Last weekend's Dublin hurling symposium was as interesting for what it told us about the game nationally as for any impact it may have on the fortunes of the organising county. Seán Moran looks at the difficulties facing hurling - especially dual players - which were discussed at the Dublin symposium.

The capital provides a microcosm of the problems facing hurling in the handful of counties who aspire to competitiveness at championship level and by extension of the rest of the country, where such competitiveness is a pipe dream.

The game has been through in the 1990s what was styled as a golden era, a notion based on the resurgence of counties long confined to the shadows - most notably Clare and Wexford. But hurling was always high profile within those counties. The lack of any real inroads into non-hurling territory is the most telling indicator of the sport's paralysis.

In the past 12 years, four counties have won the football All-Ireland for the first time. The equivalent period in hurling is 88 years. There have been diplomatic attempts to rationalise this stasis.

The rise in popularity of non-Gaelic games and the decline in physical recreation have both been advanced, and even administrative shortcomings.

At the recent symposium the county's director of hurling, Diarmuid Healy, made this point: "If Dublin hurling ends up in oblivion, the cause will not be rugby or soccer. It will be our own organisation's failure."

Whereas these factors play their part the unpalatable reality is that hurling's biggest enemy is Gaelic football, the other code that must be nurtured by the GAA and all its administrative units. One of the most intractable problems facing Croke Park in the years ahead will be the growing incompatibility of its two main sports.

An interesting aspect of last week's meeting, which was addressed by a number of heavy hitters - Healy, Kilkenny manager Brian Cody, Tipperary's Nicky English and Cork manager Donal O'Grady - was the extent of the consensus on this most basic of problems.

"Hurling is different from any game in the world," said Healy. "Therefore, the preparation has to be totally different from that for any other team game. Now Dublin people are unfortunate in that they're involved in a county that is predominantly football.

"And in football there is too much emphasis on physical fitness, too little on skill. Hurling in Dublin seems to be trying to follow that pattern. And that's what we have got to change."

O'Grady confronted the realities for his own county, who have the most distinguished dual tradition in GAA.

"Until such time as Cork County Board bring in a rule that, once you come to minor you opt for either hurling or football, in my estimation Cork are going nowhere in either hurling or football," he said. "The day of the dual player is gone. Cork County Board will have to face up to that sooner rather than later."

The problem, though, has moved beyond the sphere of dual players. There is a general acceptance that the intensity of commitment involved at senior intercounty level more or less prohibits a full involvement in both sports. The two most prominent dual players of recent times, Cork's Seán Óg Ó hAilpín and Alan Kerins from Galway, have both reverted to hurling exclusively.

More significantly, Kerins's time as a footballer is widely perceived (although he hasn't publicly acknowledged as much) to have damaged his hurling.

Former Galway manager Noel Lane got plenty of stick for attempting to give the player a "hurling only" ultimatum - and the same happened Eamonn Cregan in Limerick - but virtually all of his intercounty peers were in private agreement with the substantive concern.

And there are few counties which illustrate the problem more vividly than Dublin. The haemorrhaging of promising younger hurlers to football has been a long-standing drain on hurling. The cycle takes them from making an impact at underage hurling to graduating on to the senior stage where, after perhaps some initial optimism and even euphoria, reality kicks in and with it the demoralisation that makes the siren call of football all the more tempting.

There's little point in criticising the football management for putting a foot down on any dual ambitions. Whoever is running a county football side wants the undivided attention of his players. After the summer he's had, Tommy Lyons will hardly set the plight of the hurlers at the top of his list of concerns.

It cuts both ways. Since Kilkenny's second successive All-Ireland senior title in September and the clean sweep of minor and under-21 titles there has been some comment on the county's virtually exclusive focus on hurling. This hasn't gone down altogether well in the county but the emphasis has found favour in the wider hurling community.

"Even though I enjoyed playing football you look at Kilkenny and there aren't that many dual players. And, on that score, Kilkenny have got it right," according to Donal O'Grady.

Former Wexford All-Ireland winning manager Liam Griffin said that Kilkenny could hardly be forced at gunpoint to take up football at a high level. He compared the Kilkenny attitude to that in his own county.

"We're not quite sure whether we're a football or a hurling county. After 125 years we still haven't made up our minds. And the one thing you know about Kilkenny is that they've made up their minds."

What happens in Kilkenny happens elsewhere, albeit not to the same extent. County boards prioritise the sport at which they're stronger even if there's goodwill towards the weaker. This process has a vicious circularity that militates against developmental activity. It is also far more of a problem for hurling, which has a smaller base.

Provincial councils don't have any adjudicating powers in these matters and are reluctant to intervene, to the extent of ordering counties's priorities. This dilemma is just as marked at national level with Croke Park over the years unable to influence the growth of hurling beyond maybe the Scéim Iomána that helped revitalise Galway in the 1960s.

But even in counties with no particular track record in football, attempts to develop hurling didn't succeed and both Westmeath and Laois have recently managed to find a way out of the football wilderness with impressive achievements at underage and senior level that would be unthinkable in hurling.

This partly relates to how much easier it is to master football. Lack of the ingrained skills needed to compete at hurling's highest level is a major inhibition.

Donal O'Grady's reduction of football to two skills might have been an exaggeration but there's no doubt that the level of exposure necessary to develop a good hurler is substantially greater than is the case with football. In the words of the great Kilkenny coach Fr Tommy Maher: "A hurler should shake hands with his hurley every day."

Estimates vary on the appropriate age to specialise. O'Grady suggests minor but other opinions say younger, 12 or under. In those circumstances how is a county like Dublin going to make a breakthrough? Given that the best hurlers will also have an aptitude for football, how are they to be wrapped in cotton wool and kept away from the eyes of football selectors?

Conal Keaney is the latest outstanding hurling talent to flirt with football and the flirtation landed him an All-Ireland under-21 medal. No wonder Dublin's beleaguered hurling community is a bit anxious. No wonder Diarmuid Healy was advocating a "hurling only" culture.

Some counties observe a separation of powers with football and hurling boards but there's no evidence that this has developed the weaker code. It might work in a county like Galway, which has a clearly defined geographical divide, two Division One teams and virtually no history of dual players but elsewhere it has made little difference.

There has been great praise for the improvement wrought by Dinny Cahill in his two years with Antrim. But whereas the technical and competitive advances have indeed been impressive, the county is another with clear geographical boundaries between football and hurling territories. Furthermore for the past 20 years Antrim has been the only Ulster county with a stronger hurling team.

No matter how good a coach is, he needs the players' exclusive attention. The central question in the coming years will be the extent to which Croke Park (already seen by some hurling people as benevolently disposed towards football) can broker a programme of affirmative action that will facilitate exclusive development for hurlers in football counties.

Last year's Strategic Review Committee report made recommendations about the development of hurling with a view to raising the standard in six counties (to be selected but excluding those that have won an All-Ireland in the past 30 years) to the level where they could compete within 10 years at All-Ireland semi-final stage.

Meeting that target will require nothing short of a miracle.