Well, one small step for the GAA, one giant step for RT╔. Last night GAA men travelled into drawing rooms where no GAA men have ever gone before. For the first time in living memory GAA people were depicted on Irish television as something other than hurley wielding fundamentalists with drink problems and poor dental work.

Whether On Home Ground is a success or a failure, it represents a breakthrough in that the type of person who runs the national broadcaster has at last discovered something about the type of person who lives within the GAA. Through The Riordans and Bracken and Harbour bloody Hotel, through Glenroe and Fair City, all those characters were oddly neutered, strangely deficient in that they never went to a match, never had a row about who played full forward on Sunday, never wondered how come they couldn't get tickets to the All-Ireland final. Basically they all lived in Somerset, not Ireland.

It is at once worrying and amusing to read the accounts of how the producers of On Home Ground stumbled upon the GAA in their adulthood and made such big personal breakthroughs. They realised that, hey, these people totally love this stuff, these people live this stuff , it might be a prism through which to examine Irish lives. Roight! Totally!

Good for them.

The GAA is not just about comb-overs in shiny suits making four-hour speeches that keep the civil war mentality alive. It's hardly about that at all. For 99 per cent of the people who make up this truly remarkable organisation, the GAA is just a source of pleasure and pride; the association's ponderous edicts and its various embarrassing postures are treated with a gay irreverence in most clubhouses, the folks who run for GAA office with such earnestness are regarded with an almost anthropological interest as a breed apart.

Yet there's always trouble ahead. The comb-overs have always got something up their shiny sleeves, some dastardly plan for reclaiming the GAA from ordinary sports people. In spring it was the soccer in Croke Park debacle. This autumn it is Rule 21.

Oh boys, boys, boys. The hall is closed, the lights are dimmed, the janitor is sweeping up and the security man is checking that the doors are locked. It's all over, boys. Yet somehow a mere sporting organisation is having stress pains about an antiquated rule. The GAA has let itself become the Pauline Armitage of the green side of the house. It's sad and pathetic. The attitude of most GAA members right now is cringe.

Once upon a time I supported and understood Rule 21. It wasn't something to be proud of but if you spent time in northern grounds and in northern clubhouses listening to stories of burn-outs, hostility, harassment and murder you realised that in a visceral way the rule gave some sort of ease to GAA members. The logic still stood of course, that if the rule fell the queue of RUC men looking to join their local GAA club would be as long as the queue of gay men trying to join the local orange order. Still, it was a weapon of spite in a time of great spite and hatred and coming from the beery south it was hard to argue against.

The rule should have been deleted years ago, though. If the GAA comb-overs were to represent the vast swathe of Irish people who make up the membership, then ditching Rule 21 would have been the GAA's contribution to progress. Instead, even the Provos have decommissioned, even Martin McGuinness is happy to sit in a government with David Trimble, even the prisoners are out and home but the GAA is left brandishing its rough-hewn cudgel. Seβn McCague, like Joe McDonagh before him, is rewarded for his courage by having to listen to the most crabbed and bitter of arguments being amplified to the extent that they drown out all reason and moderation.

And the irony is the association which prides itself on its 32-county appeal is being asked to take yet another essentially partitionist step and defer to the hardest line being taken in the six counties. Sinn FΘin has made remarkable political progress in the last decade and is too savvy an organisation now not to know that it is quietly holding the GAA hostage on the policing issue.

There is a valid argument to be made for the implementation of Patten but it is not up to the GAA to make it. Nor is it up to the GAA to enforce suspensions on any of its members who may want to join the North's new police force. Nor should it be expected that the GAA should run foul of civil rights legislation by continuing to be discriminatory in its membership practices. Yet these things are being asked of the GAA.

And it's worth noting, too, that whether you adhere to the SDLP view of policing or the Sinn FΘin view, the playing pitch has changed: By keeping GAA people out of the new force Sinn FΘin can ensure that it is truly unrepresentative of the community it is supposed to police. It's no longer a question of stopping a queue of RUC people forming at the door. It's a question of preserving the rights of GAA members.

Rule 21 neatly co-opts the GAA to one side of the argument, it is an effective weapon but the GAA isn't there to be used in that way.

The GAA is a great and unique organisation. Little wonder that those who stumble upon it late in life regard it with such awe and fascination. It is a hub of energy and community endeavour, an amateur organisation which effortlessly represents us as we are, that is as quiet folk who like a bit of excitement and passion at the weekend and who know great sport when we see it. And somehow the GAA doubles as a great and glamourous provider of top level sports, with large stadia and TV deals and major sponsors.

It may not be apparent to the naked eye but the GAA is moving all the time. It is not the same organisation now as it was 25 years ago, yet it has survived. It will survive without Rule 21 also. Indeed, it will be better off for having ditched it. It will thrive. In a time when people have been making all sorts of leaps, the GAA has a last chance this month to make its little shuffle and then shut up about it.