The first modernist

This has been a trying few months for Joe McDonagh. When he brings down the curtain on his three-year presidency at this afternoon's GAA congress in Galway, the probability is that his primary emotion will be relief.

There's nothing too unusual about that but when he has more time to reflect on the term of office which took the GAA into a new millennium, what sense of achievement will he feel? Already a revisionist view believes that McDonagh's huge popularity - which at one stage prompted suggestions that he be drafted for a second term - hides a presidency where "nothing positive was achieved".

This is a simplistic distortion of what posterity will surely view as the first truly modern presidency, one which articulated concerns felt by society at large rather than played to the more limited gallery of GAA sectionalism.

No president can ignore their own constituency and there was plenty about McDonagh which held distinctive appeal for the GAA, from his background as a top-class hurler to his enthusiasm for Irish language and culture.

But he was also the first president to recognise that the association must exist within a context and contribute to society as a whole, that its character should be outward-looking and inclusive, that circling the wagons wasn't the best way to project the image of a confident organisation.

One of McDonagh's predecessors, Peter Quinn, believes that another former president has set one part of the presidential agenda since the 1960s: "The late Alf Murray was the first one to see his role as being an ambassador within the association rather than to a wider public," he said last year.

McDonagh has revised that priority. When he took the historic decision to push for the abolition of Rule 21, the ban on members of the Northern security forces, he encapsulated that concern.

"I say to you that we cannot as the largest organisation in this country shirk our responsibility or role in achieving and contributing to peace. The poet John Donne stated that "no man is an island". Certainly an organisation as broadly based and as community based as ours is not an island."

Losing that battle on Rule 21 will remain for some the most vivid image of his presidency. Defeat did nothing for the reputation of the GAA in the wider community but McDonagh's courage in trying to extirpate sectarianism from the rulebook was recognised.

To his credit, it has to be pointed out that throughout GAA history contentious rules have rarely died quickly. The ban on foreign games was raised at a number of congresses before it was eventually scrapped. McDonagh's big achievement is that he placed Rule 21 on the agenda and the next attempt at repeal will not be as fraught.

There have been other occasions when he hasn't been afraid to take a moral stand rather than simply batten down the hatches. In distancing the GAA from racism - however unintentional - by insisting on the suspension of Graham Geraghty during the International Rules tour of Australia, he saved the association from disgrace back home in Ireland.

Not everything in a presidency is as high-profile as these examples but progress is frequently made in quiet ways. This weekend sees 78 motions on the congress clar, a gargantuan agenda brought about by the fact that McDonagh's various committees have produced four major reports for congress approval.

In developmental terms, McDonagh has been pivotal in advancing the concept of `alliance' whereby the GAA and the women's sports of football and camogie seek closer association. At the Women's Forum held in January, he was described as "instrumental" to the progress made.

Recent events haven't been kind to the outgoing president. His tenure has been back-loaded with controversies and disappointments which have brought a messy end to his three-year term.

The disintegration of the hopes invested in the Football Development Committee's progressive proposals has not alone been a setback for the GAA but it has left McDonagh open to the charge that he shirked the challenge of backing the FDC, whom he appointed, in their hour of need.

Discontent among leading players has led to the formation of the Gaelic Players' Association (GPA) which has successfully painted the picture of a hidebound GAA, insensitive to the basic needs of those central to its commercial success.

At the launch of the report by the Players' Advisory Group (PAG), an official GAA body appointed by McDonagh, he launched a broadside against the GPA. "We take serious issue with any group which would negotiate a sponsorship at national level outside of our organisation on behalf of our members as long as they remain members of our organisation."

These issues have broken badly for McDonagh but he is not defenceless in either case. A president does not advocate one side of an issue or another in the runup to congress. Some members of the FDC feel short-changed by the president who vetted the proposals and encouraged them to "go for it".

Comparisons between the Rule 21 congress and this weekend's are unfair. It is true that McDonagh had taken a position of advocacy before the special congress of two years ago but that event couldn't have taken place without his decision that "the time was now upon us" to reconsider the ban on the Northern security forces.

Once he had convened the special congress, McDonagh didn't speak on the issue until the event took place although everyone by that stage knew where he stood in relation to it.

There are a few explanations as to why he took such a confrontational stand against the GPA. According to one Croke Park source: "Joe's workload was so heavy before that meeting, he was launching three reports, that he didn't have time to think it through. Once he made his position clear on the GPA, that was always going to get the headlines rather than the reports".

In acting rashly, he was stung by the opportunism of the GPA and its soft-focus treatment in some media and also by the fact that his own committee, the PAG, was chaired by a close friend Noel Lane. Yet his central contention was technically valid: why should one type of GAA member (inter-county players) have greater representation rights than others.

If McDonagh was acting petulantly in relation to the GPA, it constitutes a rare error of style during his three years in office. His oratorical prowess in either English or Irish was well known and made him comfortable on his feet (to the extent that his final address this afternoon is being made without a script).

Such skills run the risk of becoming threadbare if pressed into service too often and occasionally, McDonagh could sound too much on automatic pilot when trying to make an event rise to his oratory (hence the unkind epithet `the Guffnor'). But his engaging personality saved such speeches from pomposity or self-regard.

Aside from the Rule 21 debate, Ulster was a constant presence throughout his period of office. Ironically for someone who had become so unpopular in the North because of his stand on the ban, McDonagh ended up representing the association in the most unhappy circumstances after the sectarian murders of Sean Brown, Gerry Devlin and Fergal McCusker and in the wake of the massacre at Omagh in August 1998.

There has also been considerable frustration at the limitations of the presidential role. The GAA is currently caught between two stools. Croke Park's structures need overhauling yet the lack of democratic centralism means that every reform has to be approved by a variety of unwieldy representative structures.

One prominent member who met him last autumn says that McDonagh was close to despair at how difficult it was to achieve progress at the organisation's central level.

It would, however, be wrong to characterise the presidency as flawless. There were problems which if not directly attributable to McDonagh are ultimately his responsibility.

Within a few weeks of his ringing denunciation of violence on the playing fields at last year's Congress, he was to be embarrassed by his own county when Galway's football board was unable to reveal the identity of the person who had assaulted a referee in front of 2,000 people.

The world and his wife knew who was responsible but an elaborate game of three wise monkeys meant that arm-twisting and intimidation had its day. McDonagh was as appalled as anyone else but given his close connections to the county, shares in the responsibility.

His decision last autumn to attend a function in Boston rather than the second International Rules test was regrettable and not entirely excused by the plea of double booking.

There have been other disappointments, such as the failure to make executive appointments at Croke Park after the jobs had been advertised. But then again, only the least ambitious president can expect to leave office without disappointment.

Now 45, he leaves office with more question marks hanging over the GAA's policy-making and administrative structures than over his tenure.

In his final year at secondary school, Joe McDonagh played the part of Christy Mahon in Synge's Playboy of the Western World. Whereas it would be exaggeration to compare his natural conviviality with a playboy's, there has to be within the GAA and further afield the same sense of regret at losing him.