GAA 100 years ago exactly, give or take a few weeks, but who had to sell part of it to cover the costs of upkeep and debt maintenance.

When that transaction was reversed in 1991 and the land re-acquired, the redevelopment of Croke Park got underway.

Time will tell whether Saturday's historic events at the ground turn out to be a highpoint in Irish rugby history or a staging post on the road to even greater achievement, but we'll know by the time Ireland next kick-off at Croke Park, in the 2008 Six Nations.

In the meantime, the GAA will surely take their time to ponder the lessons and effects of the historic opening of the stadium. Opinion appears to be divided - few of those who opposed the relaxation of Rule 42 are likely to see anything in the recent two-week carnival to assuage their misgivings, whereas those in favour will have been pleased the first matches under the dispensation have passed off peacefully and satisfactorily.

And it's hard to see how it all could have gone any better, apart from the result against France. Croke Park has been massively publicised in Britain and France (although peculiarly there was more French interest in the stadium leading up to the England match than a fortnight previously) and admired. The GAA have been widely lauded for allowing the matches to go ahead, most strikingly in the respectful and gracious tribute of Ireland captain Brian O'Driscoll last Saturday.

But the scale of the public response to the whole affair is spooking some within the association. Croke Park has become so celebrated that its connection with the GAA is sometimes lost. It's not a new concern.

Director General Liam Mulvihill referred last year to the dangers of the stadium's positive brand disconnecting completely from that of the GAA.

In a private moment, another high-ranking official succinctly summarised the worst-case outcome as "Croke Park soaking up all the plaudits and us being left with the discipline problems".

That's obviously a matter for the GAA to look at in the future, but in relation to rugby it's early to start panicking. For Ireland to stage a bigger match on Jones' Road will require the team to make a big impact at next autumn's World Cup.

Ireland remain the only established Northern Hemisphere side never to have reached the semi-finals and this year's attempt to rectify that is hampered by a disastrous draw that demands progress from a group containing three of the world's top six and in all likelihood a quarter-final against the favourites.

A further anxiety for the IRFU is the current wrangling over the future of the European Cup, one of the principal vehicles of Ireland's impressive rehabilitation as a rugby force.

These are known factors, but they contribute to the possibility that Saturday might be as good as it gets in rugby terms - massive exposure with the biggest television audience ever for a rugby international (nearly twice the numbers that watched the Grand Slam match at Lansdowne Road four years ago) plus a record victory over England for whom it was an unprecedented beating in competition.

Whereas there's no doubt this was very good for the IRFU, it's a phenomenon that the GAA will be familiar with from the soccer team's successes in the late 1980s and early '90s.

Those years demonstrated the value in profile terms of having a strong international team. The GAA accepted at that time that it couldn't compete with big international events, but equally appreciated they don't happen on a continual basis.

That period was, nonetheless, an edgy one for the association with plenty of doom brokers pronouncing Gaelic games critically threatened in the light of events such as Italia '90.

The GAA responded - albeit not with pre-meditated precision - on a number of fronts - the out-of-the-blue Meath-Dublin epic over four matches, the development work at Croke Park, which in the circumstances was an even greater leap in the dark than it looks from here, the culmination of good coaching in Ulster with unprecedented success for the province in the football All-Irelands, reforming work done on out-dated competition structures, newly signed-up sponsors' advertising campaigns and the enhanced profile of weekly live television coverage.

Yet, most of all the advantage was in the sheer reliability of the GAA season, which didn't rely on any external factors to fire up its audience. For instance in 2003, the year of the last rugby World Cup when Ireland weren't enjoying the same success, three of the four highest ratings for sports events on television were Gaelic games (even the fourth was the Special Olympics opening ceremony in Croke Park).

The future is entirely in the association's own hands, but further radical action is going to be needed down the road. Earlier in the week we saw the release of provincial secretaries' annual reports and warnings from both Leinster and Munster.

Michael Delaney bluntly stated that the Leinster hurling championship is "practically extinct" and that the football was hugely over-dependent on Dublin, whereas Simon Moroney illustrated that revenue from the Munster football championship was falling.

In both provinces the problem - pace Delaney's reservations about the qualifiers - is competition or the lack of it. There are proven crowds for competitive fixtures and competitions that aren't providing these have to be reformed. These are undoubtedly challenges, but the GAA are used to meeting them at this stage.