LOTS of clasped mouths on the Ards peninsula this week.

Across on the low slung boat from Strangford to shambling Portaferry and into the maw of controversy. No Comment and Nothing to Say are the slogans of the week. Tomorrow the local GAA club goes behind closed doors to hammer out a position on the controversy which threatens to engulf the club.

It is a remarkable place. Wildly rural and beautifully desolate, hurling has found a home here in the hearts of the three parishes which form the backbone of the Down county team. You can drive from the pitch in Ballygalget, to the pitch in Ballycran to the pitch in Portaferry without covering more than five miles.

Hurling was planted here long ago by a Tipperary man working in the area. In the evenings one team vacates a pitch after training and another takes its place immediately. The love of the game never subsided or disappeared. Even when times got hard.

Politics has always threatened to spark a blaze both literal and metaphorical in this corner of the hurling world. Antrim hurling people and Down hurling people, despite being united by a love of the game and being forced into a cheek by jowl existence through geographical isolation from the rest of the hurling world, have much that separates them politically.

The three Down senior hurling clubs which exist in the little hotbed of hurling at the bottom tip of the Ards peninsula have done a remarkable job in surviving and prospering down through the decades. Ballycran, Ballygalget and Portaferry thrived for years on the basis of their own inter-parochial rivalry, before welding themselves together finally to become a respectable county team, winning two provincial championships this decade.

Despite the fact that the three Down clubs play their hurling in the Antrim league and for the most part get by without let or hindrance, geography and history dictate that they are caricatured by means of an ancient shorthand dating back to the split in the republican movement back in the early 197Os.

Antrim are provisionals and Down are Officials, says the shorthand. For the most part this crude characterisation is untrue and unfair to both parties but when members of the Portaferry club made a presentation to a retiring RUC man from the area in late August and word got about, the old name-calling routine was bound to start again.

The issue has been divisive both within the Portaferry club and between Down and Antrim. All three clubs on the Ards peninsula, isolated in a broadly unionist area, have suffered from having their clubhouses burned down from time to time during the years of the troubles. Despite parish rivalries the burning of one clubhouse would typically have an impact on the entire hurling community there like a death in the family. Opinions are hotly divided on the role of the RUC in apprehending the perpetrators. Some feel that the RUC turn a blind eye to the workings of arsonists; others feel that, if they do, who can blame them?

The troubles have had a different impact in the Ards peninsula than they have above in Antrim. In rural Ards they have learned to live with it, to get on with their business as best they can.

The reminders of their situation aren't nearly as luminous or frequent as they would be in Antrim. An RUC uniform doesn't always set blood boiling around here.

"Some would say that they were never around when they were supposed to be around," said one Down hurling man this week. "Others would say that there are RUC men who would do their best, who'd be friends and neighbours to players and would do their best."

If the issue was divisive in Portaferry, it has been the cause of seething resentment in Antrim. The alleged comment of one Portaferry player to the effect that the club had more business honouring a man like that than playing with the "terrorists of the Antrim league" has had wide circulation in west Belfast and the talk this week was of the possibility of Portaferry being expelled from the Antrim league when the Antrim convention is held in a few weeks time.

The difficulty as people on both sides concede when speaking off the record is less with the old political badges and slogans and more with the realities of day to day existence. In Antrim, hurling is played in West Belfast and in the glens to the north of the county. The political complexion of the local population differs widely in both places to that which exists at the bottom of the Ards peninsula.

For all intents and purposes the game exists on three entirely different little islands. In Belfast the hurling pockets are acutely politicised. In the Glens in the north of Antrim the nationalist community is almost isolated. In the narrow streets of West Belfast there is always the sense of enclave. In rural county Down, out on the Ards, where `across the water' means Strangford not Britain, the imperatives are different again. Hurling folk are a minority but per force they live and mix with those on the "other side of the house."

"One thing you'd have to take into account about Down," said an Antrim GAA official this week, "is that they live in a small rural community down there, they're not surrounded by their own people. A lot of people wouldn't see the harm in it the way we would. Their experience is different to ours."

INDEED. Experiences differ. As a county, Down generally has been softer on issues like Rule 21. In hurling terms, one of the Down clubs actually plays its games on a tight little pitch which they purchased from a Protestant neighbour having been turned down by several Catholic neighbours. Quite often insubstantiated rumours have breezed around the place that the odd British soldier from the nearby camp has lined out for Ballykinlar in the past. When people talk of RUC men playing a bit of GAA the names of the clubs attached to the rumour are usually from Down. None of it amounts to anything, just a feeling that Down GAA folk derive their views as much from the south as from the north.

Whether that difference in experience will be taken into account at the Antrim convention later this month depends to an extent on what happens at the Portaferry meeting tomorrow. There was much enraged talk in Belfast this week to the effect that dropping Portaferry from the league would do no harm at all to Antrim hurling. That Down had it all to lose. Feelings in Portaferry meanwhile run the gamut from indignation to embarrassment and it is difficult for an outsider to call the outcome in advance.

The club secretary Joe Boyle has resigned but has since become vice-chairman of the Down hurling board. A scheduled match between Portaferry and west Belfast club St John's has been wisely postponed until such time as feelings subside. The Antrim league itself isn't scheduled to resume activity until April.

In the end one suspects that what unites the hurling people of Ulster will be greater than that which divides them. When the heat has been taken out of the situation and eyes turn back to the hurling field. Beyond the occasional eruption of spleen and the occasional opening of old political wounds there is a unity in the desire to see the promotion of Ulster hurling.

There is an old story about Down hurling, about the days when club rivalries always sundered the county effort but the corner was about to be turned. Players from each of the three clubs had ceased to sit glaring at each other from different corners of the dressing room. There was a funeral one night and county training had to be abandoned because the woman who had died was related to 14 of the Down panel. Right across the three clubs relatives were required to attend. Through all the squabbles and rivalries it was a family business in the end. So it is with Ulster hurling generally. When the heat goes out of the current situation, the game should win out.